Dear self: read these product descriptions more closely.

Sooo...Kenneth Branagh's 2006 adaptation of As You Like It is about peaceful, intellectual white Europeans in 19th century Japan, learning all about the exotic natives and their exotic culture.  *Summary of opening text.*

In the opening scene, the peaceful white people are having a solemn party when scary, violent samurai attack, beat up an old dude (we get two clips of this, to make sure we don't miss the scary samurai beating up a helpless old man), and throw them out to wander the cold forest like the poor, abused, helpless souls they are.

Sigh.

ETA:  But then I turned on Life, and the ep. has Christina Hendricks and Victoria Pratt, so it wasn't a total Netflix Failure day.

anime: Allison to Lillia eps 14-26: Lillia arc (end of series)

The second half of Allison to Lillia is about Lillia and Treize, respectively the daughter of Allison and Wil and the son of Benedict and Fiona from the first half. I must say, I have to give this series a lot of credit for essentially being two romantic adventure YA series wherein the leads are childhood friends and one party is oblivious to the fact that the other is in love with them, without making one plotline seem repetitive of the other.

Like the Allison half, the Lillia half is basically about the leads getting caught up in a series of adventures with political ramifications. Only they bring their parents along. And one is Secretly A Prince who has to enter into a political marriage soon unless he finds someone else before M-Day. Allison, incidentally, may be the most awesome anime mom ever. Unless you can top making the man holding a knife to your daughter’s throat collapse out of sheer fear of you.

This series may be my favorite anime so far this year, despite often being naïve (and aimed at an age group that kept it from really dealing with some emotional consequences that I’m about to get to in the second half), but I do have a problem with how a lot of this half relied on Lillia literally being the only character to not know that (A) Treize is a prince, and (B) Wil is not dead, but went to Sol Beil as a spy before she was born, and has now returned as Travas, a diplomatic liaison. I’m fine with how it dealt with the Treize secret (she accepted it pretty easily, but then, she’s still largely oblivious to Treize being in love with her, much less he own feelings) but at the end, she still doesn’t know Wil is her father, but even a couple of near-strangers have figured it out. I’m fine with Allison telling her Wil was dead, just like I’m fine with her not telling Wil she was pregnant before he left (that resolution also happened between series) because in both cases, I feel Allison chose the lesser of two evils, and was acting in the best interest of someone she loved. But there’s no justifying not telling Lillia once he returned and was a part of their lives again. (Though it did crack me up that Lillia decided they needed to get married, not realized they had been married for close to two decades.


A spoilery MV, mostly of the last arc of the Lillia half (that actually gives the wrong impression of the ending):