MISC. MANGA, *Tales From The Age Of The Cobra

Enrique Fernandez is a Spanish artist who made his big premiere in the American comics market with an album-sized graphic novel of The Wizard Of Oz through Image Comics, then a few years later IDW decided to republish his original 2-part mini-series into a trade paperback titled Tales From The Age Of The Cobra. Fernandez's technique is old school anime similar to rough pencil-drawn animation that made up most of the 70s like Lupin and Captain Harlock, so a lively adventure inspired by the Arabian Nights was a brilliant fit for his style.

A masked storyteller relays a story set ages ago about the illusive thief Irvi who tries to free his love, the beautiful Sian, from a harem, but he has to literally sleep his way up to her room over a few nights. However, Irvi has to give up on Sian and runs across the unlucky in love thug known as the Bull who soon raises his own empire after renaming himself the Cobra with Irvi being his lucky charm that he keeps around. Irvi finally makes his escape after being the subject of several of Cobra's experiments by a quack potion maker in an attempt to make a powerful elixir. Irvi eventually befriends the performing dwarf Maluuk who arranges to finally put an end to Cobra's evil reign while reuniting to Sian for a series of selective endings that the storyteller alludes to which are up to the listener to decide on.

Tales From The Age Of Cobra has a rich story showing sympathetic for both the heroes and villain displaying how none of them are truly guilty or innocent. Enrique Fernandez's artwork thrives with eye-catching imagery that takes you back to Bronze Age of comics. This comes in an album-sized novel with tight but stunning panels that keep you reading the entire saga in one entire experience.

ANI-MOVIES, *Feast Of Amrita

Feast Of Amrita is a scarcity among other horror anime movies. For one, the entire thing was done by a single animator, Saku Sakamoto who had previously worked on Ghost In The Shell 2, and it was also a prequel to a full-length production he made a few years earlier titled Aragne: Sign of Vermilion which itself was a surrealistic horror. This slightly shorter production took him about 3 years to complete after the original and later combined both into a single compilation named Nightmare Bugs. Feast Of Amrita like its predecessor is a genuine J-horror movie which is something most anime horror tends to skip out on. There is a very real dread of the unknown and things crawling around in the dark here, plus coupling that with a cross between Hellraiser and Groundhog's Day makes for an intense ride for being an adequate 48-minutes long.

Near the end of their senior year, a trio of high school girls: Takumi, Yu, and Aki decide to spend one of their last days together riding a train all the way to the final stop. Once there, they notice someone falling from the top of an abandoned apartment complex. Takami runs in and her friends enter the inner ring of the building where Yu is killed by a man-sized insect monster. Aki eventually finds Takumi who was also being chased by big bugs, but then Takami is captured by a skeletal humanoid which she quickly dispatches with some shears, although she finds Aki has been absorbed into the body of a giant centipede. Takumi then gets flashbacks of things that had happened and glimpses of what might happen, which is followed by dozens of dead versions of herself falling out of the sky. She realizes that she is stuck in some sort of time loop where each attempt she tries to escape results her dying hundreds of times with each try getting that much closer to escaping. Takumi believes though she would rather stay with her friends in this insect hell not knowing that their places have now been filled by three former denizens who are now free in the human world.

Feast Of Amrita goes between gore flick to sci-fi thriller during its short run time and delivers both splendidly. Saku Sakamoto blends the 2D animation with the limited frame rate used in the CGI making for an intensely creepy feature reminding some watchers of old Playstation survival games. This is a perfect movie for a Halloween party, not too long or short that delivers shocking twists and gut-wrenching terror in one insidious scare package.

ANI-MOVIES, *Grendel Grendel Grendel

Grendel Grendel Grendel was one of the first feature-length animated movies to come out of Australia which has in recent years become a hub for independent cartoon crafters. Before Wicked or Maleficent, this was a retelling of a classic tale from the villain's perspective. Based on John Gardner's novel Grendel, this allegory for high fantasy was developed into a 1981 film directed by Alex Sitt who also did other short-animated projects. The design of the characters and the world this takes place in are distinctively trippy which flashback to psychedelic visions from Yellow Submarine. The film had a limited theatrical release due to its mature nature and specific sense of humor. The deconstruction of what men refer as monsters is singled out as the character of Grendel from the legend of Beowulf has always stood out on his own as not specifically a demon or evil spirit or some malformed giant. This undefinable creature is for all intentions the original boogeyman, or as he's referred to in this film as the Great Boogey, plus the role of his mother here is never clearly defined as other interpretations. The film's producer Phillip Adams even introduces the movie by comparing Grendel to other monsters, although this is the preamble for the story's warped dry wit.

Grendel is a large spotty green behemoth that lives in a cave near the rising kingdom of the egotistical Hrothgar who raised his land by claiming anything he could scavenge, including a merchant's daughter he takes for a wife, much to the chagrin his warrior Unferth. Grendel grows tired of the foolish king and raves about it to his mother who is really just a figment of his imagination living in the depths of his cave. Grendel's delusions even carry over to a wise dragon who he sometimes seeks for advice, as well as the occasional singing number, which riles the monster to go and attack Hrothgar's mead hall regularly biting the heads off his subjects. Hrothgar's soothsayer known as the Shaper converts the people to religion and view Grendel as the spawn of Cain making him a monster. Having enough of this, Hrothgar messages the foreign warrior Beowulf to come and finally slay the Great Boogey leading to the inevitable clash where the bold hero and his beastly crew attack Grendel lobbing his arm of. After the encounter, Grendel wonders off possibly to bleed to death, but since this is told from his point of view it is where the story ends.

Although this was an animated movie, it was clearly not intended for family viewing with cartoonish violence, slight nudity, and its deadpan humor. The minimalist character designs use clean lines with flat shapes in the animation and will remind modern day watchers of Samurai Jack. The musical scenes are moody and fit the time even though the soundtrack sounds more like it's out of the late 60s than early 80s. The main appeal of this rare treasure is the voice of Grendel is done by Sir Peter Ustinov whose eccentric performance comes through as pure comedy and works better here than when he was mercurially casted in Winds Of Change. Grendel Grendel Grendel is an unconventional look at the hero's journey who here is a 12-foot monster.

Anime Infuences In Knights Of Guinevere

After Dana Terrace had her groundbreaking animated series, The Owl House, cut short from its run on Disney Channel, she teamed up with Glitch Productions about doing her next project. The independent Australian animation studio already had several web series under their belt like The Amazing Digital Circus and Murder Drones which have not only gained fame on their YouTube channel but also on other mainstream formats like Netflix, so them working with Terrace seemed like a natural fit. Her new series was Knights Of Guinevere, a sci-fi dark comedy that pokes more than just a little fun at Terrace’s former Disney overlords. The plot involves Andi and Frankie, a pair of down and out friends who are trying to survive in a planet-sized amusement park where they come across a busted android of the park’s mascot Guinevere and the pilot shows the lengths they go to try and repair her as she reminds them of an another android they met as children. Whereas The Owl House was influenced by several anime titles, Knights Of Guinevere also borrows elements from some classics, particularly cyberpunk which of course reigned during the late 80s-90s. Aside from the obvious choices like Akira or Ghost In The Shell, there are some particular ones that deserve a look at if the KOG pilot won you over.

Two anime anthology films that are good points of interests. There is Neo-Tokyo from 1987, a short trilogy of separate stories where one segment named Construction Cancellation Order written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo which is a social satire about a salaryman sent to South America to stop a huge project meant to set up a city in the middle of a swamp entirely operated by malfunctioning robots who want stop following their program to finish the construction of which the foreman robot sees even the company rep as a threat to their project. Another anthology is Memories entirely written by Otomo with a chapter titled Magnetic Rose directed by Koji Morimoto about space scavengers that discover an abandoned station that is supposed to be the resting place of a famous opera singer, but as the story goes on, we learn that the station’s main computer has gone haywire and projects an image of the opera star luring the salvagers into a trap and deludes one of them into believing they are the singer’s deceased husband. Both vignettes focus on the dangers of how allowing AI to operate on its own for a prolonged period can be hazardous if left without monitoring. Leaving out the human factor of a self-automated society can lead to disaster.

An underestimated but masterful anime movie that you can see traces of KOG is in the Metropolis anime movie from 2001 directed by Rintaro that was based on Osamu Tezuka’s manga. Taking place in the city of the same name, Metropolis is run by plutocrats where most of the general labor is handled by retro-looking robots leaving a good portion of the underprivileged masses out of work and rebelling against their industry. With the corporation having more power than the government, the regular citizens are swept away by the whims of the rich, so the citizens blame most of this civil unrest on the robots themselves making them seen as the lowest minority despite the fact that they were built only to serve mankind. As an underground movement rebels against the tyrannical Marduks lead by Duke Red, his latest creation, a robot called Tima has gone missing which was meant to be the centerpiece of a ziggurat that would leave the entire city subject to automation. Tima befriends a young detective who teachers her more about humanity which leads to her ultimately deciding to spare the people of Metropolis from the ravages the Marduks. A good deal of KOG is inspired by this hidden masterpiece by Rintaro, as well as the Fritz Lang 1927 movie the manga was based on, especially with its anti-fascist statement and how people tend to blame robots for their problems instead of the big businesses making the robots in the first place.

One anime/manga titles most generic are aware of is Alita: Battle Angel which is one of the few that managed to be remade into a successful live-action American movie. Prior to the Robert Rodriguez film, creator Yukito Kishiro allowed only a 2-episode OVA to be made of it because he wanted to focus more on the manga, even though the impact it left with US otaku is one of the biggest influences on cyberpunk, much of which Knights Of Guinevere was probably inspired by. In a dystopian Earth, the airborne city of Zalem rests above the ground level Iron City which lives of the scraps that get tossed down by the snobby tycoons above. A scientist finds the remains of an abandoned cyborg girl he names Alita in the trash to rebuild her only to find that she is a rare type designed by the military to fight wars on Mars. Alita’s strength and discovering her emotions puts herself and her new allies in danger as the despotic forces of Zalem are constantly bombarding her with violent strife. KOG begins as a mirror reflection about a mechanical maiden being recycled from rubbish and turning out to be more powerful than the mere mascot she was thought to be.

Without a doubt, the anime that a left significant impact on KOG was the original anime anthology masterpiece Robot Carnival from 1987. This had eight short stories, each directed by a different animator. Out of all of them some fit into the world Dana Terrace might have imagined, one being the opening and closing segments featuring a huge fully mechanized carnival-themed showcase modeled as the words "Robot Carnival" which dispenses exploding marching bands and automatic cannons laying waste to a small village in the desert with no idea where it came from and what its original mission was. Another part is titled Star Light Angel where a girl in a futuristic amusement park is captured by a giant robot while a park employee dressed as an android tries to save her. The mysterious chapter of Presence is about a robot maker who invents a female bot that seems to take on a life of its own, so he destroys it and years later at the end of his life believes his old creation is acting as his angel of death. The last story that is closely kindred to KOG is Nightmare where a drunken man runs for his life through downtown Tokyo which he believes is changing into a motorized monstrosity all at the whims of a robot wizard on a flying scooter, although whether this really happened is up to viewer, but it demonstrates how technophobia can lead to suspicion and fear of the misinformed.

ANI-MOVIES, *Gunbuster: The Movie

Evangelion's Hideaki Anno began his directorial career in Gainax's first ever solo production, the 6-episode OVA series Gunbuster. Each episode was about half-an-hour long which worked for the original VHS releases back in 1988, but when you shoot ahead a few decades later you might want to see the original anime, and since the sequel series of Diebuster was set to be released it was decided to do a compilation film of the original series. This eventually led to a double feature of compilation films of both series of each OVA series, but as the Diebuster movie managed to maintain most of the original footage, the Gunbuster collected movie left out a ton of material that were integral to the whole movie. The problem was the Sentai Filmworks had the Blu-Ray rights to Gunbuster: The Movie while Discotek Media released the full OVA series with bonus features including the only English dub the anime ever had. Sentai's release of the movie came out in the states a year before Discotek OVA Blu-Ray, so this would lead many uninformed American buyers to choose the correct one.

One of the main problems that people face when trying to discover vintage anime is that a good portion of it from the 80s-2000s were OVA as there most TV shows didn't start getting released on home video until around the mid-90s This is why the original Mobile Suit Gundam was reformatted into a trilogy of compilation movies since not everyone had VCRs to record the show back in the late-70s. Compilation movies were from this point done at first as an affordable way for those just dabbling into anime could enjoy the bulk of a series without having to shell out the entire amount for the whole enchilada. Numerous OVAs such as Macross Plus and Armitage III were compiled into single movies, sometimes with additional footage or a completely different English dub. Gunbuster was first picked up on VHS through US Renditions and later on Manga Entertainment, but didn't have it released on DVD, even though it was for a limited time released on DVD as a double-feature with the Diebuster movie. Sentai Filmworks decided to get the jump on everyone in America and released the compilation movie over a year before Discotek Media released the entire OVA series with the English dub and additional features. This isn't uncommon when it comes to compiled releases of OVAs in a English version as the 3-episode OVA series of Dangaioh was first put on three VHS tapes, but the DVD version was a dub-only release with the entire first episode left out aside from a quick rundown reviewing everything that happened in it, so anime compilation movies cut out a great amount of material and leave out a lot of the subtilties and character development that you would get from the full OVA series.

Gunbuster: The Movie leaves out at least an hour from the original OVA, even if that includes the opening and closing credits to the most of the episodes, the chibi feature at the end of each episode, and some of the unnecessary in-between bonuses like the karaoke scene where Hideaki Anno actually took out a few minutes to correct a mistake in some of the prior technical explanations they made, you're still missing out on some viable material that were ejected from the movie version. Depending on what wholesaler you frequent, the movie cut of Gunbuster is probably available at a cheaper price, but if you want to get the whole experience of this mecha classic then you should really just get the single release of the complete series.

R.I.P., Drew Struzan

 

K-Pop Demon Hunters: Why It's A Big Deal

K-Pop Demon Hunters was another original release for Netflix in June of 2025, but since it came out during the middle of the bustling summer blockbuster season the masses didn’t pick up on it at first. Most movie goers were either checking out the latest superhero or dinosaur flick in the theaters and didn’t bother watching anything at home on their own streaming service. K-Pop idols were popular enough with fans all over the globe, however taking that concept and having the singers lead a double life as blade-wielding beast busters was an inspired idea.

Maggie Kang was a storywriter and animator who worked on films such as The Grinch, The Lego Ninjago Movie, Trolls, and Rise Of The Guardians. She also worked on various movie franchises like The Croods, Rio, Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and Despicable Me. Maggie grew up as a Korean girl living in Canada and worked with Shrek creator Aron Warner who had joined Sony Pictures Animation after leaving DreamWorks to make the animated movie Wish Dragon to which she pitched the idea for Korean pop singers fighting demons. Warner got the project greenlit in 2021 and Sony was riding high from the success of the Spider-Verse movies, even though Sony was hesitant to put the animated film in theaters, especially with a production cost of 100 million dollars. Korean culture was on the rise, and Netflix was quick to recognize this as they knew how tremendous shows like Kingdom and Squid Games were, so when Sony went looking for distributors, Netflix snatched it up. Sony got paid only $20 million from Netflix for the streaming rights, however they didn’t expect how huge K-Pop Demon Hunters would become. Over the summer of 2025, the movie gained more traction through word of mouth as it became the #1 original title in Netflix history with a bestselling soundtrack. Sony does still have the contractional rights to do further installments, so it's possible this might lead to a bidding war as the direct-to-streaming cartoon movie grew into a genre-blending juggernaut. This led to theaters having special singalong screenings which is a big landmark for breaking out of the streaming format.

Maggie Kang directed KPDH with Chris Appelhans, a former children's book author turned animator that just finished directing Wish Dragon. The story for KPDH is an original premise not based on any existing source which highlights the K-Pop industry and merges it with supernatural adventure. The anime-styled action has martial arts and synchronized dancing, making each fight scene into its own mini-music video. The other big attraction was the musical numbers which help distinguish the film as a musical where some pieces are done as a performance while simultaneously operating as their own stand-alone vignette.

Korean folklore might seem like the central premise for the story, however the thought of spirit warriors fighting against demonic forces can be applied to dozens of historical cultures. Demonology itself is applicable to numerous mythologies. The Honmoon concept made specifically for the movie that acts as a barrier between the human and demon realms which is essentially placing a harmony-based sound wall to keep the demons underground, even though the film never explains the dynamics of this forcefield powered by people’s moods can repel the literal forces of Hell. The demon king Gwi-Ma is a formless entity but does have the presence of a Satan archetype using deception to achieve his goals, although the film doesn’t really come out and say if any of the victims of the soul-stealing demons are in fact dead. Other spiritual beings in the movie are “yogoe” which are generic Korean spirits that interact with humans and demons which take no specific sides are represented by a grinning blue tiger and a multi-eyed magpie. Yogoe are neutral and not affected by empathy or hostility which is why both spirits are still around in the human world after the new Honmoon is created at the end. The Honmoon itself is executed through music which was an instrument used in ancient Korean exorcisms.

Music is a key ingredient in KPDH as it is the weapon of choice used by both Huntr/x and the Saja Boys. Huntr/x uses music to lift people’s emotions and find confidence in themselves to not give into darkness. The Saja Boys instead implement music to coerce humans into lowering their defenses, making them subject to suggestion which in the movie translates into just your average evil brainwashing scheme. The Honmoon is powered by the syntropy humans generate when their hearts are united all listening to the same harmony. Depending on the performers, this music can either be a valuable weapon or a deadly weakness, so when Rumi’s demon side is finally revealed, Mira and Zoey turn against her, thus disrupting their euphony which ultimately leads to everyone falling under the Saja Boys’ spell. Rumi eventually finds the harmony inside herself, allowing her to synchronize with her bandmates and defeat the Gwi-Ma which shows that people need to discover their inner strength to be part of a larger circle.

For many fans, another factor of KPDH’s appeal is that of representation as they interpreted Zoey’s random and insecure nature as being autistic, or Mira’s rebellious attitude attributed to not fitting in with abuse she received from her family. The largest allegory is Rumi’s demonic nature being seen as an example of gender expansion hiding their inner gay nature. These are all acceptable comparisons, although the downside to any fan theories regarding a character's backstory is that very little of it is really brought up in the film. Unless it's stated that this character is gay, or has ADHD, or was a recovering addict, then we as the audience have little to no clue to confirm this. Representation does matter, however if the story doesn’t take the time out to define any of that, then how much it matters doesn’t register enough to be recognized. Rumi’s birth was because of the interaction between her human mother and her unknown demon father, so the possibility exists that Rumi’s mother was the victim of a sexual attack. This is why there was much speculation behind Huntr/x’s mentor Celine who knew the truth of Rumi’s heritage, which is why she wanted it to remain a secret from everyone else. The fact that this largely an all-ages feature film doesn’t allow the audience to know the dark underbelly of the demon hunters’ lives, although this takes away from the representation most fans were looking for if it never addresses it. There might have been more room for this if they weren’t set on having the running time being only 96 minutes.

Speaking of being short on time, one last aspect that caught more attention from fans than what was given was the made-up romance between Rumi and the demon Jinu who is only doing all this to have the memories of his former life erased by Gwi-Ma so he can enjoy his eternally damned afterlife in peace. Rumi is desperate to keep her demon history a secret, and Jinu is the only one she can talk to about any of this even though she should have been smart enough to know that trusting him was a bad idea. Even the music number the two of them have seems forced, plus Jinu’s sacrifice at the end is too little too late as he just would have been sent back to the underworld anyway which isn’t any better than giving up your already cursed soul. It’s not that the fans who fell for this romance are simps, but they should have seen the flaws in it

Sony Pictures Animation efforts will hopefully lead to future original Korean animated productions making their way to English-speaking audiences. Manhwa, the Korean equivalent of manga, has been largely successful with Americans, particularly with the advent of Webtoon. Korean animation on the other hand has had little exposure in America. Movies like Seoul Station, Red Hawk, Sky Blue, and Ghost Messenger have all gotten Western releases but never stood out among other animated releases. Most of the Korean animation that has been translated into English were underground rip-offs of already established Japanese anime such as Gundam and Dragonball, including some American properties like Batman, Wonder Woman, and Tron which hasn’t helped establish any trust between nations. However, a month before Netflix premiered KPDH, they released the original animated movie of Lost In Starlight by Han Ji-Won which was a science-fiction romance done in the spirit of Makoto Shinkai films such as Your Name. It is possible that Netflix picked up Lost In Starlight to help familiarize Americans a little more with Korean culture, although KPDH goes its own direction modeling itself more like a Marvel movie. Hopefully, there will be further efforts to bring more Korean cartoons over to this side of the ocean as the triumph that KPDH has become might help give this untapped resource more exposure.

ANI-MOVIES, *For Whom The Alchemist Exists

For Whom The Alchemist Exists was an RPG that ran online for a decade before it was shut down. Also known as The Alchemist Code, the Japanese video game got a full-length anime movie in 2019 whose chief director was none other than Shoji Kawamori who originally designed Optimus Prime. Animated by Satelight, the film took the steampunk fantasy gameplay and rewrote it into being a slightly original isekai despite the fact that the borrowed quite a few concepts from 90s anime titles like Rayearth. This entire movie could be seen as a copy/paste of both the Escaflowne movie and Leda: The Fantastic Adventure Of Yohko where the shallow concerns of an emotionally damaged schoolgirl somehow compared to the plight of an entire world being consumed by evil.

Set in the alternate realm of Babel, alchemy has been the source of much chaos in this world's development where magic users can summon up heroic spirits called Phantoms from the past to join them in their battles, similar to Servants in Fate. From the discord arises a multi-headed dragon called Destruk who wraps itself around the central Tower of Babel which cuts off the alchemists' powers, seals the Phantoms away, and plunges the land in darkness with giant robots called Dark Mages. Two alchemists, Liz and Edgar, use some of their last caches of magic to summon a Phantom to help save the world, but instead they get Kasumi, an original character to the movie who is a teenager from our world given the powers of purifying dark magic by an incidental interdimensional gatekeeper that acts as the god character in isekai who reincarnates people into another world. Kasumi has no idea how to activate her powers, but the kindness she shows some of the refugees and her home cooking helps them to lighten up and temporarily regain their alchemy. The former Phantoms are now corrupt and working for Destruk who are sent to collect Kasumi. Edgar leads an assault against Destruk after the alchemists reunite with some of the secondary characters from the video game while Kasumi purifies the Phantoms and they join their former comrades in battle. Kasumi learns that Destruk was originally a serpent sacrificed in the previous wars that was transformed into a giant dragon, so she uses her white magic to free the cursed reptile while sending herself back to Earth. Turns out the whole thing that was holding Kasumi back in her world was working up the courage to stand up to her mother on pursuing her dream as an actress, but that slightly stressful scenario is supposed to be equal to liberating a magical realm is a wonky piece of storytelling.

For Whom The Alchemist Exists is hard to compare as how it adapted the video game, especially since the online servers were shut off years ago. The production is fine, and the CGI used for the mechas and magical tanks is honestly implemented fairly well, but it doesn't seem to be that it was above the quality of a TV series and not totally up to theatrical release standards. Anyone expecting to get the deep storytelling of Fullmetal Alchemist is going to be for a disappointment, and even any fans of the game might find this movie lacking in any stimulation.

ANI-MOVIES, *Hula Fulla Dance

Hula Fulla Dance is a coming-of-age story with an unnecessary supernatural ending. Written by The Colors Within scriptwriter Reiko Yoshida, this Bandai Namco Pictures production was directed by Gundam veteran Shinya Watada and released in 2021. This is based on the real-life hot springs resort, Spa Resort Hawaiians, which had previously been the subject of the Japanese classic Hula Girls, but it was the first time anime was used as the narrative. The film also was done to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the disasters that hit the Tohoku region. The anime movie was popular enough to get its own manga adaptation, even though it hasn't gotten much notice in America.

Hiwa just graduated high school in Japan and wants to take up her older sister's career of being a professional hula dancer. It's never stated, but its implied Hiwa's sister passed away from the Tokoku disasters, so Hiwa joins the Spa Resort Hawaiians' hula dancing troupe along with four other girls who each have their own dreams and personal setbacks. Among them is Kanna who wants to forge her own path away from her parents, the painfully shy Shion, the overweight Ranko, and Hawaiian native Ohana who came to Japan because she was too short to be part of a hula team back home. The girls screw up their debut performance but get their act together by the time of a national hula dance off where they use an unconventional pop song for their shot. Throughout this, Hiwa keeps dreaming that her deceased sister is coaching her own from the afterlife while possessing a mascot plushie, which oddly enough turns out to be true but not in a horror movie sort of way.

Hula Fulla Dance is a traditionally 2D animated film, although during the dancing performances the animation shifts to using 3D models for the dancers which is a sharp contrast to the otherwise lively graphics. There are some standard shoujo manga cliches, including Hiwa's flirting with her sister's old boyfriend, but it does have a fair message of friendship and entering into maturity. You're not missing out much on this predictable slice-of life feature, even though it might be worth a viewing on streaming.