From the Japanese Internet game (and soon anime) otaku phenomenon Kantai Collection (or KanColle, for those who dislike typing), as the starter furniture for your office. Someone has drawn an adorable cat over one of the oranges on the box.
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From the Makoto Shinkai film The Place Promised in our Early Days, on the stairs leading to (one of) our protagonists apartment in the later part of the movie. Kind of unclear a screencap, but trust me, that’s totally what those top two boxes say.

I actually spotted this back during a theatrical screening of the movie, shown as part of the Glasgow leg of last years Scotland Loves Anime festival in October, but procrastinated about posting about it because I couldn’t remember where the heck I’d put my DVD copy. It probably shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise, anyway – whilst Garden of Words proved to be more of a Ringo Box movie, and I’ve not been back to check Voices of a Distant Star, both 5cm/s and Children who Chase Long Titles sported orange-transportation devices.

I had been a little terrified about revisiting the movie, though. I’m not a particularly big fan of Shinkai’s work, I’m afraid – I enjoy most of his productions on first viewing, but upon rewatch I tend to be overwhelmed by the extremely tortured writing his work often sports. 5cm/s I found kind of unbearable upon a second viewing. With Place Promised actually being my favourite of Shinkai’s output, or at least the one I enjoyed the most at point of first encounter, I didn’t really want to ruin that – it was nice to be able to say I genuinely enjoyed at least something he’d made.

Saying that, whilst I can’t really remember any of the minutiae as to why given it was the best part of four months ago that I last saw it, I still enjoyed it well enough. All’s well that ends well, I guess!

(PS – Hi there Reddit, I guess? That sure it a lot more traffic than I’m used to… For what it’s worth, when I asked (RoD/Kamichu/Magi) director Koji Masunari about Mikan Boxes at a Welcome to the Space Show Q&A, he said it was mostly due to their commonality in Japan more than any specific memetic thing)

I don’t want to give the illusion that I’m doing anything as silly as returning to episode blogging, at least not for a show which has “sister” in the title rather than a good word like, say, “idol”. Now, maybe if Studio Pierrot took a break from whatever show I don’t watch that it is they produce these days to make, I dunno, My Younger Sister Might Be A Magical Age-Changing Pop Idol or something, then maybe I’d create a whole new blog just to write about it at great length, because clearly that’d be worth the effort.

Digressions aside, the second episode of ImoCho (or Recently, My (Younger) Sister Is Unusual, for those of us who like English and don’t have to worry about twitter character limits) aired today, and I must confess, I ended up watching it. Purely out of scientific curiosity, you understand, and I just happened to have Crunchyroll streaming an episode of gdgdFairies to the television at the time.

Yeah, I’m probably protesting too much.
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Yamakan sure did go and make the Fractale of idol cartoons.

Which isn’t to say that Wake Up, Girls is a bad show – it’s actually pretty entertaining and has a traditional 2D animated dance sequence, and at least one of those things is more than you can say about most idol anime these days, but watching the movie which begins the franchise is an experience not-unlike watching the first episode of the directors most infamous of prior works.

That is, it’s all cynical as hell, and it sure enjoys pointing it out on a regular basis.
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From Precure AllStars New Stage 2, being used as a table by Candy from Smile Precure.

I don’t really have anything left to say about the movie itself – I wrote about it in yesterdays end of year post, having only just gotten around to watching it a couple of days back due to feeling obligated to watch it because mentioning the Precure movies in those posts is pretty much tradition.

I will add that I drew at Peace Janken, though. Darn.
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