We do love our anime. I drew this after we finished watching Witch Hunter Robin. We watched it back in October, so my memory is a bit hazy of the actual anime. From what I do remember, the animation was excellent and the story was at first intriguing and then tiresome: I slept through a few of the middle episodes.

It had an interesting set up and then never delivered on the full possibilities of the story. It's about a quasi-governmental agency that hunts witches. The witches are powerful humans who tend to abuse their powers. The anime hinted at what the witch power was but never fully disclosed how it worked or where it came from. There is some discussion about an earlier time where witches could control and use their powers. Whatever knowledge they had then was lost in modern times. Most witches ran around killing people with their power, and most of the anime consisted of hunting down these rogue witches.

There were good witches, and Robin was one of them. Through the power of religion, witches, if caught early, could be trained to use their powers for "good"--as in what the church believes was good. At the start of the story, Robin used her powers to help the agency hunt down the bad witches. She dressed like a nun and was seemingly raised in a convent where she developed the control of her power (a control that she did not perfect until she purchased reading glasses to allow her to see far away targets--weird, huh). She joined a well-knit group of investigators, some with witch-lite powers, that hunted the rogue witches. The co-star was the man in the doodle, who led Robin's field unit.

The story part consisted of an inter-agency plot and the development of a weapon that allowed humans to use the witches' powers. This part was never adequately developed. While the writers managed to bring the anime to a conclusion, it was not terribly satisfying, and, like many animes, seemed glued together with little more than good intentions and lots of hand waving.

We gave it four out of five stars on Netflix. We reserve four stars for animes that while not perfect (usually because of weaknesses in story or a terrible ending), we enjoyed, and would enjoy other animes of similar quality.

It finally hit fifty degrees yesterday in Seattle. We were growing tired of the cold and rain. We took Button and Ziggy to the dog park, and Button ran a bit. She's a fast dog. I watched from a distance as a dog started chasing her. She ran away from it at a normal pace, and when it got close, she shifted into super-speed mode. Unlike Ziggy, who when a dog gets too close when he's chased, turns his head and tries to run and look back at the same time, Button had no such concerns. She left the bigger dog far behind her as she blurred past a bunch of people who made comments like, "that is a fast dog."

Not that I need a fast dog to judge my self worth. Need is the wrong word: it's a deep-seated hunger brought about by my own clumsy past.