Aggretsuko is basically designed for me – a sentiment I have seen repeated by many others but still feels true on a personal level. The name portmanteau’s Aggressive Retsuko.

The titular Retsuko is a red panda salarywoman who has the deep dark secret: when she gets mad about the irritations and injustices of her existence, she goes Hard at a karaoke bar, death metaling it up – the coolest kind of venting I can think of. Sometimes, you just want to scream. Well, she does it to blast beats and sick licks.

You do not have to like death metal to like Aggretsuko, and indeed the type of death metal that Retsuko karaokes is not my preferred sort of death metal – melodic death metal, but it’s fine in the short bursts, and the lyrics are all tied into those frustrations. Ultimately, it’s fun.

Plus, these death vocals are performed by Raracho, Aggretsuko’s pseudonymed creator, who writes and directs each episode. Which is great.

So, this show has a lot of things going for it for a person who likes the same things that I like and thus should be subscribed to this channel. It’s got metal; it’s got anime – which I have fallen off from since my younger days but still enjoy; and it’s got red pandas.

I love red pandas. They are favorite animal, which results in periods of me attaching photos of them to actual work emails that I send to people with whom I actually work in a real office setting.

My daily grind in an office is likely part of where Aggretsuko’s relatability comes in, because this is a show about a woman in her 20s who is trying to figure it all out. Each short episode focuses on one or several widely-felt frustrations: the struggle of keeping a major part of yourself secret, the difficulty of finding adult friends, the aforementioned daily grind, etc.

And it really gets at the heart of each of them. Despite the silly exterior, Aggretsuko genuinely understands why life is frustrating. They’re hardly new observations, but I’ve never seen them presented like this. With the visual language of a Japanese children’s cartoon, the underlying message has a way of sneaking up on you. You are laughing along and then suddenly you see yourself in a cute but unhappy red panda or one of her animal co-workers and you begin to second-guess every decision you’ve ever made and oh gosh what are you doing with your life, Alec, to quote metallica sometimes the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way and how far down this tunnel are you going to go before you realize that you…

Um. Anyway.

While season 2 of Aggretsuko is set to release sometime in the next year, Netflix saw fit to grace us with another holiday special – a thing they seem to do a whole heckuva lot, but I’m not complaining. We Wish You a Metal Christmas is, indeed, Christmas themed, both released and taking place in the couple of days leading up to Christmas and then culminating on Christmas Eve, which is the day that this video is going up; so in sync. In this episode, Retsuko is being taught by her young doe colleague how to be an Instagram girl. How to frame that food and contort that face to make the best Content, the stuff that will get random people on the internet to SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON.

Her obsession with it, trying to understand the tricks with lighting and positioning, is something all of us think about when taking photos or videos. If you were to look through my Instagram feed, you wouldn’t see any people or foodstuffs, but every photo that is up there is one of at least a half dozen attempts – one of them the 40somethingth version of the same shot. Because if I am going to put something up – there, here, anywhere, I may as well do it properly, right? How else could I convince people to SMASH THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON.

But where it hits a bit close to home is in a conversation between two of Retsuko’s colleagues about the inevitable result of this pursuit of likes. It gets pretty dark, but what is deemed the start of the spiral is something that I think a lot of younger people would cop to: traveling to another place – in this case, a new prefecture – for the sole purpose of hitting up a trendy spot with some instagrammable eats. This is something I struggle with on a fundamental level, and I imagine I’m not alone there.

I talked a bit about it in my first video, but for a few years, I used an app called 1 Second Everyday, where at some point each day I would grab a second of video of a thing I was doing; at the end of the year, you have six minutes that are your life. And I felt compelled to do something every single day so that at the end of the year, people wouldn’t think my life was boring. And that meant doing new things or going to new places or meeting new people. My particular use of Tinder in 2016 was at least partially driven by this driving need for neweness

And I am glad I did it for the time that I did, because it helped me get out of my apartment and into the world. And because I made a concerted effort to do more than just get The One Second. I tried to enjoy the things that I was doing, despite the depressing motivation for having done them.

Because there is nothing wrong with going to a trendy café in a different city, even if you really just want to take a picture. The problem becomes when you do that without enjoying it. When you end up with your friends and refuse to eat noodle soup because it’s not photo-worthy enough for your holiday pic.

You can’t do that. You can’t let that impulse control your life and your happiness and your self-worth – even though it’s so easy to do. But you need to be okay with being in that moment, with getting the soup even if it isn’t photo worthy, because it’s delicious and you’re with your friends.

Aggretsuko gets it. It knows how complicated all of this stuff is to navigate. And it uses adorable animals and anime styling to give you another way to think about your own frustrations. In a way that you can laugh with and headbang with.

Eight Point Seven out of Ten

GRIS is an indie puzzle-ish platformer. I love indie puzzle-ish platformers. It’s on the Nintendo Switch. I love my Switch, and with the recent release of Super Smash Bros, I am putting in a whole lot more hours on this thing than I have in a while. It really is an amazing system, but it’s one that I have rarely used in docked mode. I’ve played a few hours of Zelda, Mario, etc. on my TV, but most of the time, even at home, I do it handheld.

But GRIS changed this. Excepting a couple minutes I spent to prove the point, I played the entire four-or-so-hour experience on my TV. Because this game, though it is on the Switch, isn’t made for the Switch. It would be just as at home – probably moreso – on a PS4 or Xbox One where it could run at higher framerates and resolutions and maybe a little bit of HDR in there for good measure. It’s not a game to play on the go. It’s one to sit with and contemplate.

Let me back up: you should buy GRIS. It is both fascinating and very good. I am not going to be showing much footage from it because any given image is a spoiler. This is especially true as the nature of the game’s milestones becomes clear: you are returning color to a world of gray. Anyways, with each color you add, the world becomes even more beautiful. I paused so many times in awe of GRIS’s imagery. I would spend at least $55 for a coffee table book of moments from the game. I may spend more than that getting fine art prints of screen caps to hang on my wall.

So I’ll show a bit, when it is absolutely necessary to illustrate the point, but the less you see before you play, the more I think you will get from each new moment. And, like, just buy it.

The presentation of the GRIS’s imagery is fascinating, because the camera itself is fascinating – performing this high-wire balancing act of practicality and cinema.

Though locked firmly at a 90-degree angle from your face, its placement in space is constantly changing along all three axes. At times, you are the center of at tention; it swoops in to be there right beside you. This is when it would be most appropriate to play in the Switch’s portable mode, though you still wouldn’t want to.

More typically, you remain at the center but the attention is elsewhere, as the camera has pulled back to reveal more of the world itself – those sparse, beautifully rendered lines and, eventually, their subtle but distinct colorations. You take it all in. This is the cinematic.

Or you are not at the center at all. The level design stands at the forefront as you are tasked with a puzzle that takes up a space many, many, many times your size. And you must see the entirety of the thing in order to understand it. This is the practical. It is also when portable mode becomes effectively useless. Even on a TV of relatively substantial size, you are tiny. On at least two occasions, I found myself lost on the screen and needed to move the analog stick a bit to find the black blob of motion. The camera moves smoothly in and out, never actually “cutting,” which can feel in turn epic and exhausting, depending on how dynamic it feels like being at a given moment.

But the important fact imparted by the constant expand&contract is that you will always see everything that you need to see in a given moment – sometimes more but never less. This is pleasantly reassuring.

Play is simple. Stick or pad moves. B jumps. A… breathes. Eventually, Y does something too. X remains unused. They do what you ask of them when you ask it. Here and there something might not respond exactly as you might like – mostly in water – but those moments are fleeting. On the lovely Switch Pro controller, which is basically a requirement since, again, TV, everything feels quite nice.  

At first glance, GRIS probably appears a little bit like a 2D Journey with a drained color pallete, but let’s return to my alternate title, because I think it’s akin to something a bit more recent. Celeste, which was released earlier this year on a bunch of platforms including the Switch, is a wonderful, brutal little 2D platformer. It tells the story of Madeline, who climbs a mountain to face her own inner demons – those demons also being herself. Madeline’s anxiety and fears manifest themselves in increasing torturous ways. It is not subtle, but it is both effective and wonderful. It’s a unique subject matter for a game in general and particularly a game of its sort. It’s a game in which you will die hundreds or thousands of times climbing up the mountain.

Now, remove the spikes. And beneath that, you find GRIS.

It’s not just that GRIS lacks overt danger or an actual fail state; it’s that GRIS is told in images rather than words. You know that the unnamed girl you are controlling is dealing with the fallout of something, and you help her to come to terms with that and put the pieces back together, but the question of what, exactly, has broken is open.

And it’s one on which you can project your own damage. Celeste tells you what Madeline is feeling, and perhaps you feel it vicariously through her. GRIS tells you nothing beyond the fact that you press A and she takes a breath. But the breath is short, clearly intended to be something more. And so you think about that. You don’t intentionally press A very often, but when you do, it gives you pause. And you think about it some more. And you wonder what she is trying to do and then you try to figure it out. Is it really just taking a breath? Does she want to talk? I called it the Press A to Emote button for a while, because it seemed almost like she was trying to cry. In fact, the first time I pressed the A button, she collapsed. This before she’d even picked up the ability to jump.

And you fill in the gaps with the pains that you know. The times that you were unable to do anything but take a short breath. This girl doesn’t have a name or a voice but she is struggling to cope with something. And even if you are never able to explicitly understand what it is, you feel that pain that she is feeling and you have to help her. You want to help her.

Because you have felt it too.

Eight Point Nine out of Ten

Back in August, the New York Times ran a story film called “After a Director Dies, Friends Finish His Life’s Work: A Zombie Musical.” That musical was/is Anna and the Apocalypse. The circumstances surrounding it are quite sad, but the fact that the late Ryan McHenry was able to have his work finished – and finished this well – is something kind of like inspiring. I recommend the read.

So, yes, Anna and the Apocalypse is a musical. In the Broadway (or… I guess, West End) sense of the term. Imagine Shaun of the Dead but starring high school theater kids, and you’re 80% of the way there. This is a British movie about a zombie outbreak wherein a bunch of teenagers burst into song when the narrative feels it’s appropriate.

See this clip, which lacks zombies but will give you a pretty good sense of what’s going on. It’s pulled straight from the movie but has had lyrics overlaid on it because I guess they didn’t feel like there was enough going on onscreen. They’re distracting, but you get it.

Having been a theater kid myself in high school – you can find videos of me acting back then here on YouTube, which I don’t recommend – I have a particular affinity for this type of thing. And in general I love me a good musical. And on that level alone, Anna and the Apocalypse is a success. The songs are catchy as hell, so much so that I went home and immediately queued them up on Spotify and was already singing along with No Such Thing As a Hollywood Ending.

But the music isn’t just catchy; it’s narratively necessary, pushing along the story and allowing the characters to really express themselves in a way that your average archetype typically cannot. There is only one song of 12 that doesn’t work. It’s called “Human Voice,” and it’s a pretty good song taken on its own… Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with the scene in which it’s placed or even, to be honest, the movie itself.

Being a screed against the digitization of modern communication, it doesn’t really work to have a bunch of people singing about wanting to hear an actual human voice when they’re literally locked in a room with other people all while having phones without service. And technology in general plays basically no role in the film. There is no scene where someone is on their phone and then gets eaten and it’s all technology’s fault and etc. So… to what end? Human Voice comes off like a rant on the part of a lyricist who wanted to get something off of his chest by putting it into the actors’. It’s irrelevant and its irrelevance is distracting … but it’s also only four minutes long and is, again, performed well. Obviously, I am still thinking about it, but it doesn’t detract too greatly from the film in general.

Fifteen minutes in, a couple sitting a few seats over from me got up and left. At two different points in the movie, a Chatty Cathy to my back left got up as well; her companion certainly seemed to enjoy it, though, laughing almost as often/hard as I did. I can only assume that this was a failing on their part to understand what they were in for and also a general inability to enjoy things that are good on their own merits. Musicals are great, y’all. Full stop. And this is the best movie musical since I don’t know when.

I’m curious how it would work on a stage. I think it could definitely be adapted, the kind of thing that would play Off… or maybe Off-Off-Broadway. It’s already inspired a book – the first chapter of which is available online, and I’m seriously considering checking out the rest.

If this were 2012, I think Anna and the Apocalypse would be my favorite movie of all time. The fact that it isn’t now makes me actually feel old.

Happy birthday, grandpa.

I say 2012 specifically because that’s the year that Joseph Khan’s Detention hit theaters for precisely one week, presumably to capitalize on the lead performance by Josh Hutcherson coinciding with his ascent to the cultural consciousness with The Hunger Games. I saw it at a press screening on a whim because I had to be in the area for an unrelated thing, and I was blown the heck away. A time-travelling sci-fi/slasher/romantic comedy/coming-of-age drama from the guy who made basically every good music video ever (and would go on to make Taylor Swift’s video worthy of sensation). I saw it only a couple of years out of high school, and it felt so true to the emotions of my experience, even if I couldn’t relate to… well, any of the specifics.

It has been my favorite movie ever since, and each of my ten or so watches has just solidified that fact. Since then, movies like Girl, Asleep and The Edge of Seventeen have threatened its place, but not really any movies that aren’t coming-of-age tales about teenagers. I relate to them in a way I try not to dwell on.

Or, at least, I did.

I felt the seeds of change a little earlier this year, actually, while watching Eighth Grade. I loved that movie – four stars for sure – but I found myself on Kayla’s father’s side rather than his daughter’s. There are only a handful of quote-unquote adults in Anna and the Apocalypse, all of whom exist largely to crush the dreams of the younger generation. As such, I didn’t particularly relate to them… but I also didn’t connect with the, uh, youths in the way I expected I would, or the way I know I would have a few years back.

I guess I’m just little too far removed from these archetypes. McHenry originally pitched it as High School Musical but Troy Gets Eaten by Zombies, and everyone is about as surface level as you would might expect hearing that. I didn’t really think about that much in years past. I guess I do now.

That isn’t to say I was entirely outside Anna and the Apocalypse or didn’t feel anything during it. Quite the opposite. I felt a lot of things. I was thrilled, excited, tense, and delighted. I literally cried at least one actual tear during a particularly emotional moment, and my girlfriend cried three separate times.

That’s because this film fundamentally works. It’s a modern day Christmas Carol but with more red and less message. It is a film that aspires to be exactly the thing that it is, and it is a triumph in that. Seeing it, this truly unique little thing, in a theater is an unexpected joy, because it’s exactly the kind of movie you never see in a theater. It’s the kind of thing that you only hear about in retrospect, like on a blog or in a Youtube video. Or that shows up as a recommendation in whatever streaming service feed it ultimately winds up in. And you check it out on a whim, and you’re like, “Whoa. That was amazing.”

I knew Anna and the Apocalypse was coming. I have five Facebook friends in common with director John McPhail, at least one of whom has been raving about the film all year. So I’ve been looking forward to it for quite some time. But even so, I successfully avoided knowing anything concrete beyond the premise. I avoided trailers and spoilers, and I’m glad to have done so, because it still felt like I was making a discovery. That I got to do so on the big screen made it feel even more special.

But I look forward to seeing it on a small screen to. As soon as it hits Blu-ray, I’ll be adding Anna and the Apocalypse to my collection. And an annual viewing to my Christmas tradition.

Eight Point Three out of Ten