There’s two ways to look at Shogun’s Samurai: it’s either a clever reinvention of history for the sake of drama, or a shameless excursion into total fantasy. The fact that most Western audiences won’t know the way history’s being so drastically mixed around (shilling for mutilated) is a boon, not a hindrance: they’ll see it through relatively unclouded eyes.

I knew enough about the history behind the events in Shogun’s Samurai to be amused by the changes, but I’m not close enough to them to be outraged. Perhaps that makes me the ideal audience for it: I liked it fine for what it was—stylish but also intelligent pulp fantasy—without grousing about what it should have been.

Witch Hunter Robin is the kind of show I always feel the most ambivalent about: one which has the seeds of greatness in it, but seems arbitrarily hidebound by its style and approach. For a good deal of its running time, Robin is so low-key and so flat-affect that it’s a miracle anything happens at all. Then in the last few episodes, the tension that’s been humming beneath the surface of the show rears up all at once, and I found myself unexpectedly moved and involved. I just wish it had come sooner. This is not a bad show, but it is a frustrating one, and many people are likely to get turned off real fast if they don’t know how it works ahead of time.

Here we have a show with a great premise, a great-looking gallery of characters, and a great animation style—but which is dialed down so far that most audiences are going to breeze right past it. Once I accepted the fact that the show wasn’t going to try and punch things up artificially, it worked well, albeit on its own quiet terms. For whatever reason, the creators chose this approach, and while it would be easy for me to lambast them for doing so, I’m betting it would be more worth my while to try and interpret what they did and why.