The first minute of this episode was a surreal bit of nostalgia. To clarify, I’ve never played Persona 4—I avoided it because I never managed to beat Persona 3, even though for years I considered it my favorite video game. That aside, I have the Persona 3 OST and love it, and the Velvet Room BGM, “Want To Be Close,” has apparently remained the same across both games and, now, the show. It was interesting to suddenly hear that song in an anime, and while I don’t know the Persona 4 soundtrack, it nonetheless felt familiar since it carries the same distinct vibe courtesy of composer Meguro Shoji.

Anyway, about the show—I don’t need to have played the game to know that the show is reaching around its own ass to pay it tribute (like using the game’s own soundtrack). Some of the scenes look like the animation was made to imitate exactly what happened at the same moment in the game. The most obvious visual call-back is when Narukami uses a spell:

Visual call-backs and references are awesome (especially for fans of the game I’m sure), but the trouble I have with this adaption is that it lacks its own personality. Episode One was written and paced very awkwardly, and most of the animation didn’t stand out at all. It seems like the show is more concerned with presenting a trimmed-fat transliteration of the game material than it is with being a good anime series. If I’d played the game, I might be happy with that, though. After all, I dropped the Persona 3 anime precisely because it had little to do with the game (and it was just boring).

Of course, I could be totally wrong, because I haven’t played the game. Maybe the shortcomings of the anime have nothing to do with its being an adaption. Either way, I felt this was a rather weak opening episode.

(I probably would’ve loved it if the fight had opened with “BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY B-BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY!”)

You may be aware of this, but I’m currently a NEET. I’ve kinda been one since May, but only now am I Not Employed, being Educated, nor in Training, nor plan to be in the near future. My “job” is to keep my house clean and, more importantly, to take care of my mom while she’s at home between hospital stays, which she is as of today (WOOHOO!!!). Being a NEET is all like…

And now I’ve been doing more Stuff than I ever thought probable. I finally understand how my friend watched thousands of anime and played shitloads of videogames in his years as a hikkikomori. Time just sort of prostrates itself before me, and I rape it with anime, writing about anime, writing in general, recording albums, performing in (a) live show(s), playing Dark Souls, and internet bullshittery.

What I hope this means is: perfect chance to keep up with an entire anime season! I actually did pretty well with the summer season: I think Usagi Drop and Nekogami Yaoyorozu get credit for the first shows that I’ve kept up with throughout their run, and watched the final episode within days of its arrival. Ever.

This season, I’m doing something I’ve never done before and giving shows a second chance. This won’t count for shows that I have no interest in watching; but shows that make me go “eeeeh” will be given several episodes to sway me. My excessive free time isn’t the only reason for this; the cause is Ro-Kyu-Bu, a show that I dropped after one episode last season, confident that I wasn’t missing anything as reinforced by everyone who finished it seeming to go “why did I watch this.” Then, I was slightly buzzed and Taka showed me this ridiculously adorable video, so I decided to watch ep 2 streamed just because drinking and watching bad anime sounded like a great idea. Turns out, episode two was quite good, and the next two episodes were still fun, and now I’ve actually downloaded the show. So, from now on, I’m gonna be a nice guy and watch a few eps before dropping.

Anyway, this is starting to read like a post on an ISSS, so I’ll get to the anime now.

Shows I’m Psyched About

Fate-Zero: I knew this was going to own the Fall season ever since it was announced way the hell back in like April or whatever, so I’m not surprised that it does. It’s no secret that I fucking love Kara no Kyoukai, and this show is the second coming of that. I’d thought with KnK that we probably wouldn’t see its like again in terms of how far it went to tell its story perfectly; instead, it feels like anime wants to move even more in that direction. (See, for instance, the six-part Break Blade and Towa no Quon movie series.) Here we not only got a 45-minute premier episode to a 26-episode show, but the BD releases are to contain extra deleted scenes. UFOTable will go the fucking distance to animate all of this god damn story. Hopefully, the first BD box release will be timed to come out during the interval between the show’s two seasons (it will be breaking in December and returning for the Spring season).

How is the show itself? Mostly terrifying. Credit will probably go to Urobuchi Gen for this show, perhaps rightly, and he’ll have written two of the best anime of the year. We may have Aniplex and Iwakami Atsuhiro (who owns my soul) to thank for them, but it comes down to Gen to lay that wonderful foundation.

Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai!: One hell of an opening episode! Some shows go the “fight first, then exposition” route. Some go the “exposition, then fight” route. This show? Whole fucking first episode is one gigantic battle. It introduces a giant cast; some would say that none of them has time to be interesting, but if you’re like me, hearing their seiyuu is enough to make them interesting immediately. I’m not going to get into that because there’s too many names and plenty of time to say something more than “OMG SHE’S IN THIS SHOW!” later on.

Most of the fighting wasn’t well-animated or interesting to look at, but it was made an interesting experience through the facade of tactics and lots of badass introduction moments. It wasn’t left at that though, and the last combat scene was quite interesting. Still not the best animation, but the concept of the fight made it awesome: the strongest girl taking on the next three strongest—one a friend, one a total stranger, one an enemy. Everything about it was pretty awesome, and every character in the show feels likable by way of coolness.

The director has a pretty diverse portfolio of mostly stuff I don’t like, but he was also involved with the Crest/Banner of the Stars franchise. The writer did the script for Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu, which was pretty tactical at times, too. I hope this means we’ll see even more awesome tactical battles!

Hunter X Hunter: My best friend is a fan of this franchise, and he has great taste in shounen anime, so I’ve been mildly interested. I saw an ep of the original show dubbed in Tagalog while I was in the Philippines and it looked almost exactly like Yu Yu Hakusho (which is from the same manga-ka). This show looks nothing like it—the visuals are extremely solid, especially considering that this is a shounen manga adaption. Yes, Madhouse are badasses, but they’re known to slack a little on shows like this—not this time. Visually, it reminded me of Trigun, which I guess is owed to their sharing a chief animation director/character designer.

Besides looking great, the episode was solidly put-together in a big way, containing a large portion of adventure (apparently very abridged from the original show/manga) and lots of exciting events, while maintaining a perfect pace. This almost never happens in anime. Just for bonus points, two of the main characters are voiced by Sawashiro Miyuki (playing a boy!) and Fujiwara Keiji, which is a godly combo. And just because I’ve already seen one person complaining about the ED, I’ll state the fact that I like it. I instantly looked up the band after hearing it. They’re okay.

Chihayafuru: Between this and Hunter X Hunter, Madhouse has finally put themselves back on top in my eyes. It’s been a rough year with only a couple of sequels buffering the stream of crappy comic book adaptions, but those are finally over and we’ve got this show, which I think stands to walk away as the most favored show of the season for the kind of people I talk to. One thing I’ve learned about sports/game anime is that most of them are awesome, and you can’t go wrong with one this good-looking, well-made, and focused on characters. I only just found out it’s directed by Asaka Morio, IMO one of the best directors alive.

What grabbed me the most in this episode was simply how gorgeous the character designs are, especially leading lady Ayase Chihaya. It bothers me a lot in anime how characters that are said to be “beautiful” are usually no more spectacular than the characters around them. Here’s a show wherein the leading lady is a shining beacon of majesty, very believably beautiful in-universe and out. If that’s not enough, before I could pick up my jaw, they dedicated half of the episode to her as an insanely adorable little girl performing perfectly animated roundhouse kicks. I died.

Shows I Didn’t Drop

Phi Brain: Kami no Puzzle: Unlike most sports/game anime, I think the mileage any viewer gets out of this show will have a lot to do with whether they find the puzzles interesting, since it seems to take a more, I dunno, Yu-Gi-Oh! approach to gaming than a Chihayafuru one. In any case, Sunrise are being no slouches about making it look nice. The character designs are weird in an interesting way. The main girl is pretty cool, and Shimizu Kaori is great playing her. I can’t really tell if this is something I should recommend to people, because I think my enjoyment was greatly enhanced by my obsession with labyrinths, especially moving labyrinths with minotaurs in them. And then, puzzle geass!

Mashiro-iro Symphony: Love is Pure White: I didn’t expect to like this at all, since eroge adaptions are about the most boring thing on earth to me, but this was pleasantly surprising. It felt carefully paced and the character artwork was really consistent and solid. “What gives?” I thought, and then noticed it was done by Manglobe.

Everyone who knows about Manglobe has their own ideas about the studio; whether they’re now a bunch of sellouts or if they’re still doing interesting work in stale genres. I happened to adore Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai and completely detest Deadman Wonderland, so I’m on the fence. All I know is, I saw a good episode of anime here, and I hope that I’ll be seeing more. If I don’t, oh well, I’ve hated Manglobe since long before it was cool.

What I liked so much: the very lengthy opening scene. I feel like it took the time to come into its own as a scene and not just be some throw-away event on the way through game material, like what you’ll see in Persona 4. That, and OMFG Sakuno is HOT. My body could barely take it. I can’t remember any instance before where I’ve heard Gotou Mai’s voice, but here, with this character, b(￣ー￣)b.

Working’!!: I finished season one with my brother just before the regular airing of the first episode, and I never found myself getting into it. The opening episode of season two showed more of the same, but with some noteworthy tone changes. Will the show continue to experiment? If not, I don’t think I can make it through another season of the same god damn rehashed jokes carted out over and over episode after episode, regardless of how much I love Poplar and Yamada.

Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere: This show is complete fucking chaos, and I’m not sure how to feel about it. Episode one was a blur of characters and locations and terms and other shit flying around, and I didn’t know if it was the kind of show where I could kick back and enjoy the fun like Majikoi, or if I needed to be taking notes if I want to keep up with what looks to be a very complex plot. The fact that the official site apparently contains some kind of terms glossary for each episode leads me to believe the later, which scares me.

Maybe all that really matters is having a shitload of awesome seiyuu getting to play characters that clearly have a lot of personality (though they only got to show glimpses of it). Fukuyama Jun’s lead character has an outstanding level of presence, showing up at the end of the episode and clearly dwarfing everyone else, including the teacher who just had a whole episode dedicated to how badass she is. This has to be worth something. So does lots and lots of fighting. Even if I have no idea what’s going on, it looks like fun.

Persona 4 The Animation: I’ve already said my piece here, and animekritik has said some similar stuff from the perspective of someone who’s played the game. I really just hope that this adaption grows its wings pretty soon instead of trying so hard to be a game that it can’t be.

C3: If one show deserves the “boring generic crap” stamp this season, this is it, and I’m sure it will be stamped all over by people all too ready to stomp on shows like this. It’s not very good. Oonuma Shin’s directing does nothing to help it. The jokes are stale old bullshit, the dialog is “GRR YOUR TITS ARE TOO BIG, I’LL CURSE YOU!” and all that old rigmarole. It deserves special mention how fugly the male lead is. He occupies that special hell of generic designs where the designer gave no shits about the male characters whatsoever. The main girl is cute, but not nearly cute enough to buy this show a pass. After Mashiroiro and Chihayafuru, I hardly even remember this girl, save her first appearance naked (the standard way for a girl to first appear in all visual novels).

Ordinarily, I’d have dropped this like it was Denpa Onna, but in the end, it wasn’t that bad. I’m a retarded for heartwarming friendship crap and the girl thoroughly thrashing the entire house was at least a little fun. I’m willing to give it the three-episode test, if nothing else.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai: This episode did nothing for me. I’m kind of over this whole “light novel that’s meta about light novels” thing. It worked for Seitokai no Ichizon because it had energy, and it worked for Ore no Imouto because it had passion. But this… it’s kinda dry. I do like that it feels as though the author wrote this after seriously analyzing the reasons he had no friends in high school. Also, of course, the character designs are fantastic because Buriki is amazing, but the two main girls are the ones I like the least out of the cast. I’m hoping that the supporting cast will save the show, if not all the great seiyuu in it.

Shows I Dropped

Tamayura: See here.

Kimi to Boku: The exact same reason as Tamayura, only doubly because I’m not as big on watching cute boys do cute things as I am on cute girls doing said things.

And there you have week one! I doubt I’ll do this every week all season, but hey, crazier things have happened. That I even managed to write this whole thing today when I was actually genuinely busy says to me that I have That Much God Damned Time.

[Week One (Because NEET Stands For "Nothing Except Excessive Time")]

One way to be sure this gets done: write it as the week goes along! Like last week, this week has been an emotional mood-whiplash rollercoaster, but through it all there’s always time for watching and blogging anime (and making music). Not sleeping helps! Worth mentioning: I finally got my driver’s license this week! Woohoo!

We’ll do the shows in the order that I enjoyed this week’s episode.

Fate/Zero (ep 2): Talked about it extensively here, so this will be brief. Early in the episode, I thought, this show might not be able to uproot Steins;Gate as my favorite show of 2011, just because Steins;Gate is more playful and fun. Then the Cthulhu scene happened and all the doors reopened.

Chihayafuru (ep 2): Unsurprisingly, this continues to be the Good Fucking Show this season. I love that we’re still seeing the past, because I’ll take as much adorable kid Chihaya as I can get. I think I’m in love with her, regardless of time period. If there’s one thing that bothers me about this show, it’s that being a great sports anime makes it predictable; though this isn’t a fault of the show so much as one of my experience. That’s where the visual flair and gorgeous character designs give me more than enough to not find it a stale viewing experience.

Seeing the matches almost makes me want to learn a bit more about the mechanics of Karuta, which seems like a pretty simple game anyway. I’m really enjoying watching Chihaya run away with at first vicarious passion, and how she’s so forward, simple-minded, and optimistic, no matter the circumstances.

Ben-to (ep 1): I was worried that this season would be the definitive point wherein light novel adaptions stopped mattering to me, what with Haganai and C3 being different levels of bad. Then I got Ben-to, which is every bit as great as I wanted it to be, and totally light novel. I gotta hand this one to Itagaki Shin, because the directing was the strongest part of this episode. Everything had this dry, strangely mysterious feel, where characters would suddenly appear and disappear from the frame in scenes, and everything had a natural flow which punctuated the action scenes wonderfully. And the action scenes were visceral and chaotic enough to be totally awesome.

Yuuki Aoi-voiced Oshiroi Hana is my favorite character so far, being as she’s blatantly insane, but in a strange, unpredictable way, totally the opposite of the bland craziness from the likes of Haganai characters. The beautiful Ice Queen is secretly Casshern, voiced by Ise Mairya who tends to be more in the background, so it’s nice to see her in a leading role again. The protagonist hasn’t done much yet except at least show us that he’s a fighter. I’d love it if he powered up and became a true contender in the Bento War.

This plot owns. I’m the type of person who fights over food. Last year, my brother and I got into a fight over a friend’s leftover hamburger. I was getting owned because my bro is way stronger, so I slammed a microwave door into his face. (I still lost). Food violence is serious business, and I love its presentation here, especially through the dialog of the diesel store worker.

Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai! (ep 2): This episode kept up the ballistic energy of the first, and combined it with gallons of the best kind of fanservice. It’s starting to bring to mind the best parts of last year’s Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou, though that show had better character designs than this one. Aside from not-great character art, I have no complaints about this show. There’s action everywhere, tits (looking forward to the blu-rays) and a hot archer girl who wants to get all over the main character’s “lance.” (I can’t begin to understand why he’s avoiding her.) The action scenes, while not the most fluid, exhibit nice attention to detail, such as even showing the bullets inside of a gun that got cut in half. I enjoy the interactions of the characters, sparse as they may be, because they actually work well as a team. Looking forward to where the plot might go.

Phi Brain – Kami no Puzzle (ep 2): I enjoy this show’s over-the-top shounen anime nature. It creates a world revolving around puzzles, with stuff like “the pyramids were ancient puzzles.” This is awesome because it justifies huge, crazy puzzles. I’d really love it if this show ended with a puzzle on the scale of a city or something. I also enjoy the title system because it’s stupid but fun.

What really sold this episode, though, was a combination of great character design and vocal performances, especially Gammon, played by Fukuyama Jun at his most uproarious and insane. The one thing that bothers me about this show is how it doesn’t actually explain the puzzles and how they’re solved. Maybe this is to let the viewers have a chance to solve it themselves, but it’s not very fun, unlike the rest of the show. The whole baka morse code thing was brilliant, though.

Hunter X Hunter (ep 2): Hunter X Hunter continues to look ridiculously good and display perfect directing and pacing. Persona 4 could learn a thing or two about how to do a good job super-condensing a story from this show. That said, while this episode was technically solid, I didn’t find it as enjoyable as the first. It feels like the show is rubbing in our faces how intelligent and badass these three characters are, and all this “that was the true purpose” type of dialog irks me a little. By the way, I’ll be pissed if we start meeting hunters who are complete jackasses, considering how much of the requisite for being a hunter involves being a good person. Anyway, I’m still looking forward to more of this show.

Mashiro-iro Symphony (ep 2): Mashiro-iro Symphony is like a really cool guy whom you want to be good friends with, but you can’t get too close to him because you know he’s a drug addict. Most of the show is a smart, well-produced visual novel adaption with gorgeous character designs—but every once in a while, the main character walks in on girls changing and faceplants into their tits. I can be forgiving of these stupid antics, but here it’s doubly frustrating because the stupid moments start defining the relationship between the leading guy and girl.

Other than that, everything in the show is great. Most of the characters are likable right from the get-go, and of special importance, so is the protagonist. The scene with all the guys stuffing themselves into a food coma was lots of fun, and I’m actually genuinely interested in the gender politics of the school merger. I really want to think this show is going to be great—if it weren’t for the stupid shit, I probably wouldn’t doubt it.

Guilty Crown (ep 1): Here we have a show about DFC cleavage. No really, it wasn’t easy to decide where to take the screenshot for this ep, considering how much of it was close-ups of Inori’s rack. Comparisons between this show and Code Geass are apt, and it’s being a noitaminA show by Production I.G. puts it in the tradition of Eden of the East, though it feels a little more Fractale, in whatever good way that can be said. What kept coming to mind for me was Final Fantasy VII, with the (very pretty) run-down cyberpunk feel, the girl singing in a sunny garden within a dilapitated building, and then the real money when Gai showed up, looking like Sephiroth. (It also looked like his gang was in trenchcoats.)

A lot of notable seiyuu are on the cast roster, but so far it’s about Kayano Ai playing Inori, and she’s pretty good. This will surely be an important role for the up-and-coming star. Kaji Yuuki is a bit more lukewarm as the protagonist, who’s generally lukewarm. That doesn’t matter because this episode is about being action-packed in media res, and possibly beats out Majikoi and Horizon in the quality of doing such (though it wasn’t as purely fun to watch as Majikoi ep 1).

There was a lot to like. Most especially, the soundtrack. Gai’s entrance and the music that played during it was so good I practically got up and gave a round of applause. Besides that, all the music is great, and I was impressed to learn that the soundtrack is composed by Supercell, OP and ED included. Very cool. The TV rip doesn’t do these visuals justice, and I can’t wait to see the episode on blu-ray. All that said, this episode didn’t do anything wrong, but it didn’t leave a strong impression with the characters or story. At least there’s 22 episodes for that, and hopefully it doesn’t fall apart when characters start talking.

Working’!! (ep 2): I’m happy. This was probably my favorite episode from either season of Working, and displays the directing style that we’re likely to see throughout the series (which wasn’t really evident in the pilot). Here, the show tackles the main issue that I had when I started watching S1 last year, which was that it stretched out the jokes too much and didn’t match the successful comedic timing of the superior manga. Now, the delivery is way more tight and crammed with laugh-out-loud moments. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the episode centered wholly around Poplar and Yamada, who are by far my favorite characters in the show and seemed to get the least screentime in the first season. If this is a continuing trend (the first episode also had a lot of Poplar) then I’ll definitely enjoy this season a lot more than its predecessor.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai (ep 2): I enjoyed this episode a lot more than the first one, primarily because Sena is moe. I can’t say I care for her design, what with her gargantuan tits, but I love the way she seems to have nothing but time to waste. She’s the type who’ll go all-out with anything she actually finds an interest in, which she does on a whim because she doesn’t have any passion on her own. It only takes someone nudging her to get her rolling, and she doesn’t stop. Aside from the fact that she doesn’t get along with the others in the club, she’s actually really into it. I’d kill to have her as a friend.

The Monster Hunter parody was pretty well-done, most especially in the animation, which created the appearance that the characters were doing the stiff and programmed movements that they really would in a game. Best of all was when Yozora put down an exploding barrel, and the barrel just sort of appeared in midair halfway through the character animation—nice touch. I couldn’t help the whole time thinking about the far superior MonHan parody in Gintama, though, which made me want to rewatch that instead of this lol.

I’m looking forward to getting more characters since the main girls’ designs still aren’t doing anything for me, but at least I’ve latched onto someone to keep me watching.

UN-GO (ep 1): It’s starting to feel like Studio BONES has given up on their male audience, between this and No. 6. UN-GO is a girl’s show in every way, being a murder mystery episodic starring a cast of pretty-boys designed by none other than Kouga Yun (Loveless, Gundam 00). The first episode is pretty good, primarily by way of smooth directing, and writing which holds up even though the mystery isn’t particularly interesting. The staff and production are solid, and of note is a pretty cool soundtrack backing it up.

Here’s where things get weird: this show is based on a novel by Sakaguchi Ango, a Japanese author who lived from 1906–1955. He happens to be the guy who wrote In the Forest, Under the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom, which was the second and most insane story adapted in the Aoi Bungaku series. This opens another dimension of questions and intrigue about the show and where it could go.

But for now, we’ve got what’s here, a girly mystery show. My brother said of Inga that “he looks like some chick you’d see at Nekocon, and you’ll probably see a bunch of chicks cosplaying him soon.” Yeah, probably. But wow, he’s voiced by Toyosaki Aki! I never would’ve guessed until I looked it up. Toyosaki continues to show that her voice range hasn’t even been fully explored; she’s always full of surprises. And there could be no better choice for someone who has to transform from a loli-shouta into a big-breasted harlot. On that note, I don’t know what to make of the supernatural element, except that it’s even girlier this way.

Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere (ep 2): I’m actually impressed by the extent to which I have no fucking idea what’s happening at any given time in this show. Every single aspect of it is complete chaos. The character designs are chaos; the dialog is chaos; the directing is chaos; the Sawashiro Miyuki character’s backstory is chaos—by the way, I have no idea how she’s connected to anything else in the show. Is she even in the same class as everyone else? None of the scenes flow into each-other at all—it’s like watching random bits of late episodes of a long-running show about which I know nothing.

And yet, pieces of it are totally appealing. Namely, Fukuyama Jun’s character jumps off the screen with more charisma and presence than any other character this season (that’s two amazing performances from him this season!). He’s a joy to watch, and the other characters are so bizarre and chaotic that I feel like I want to make sense of them—I just hope the show intends to give me such an opportunity.

Mirai Nikki (ep 1): I wonder if /a/ is loving this, since it’s adapting one of their favorite manga and Norio Wakamoto is in it. I read and enjoyed the first two volumes of Mirai Nikki years ago. To me, it felt like a NISIOISIN-esque light novel in manga form, and I appreciated the breakneck, murderous pacing and expressive artwork. The manga already reads at the speed of an action film, so when adapting it, it was bound to get slowed down. Unless the anime version was particularly stylish, there was no way it could measure up to the manga. I knew this and went in with low expectations, which were met and not exceeded.

I’ll keep watching for now because it’s not bad and there are some cool scenes I’m interested in seeing animated, but my hopes are rather low.

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (ep 1): My favorite part was the ultra-cute Emily Armond. Over-the-shoulder ponytails always make me uncomfortable because wearing my hair like that would be infuriating, but on her, it’s damned excellent. I was surprised to learn that she’s voiced by Endo Aya, whom I’ve never heard as a young girl before. Usually she plays okaa-san roles or has a deeper voice (Sheryl Nome, Engi Three-Piece, Takara Miyuki). So far, she’s doing alright here.

Of course, while lolis are an integral part of the Gundam franchise, the real point of this show is the giant robots. The design of Gundam AGE, while decidedly not unique, feels really good the way it’s drawn in this show. It has personality, and seems cool and manly. By the way, talk about manliest Gundam pilot ever in the form of Flit. Has a pilot ever been so ready and willing to take up his mech and kick robot ass? Of course, this is because Flit pretty much built the damn Gundam, which is an interesting twist on the usual fall-into-cockpit-take-reigns-of-history route.

I really hope that this show ends up on Cartoon Network, and not in the morning slot with Bakugan and Beyblade and Pokemon, but in the prime-time action block.

Persona 4 the Animation (ep 2): Even moreso than the first episode, the pacing in this one was complete shit. There was enough content here to fill a two-episode arc, and it was burned through very awkwardly. It’s bulldozering through plot points with no consideration for presentation. Adding to that, I really don’t care for the character designs, especially the school uniforms. The white-on-black stitching isn’t attractive and lends to way too much inconsistency with the difficulty that must come from animating those things.

There’s potential for greatness lying underneath this show. Stylistically, it looks like it wants to be very cool, but just isn’t working. The next episode previews make me think of Boogiepop Phantom and how much better this show would be if it had that level of atmosphere. Whatshisface coming to terms with himself to create his persona could’ve been an interesting character building exercise, but it was so fast and haphazard that there wasn’t time to take anything in.

Persona 4 is on the chopping block. I’ll be dropping it if the next episode is more of the same.

C3 (ep 2): I appreciate the variety of visual techniques used in the second half of this episode. Oonuma Shin is giving himself a run for his money in that regard, and it’s clear that he brought some more friends from SHAFT to work on this episode, as evidenced by the cut-out-paper scenes. And that’s as far as I can praise this show, because it’s complete shit otherwise.

C3 feels like it’s trying to win some kind of trite marathon. Every single line of dialog and every situation is trite. Even the voice acting is shit—Chihara Minori, who is a good seiyuu, and Tamura Yukari, who is a great seiyuu, add nothing to the leading women. They’re flat and boring like their characters. I don’t know the metal claw woman’s name to match her up to a voice, but she was completely fucking annoying. No one gives a shit about the lead guy—I barely remember he exists. The character designs are boring. They’re so boring that even though the OP should be a collection of super good-looking character animation, I didn’t find myself enjoying it, because I don’t enjoy seeing the designs.

This episode does that light novel thing where it goes from dumb comedy to heavy drama at the drop of a hat, and the transition isn’t even jarring because the first part of the episode was so boring, it took the second half just to wake me up. Tons of people bitch about mood whiplash in shows, but I happen to love two shows known for it—Angel Beats and Kore wa Zombie Desu ka—because those were good shows. Kore wa Zombie was hilarious in the comedy parts, and the drama bits were so over-the-top in storytelling that they were cool. Angel Beats was just solidly produced all-around and made whatever it did work. C3 pales in comparison to either series. I promised that I’d give this show a three-episode test, but I’ll be utterly bowled-over in shock if the third episode is somehow good.

Shows I Dropped

Maken-ki (ep 1): At this point, I don’t need to give a speech about how fanservice action shows can be great—Seikon no Qwaser is one of my top 30 favorite anime. But I don’t need to watch more than one episode of this to tell that it’s no Qwaser nor Queen’s Blade nor even Freezing. It’s flatly bad. I find it funny that effort was put into making some of the backgrounds pretty, but the character designs are fugly as sin. The animation in fights is decent and there are some neat directing quirks, but the choreography is weak. Panty shots and retarded girl-falling-on-guy scenes have never done anything for me, and they make up a huge amount of this show. Also, there’s this weird shaky-cam effect used almost constantly, which is totally annoying. There aren’t even any notable seiyuu, though I rather liked Yahagi Sayuri as the blonde. Takeda Hiromitsu should stick to manga about girls climbing a wall of dicks.

That’s all for this week! Please submit your ideas for what NEET should stand for next week in the comments! Also, next week, I’ll introduce The Chopping Block. I’m looking forward to it!

I was only watching Nichibros and Nisemonogatari. I hoped Black Rock Shooter would be good so I could watch that. It disappointed me.

I hadn’t realized that Smile Precure! was also about to start. I watched it with excitement. It was awesome.

And that’s really all there is to say on the matter.

Casshern Sins, Heartcatch Precure, and Yumekui Merry all come to mind when I look at Saint Seiya Omega, and not in a good way. I like Casshern and Heartcatch, but the things I like about them aren’t present here; instead, what I hate about Casshern and Merry are what I see.

Two names are important to analyzing these shows: Umakoshi Yoshihiko, who did character designs and animation directing for Casshern Sins, Heartcatch Precure, and Saint Seiya Omega; and Yamauchi Shigeyasu, who directed Casshern and Yumekui Merry. Another person of mention is Hatano Morio, the director of Saint Seiya Omega, who also directed a few episodes of Heartcatch Precure.

Casshern Sins and Yumekui Merry share an incredibly disorienting visual style, wherein super-close-ups are used frequently, and fights often make no sense whatsoever. Both are visually interesting and more than a little stylish, but that style is only as cool as it is irritating. Both shows do feature occasional brilliant fights, which can be attributed to the star animators brought onto the show to handle them.

A cool fight from Yumekui Merry [ep 6?] (skip to 0:50):

The disorienting nonsense it usually features [ep 11 or 12?]:

Yumekui Merry doesn’t feature Umakoshi designs, whereas Casshern and Heartcatch do. Heartcatch doesn’t suffer the problems of the other shows, which would lead me to believe that those problems were the results of Yamauchi’s directing. However, now we have Saint Seiya Omega, which has the worst case of disorienting, ridiculous directing of the bunch.

Heartcatch Precure fights/sakuga [early eps]:

This is perplexing. I don’t think the disorientation is the fault of Umakoshi’s animation direction. Not only is his work on Heartcatch outstanding, but he also did the same job on other good shows. Instead, I think this may be the fault of the (apparent) newbie director, Hatano Morio.

Penultimate fight of Saint Seiya Omega ep 1 (start around 1:11):

Hatano may be trying to imitate Yamauchi’s directing style. After all, while I haven’t seen them and can’t speak for their visual style, Yamauchi did direct a number of Saint Seiya movies and an OVA, after having been a major staff on the original show. If Hatano/the staff is just imitating Yamauchi’s style, it may explain why Saint Seiya Omega is more disorienting and less stylish than Casshern and Merry.

A cool fight from Casshern Sins [ep 4]:

By the way, if you’re wondering how the studios factor into this: Heartcatch and Saint Seiya Omega are both done by Toei, Casshern Sins by Madhouse, and Merry by J. C. Staff. So that’s no help at all.

Saint Seiya Omega will probably have some pretty cool guest-animated fights somewhere along the line, but I don’t care to stick around. I found this episode almost unwatchable between the bad directing and boring dialog. The only reasons I’d have to stick around are Umakoshi’s designs and that awesome Pegasus Fantasy duet OP.

is that it’s a grown-up show. When I saw it on this season’s chart, I was all too ready to blow it off, having long grown tired of A1 Pictures’ constant stream of very pretty looking melodramatic shows. But this isn’t a show about lame crying teenagers, it’s about a grown-up pair of brothers going to space. There’s still a lot of crying, but it’s adult crying. Or something.

Unlike ghostlightning, I couldn’t care less about space, astronomy, or hard science, but I do love shows about brotherhood, because like him, I am the oldest (of three in my case). My first brother is only a year and a half younger than me, whereas Mutto’s is three years, but it’s just as well. When I was fifteen or so, my brother started to overtake me in height, and Mutto’s looks like he overtook him at twelve. Hibito is god damn monstrous.

I’m ten years too young to have a brother who’s way the fuck more successful than I am, but that doesn’t mean it seems unlikely. He may be fairly directionless, but at least he’s in a university, unlike some older brother who’s been bumming around the house for almost a solid year.

Mutto and Hibito seem to have been really close, which is good for me because I’m also extremely close to my brothers. Victor (nineteen) and I certainly ran around in a forest recording things for most of our teen years. Unlike Mutto, but like Hibito, my brother and I never forget anything that we do (though Victor is MUCH better at remembering every promise that I’ve ever made to him, apparently). We probably will never forget because the video evidence is everywhere, constantly reminding us.

Here’s a fact I didn’t remember: apparently, our still-running Project Awesomeness comedy series was originally something I thought would make us “famous.” According to Victor, every time I’ve ever talked about my plans, they’re about how I’m going to become rich and famous one day. Then I think back—to things I always remember, now re-contextualized into a straight line.

I remember being eight years old, Victor probably six, and we were jumping up and down on our beds. I was explaining to him that the video game I was “designing” was going to make me two million dollars. I literally thought that if I “designed” a game (this involved writing strategy-guide-esque descriptions of levels, drawing maps and enemies, etc.) and sold it to Nintendo, they would give me two million dollars. With that money, I explained, still jumping, I would purchase every video game console and every video game in existence.

Fast forward seven years; I’m fifteen, he’s fourteen. I’m dead-set on becoming a director. As a matter of fact, what I want to do is drop out of school like Ryuhei Kitamura did and make a breakout low-budget film, like he did with Versus, and become world famous. My breakout would make me a full-time director, and what did I want to do with the money? Buy every anime DVD in existence. I never change.

Hell, maybe the reason I’m not driven right now is that there’s no massive stock of collectible entertainment I want to purchase.

Anyways, here’s what my little brothers want to do in life:

My fourteen year-old brother, Shade, wants to be a game designer.

Victor isn’t sure exactly what he wants to do, but he knows he wants to do film, and he’s in a film curriculum.

HORY SHIET.

Both of them are lazy and impassionate, yet both are far better at what they’re trying to do than I ever was (and more consistent). Shade modifies his PC games (i.e. making Minecraft skins, etc.) and has a load of modeling programs. Victor is good enough at editing videos and enjoys it enough that there’s no reason for me to ever do it (I am terrible).

Have I gotten off-track? Mutto is a reprisal of Hirata Hiroaki’s previous role as Kotetsu from Tiger and Bunny: another older guy who we love, who acts like a loser even though he really isn’t one. Both characters start by losing their jobs and work their way back to the top (one would expect).

This show could be great, or it could be good. Basking in the majesty of space doesn’t have any effect on me, but we’ll see how it goes.

Medaka Box follows the character formula that defines Nisioisin’s writing. There’s a girl who’s a genius-badass, and a guy who’s a badass-genius. The girl is aware of her own genius, while the guy is doubly aware of the girl’s genius. The guy is also aware of his own genius, but believes (and is usually right) that his is far lesser than hers. The guy is not unconfident: he knows that he’s a badass and somewhat of a genius, but he’s so sure that the girl is better than him that he understates his badassness. We only see his badassness in his interactions with anyone other than the girl, as he treats all others as equal to or lower than himself (unless they’re yet another incredible badass/genius).

Is this explanation confusing you? It should be. Nisioisin writes confusing stories. Usually, they’re full of constant, biased, loopy narration. Medaka Box doesn’t have this element—it’s more straightforward, not only because it’s based on a manga, but more importantly because that manga runs in Shounen Jump and not, say, Faust. (Nisioisin has written manga that are exactly as head-fucking as his prose.)

Regardless of narrative style, the point stands that Nisioisin’s main duo is very here. Medaka is a genius (I’m actually shocked that this exact word didn’t see any use in the episode) in just about any field, and has an overwhelming presence. (Well, she should have one, but it wasn’t portrayed as overwhelmingly as, say, Senjougahara is in Bakemonogatari.) The lead character is second only to her in genius and skill, yet he presents her as being a world apart from himself. And just like other Nisio leads who are “surrounded by geniuses,” the lead seems convinced that he’s only as good as he is because Medaka rubbed off on him. I’ll bet Medaka believes differently, and will reveal to him his personal badassery at some point.

Moving along, what is goddere? Hitoyoshi is tsundere, as he admits in the episode. Goddere is a term that, as far as I know, came from Kyouran Kazoku Nikki, wherein Kyouka claimed to be the most supreme kind of dere, “goddere,” and said, “it’s not like I’m being omnipotent and all-powerful for your sake!” To me, the idea of goddere, which Kyouka expressed to an extent, and which Medaka expresses to the fullest, is literally “the love of a God.” It’s when the character either is or sees herself as so powerful that her love is protection, like the love of God. Medaka seems to be preaching that she’ll protect everyone with her endless benevolence. Pray to Medaka and thou shalt be saved.

On a different note, Kamina is back from the dead!

I didn’t like this episode very much but I’m not ready to drop the show yet.

I don’t know if Shinichiro Watanabe actually choreographed the fight scenes in Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, but both shows featured spectacular combat sequences often showcasing strange and eccentric fighting styles. Clearly, Apllon isn’t a story heavy on fighting, nor would it make any sense for the characters to show of eclectic maneuvers.

Were this another show, I’d probably be complaining about the fight scene. Why waste high-grade animation on a fight wherein you can’t tell what the fuck is going on? I might assume that since it’s a non-fight-centric show, maybe they didn’t care that much about how the fights looked.

But of course they did. Watanabe always cares how things look, and I don’t care if this is a manga adaption, he’s going to leave his mark on it. The fight is meant to disorient. Not only does it not establish a horizon line—it seems to purposefully avoid one, cutting to random parts of the fight, showing people anonymously getting thrown around, all set to insane jazz music.

That’s the fight Kaoru witnessed. He didn’t know what the hell was going on—he just saw the magnificent beast that is Sentarou going nuts on a bunch of dudes and had about a million questions running through his head along the lines of “what the fuck just happened?”

Alright, ep 2 is done dling now.

Of the great pickings this season, the show that’s caught my attention, and that I feel I may actually watch all the way through, is Tsuritama, a low-key show about a bunch of awkward, cute boys learning to fish. Or something.

Here’s a fun fact: Enoshima, the town in which Tsuritama takes place, is fucking tiny. Episode one showed random locations in the city, and lots of mention is made of the fact that the show takes place there (“Enoshima don!”), but I got the best sense of what kind of town it is by looking at it on google maps. (click to enlarge)

My neighborhood is bigger than Enoshima island. The average SM mall in the Philippines could barely fit on that thing (and artificial island Mall of Asia is actually bigger). Norfolk international airport, which is near my house and is the smallest airport I’ve ever seen, is the size of the whole above screenshot.

I don’t have a point to make about this; I just find it interesting.

Nakamura Kenji is one of my favorite directors, but Tsuritama isn’t like his other shows. Kuuchuu Buranko, Mononoke, and C were a lot more artsy and visually extravagant. Tsuritama nevertheless stands out with its bright and vibrant color palette, which it shares with Kuuchuu Buranko, along with the character design of Irabu-sensei (here seen morphed into the vaguely malicious Coco).

I don’t mind that Tsuritama is less artsy, because the reason I love Nakamura Kenji is that he makes offbeat and artsy shows that don’t get wrapped up in their own artsyness (the way I feel Masaaki Yuasa shows do). It’s also good to see Nakamura doing something more relaxed after C, which I felt was more or less a failure.

Because indeed, Tsuritama isn’t wielding a heavy animation budget. Like Kuuchuu Buranko and C, it feels pretty cheap, but because it doesn’t have C’s ambitious alternate world or combat scenes, the cheapness doesn’t stand out nearly as much.

On that note, this must be one of the lowest-budget A-1 Pictures shows I’ve seen. Usually they can be counted on for high-quality character art if nothing else, but Tsuritama has more than its fair share of iffy cuts. At least one A-1 Pictures staple is in-tact: all the boys are pretty as fuck.

Yeah, Tsuritama feels pretty gay a lot of the time, but somehow that just makes the whole thing more relatable for me. I am, after all, surrounded by pretty boys in real life, and we’re all gay as fuck, so I can’t even say anything about these guys. What was I talking about?

I like the show, anyway. It reminds me of NieA_7.

First, the analysis of The Crystal Empire:

Also, my first impressions of the new episode, just so MisfortuneDogged can see it:

Text version of The Crystal Empire video:

The Crystal Empire was released with sharp timing in my life. After a month and a half working full time at my first job, i was trying to have my hours reduced, and instead found myself working my busiest weeks yet thanks to the winter holidays. In the middle of an otherwise depressing week, the start of season three was a beacon of light, and getting to write about it was one of the best parts of the month for me. I got back into writing about MLP because of these episodes, and about two weeks later, I started this video series, which has become a small-scale hit and the highlight of my life at the moment.

Needless to say, this pair of episodes is pretty important to me, in the way that My Little Pony as a whole is astronomically important to me. I hope that all of you who watch my videos understand that even on the occassion when I’m criticizing this show, and indeed I’ll do a bit of it in talking about this episode, I’m still an uber-diehard fan. The only reason I can even criticize its poorer moments is because they stand next to so many utterly brilliant moments. There’s a good reason that even though I’ve watched literally thousands of cartoons (mostly from Japan) and consumed unholy amounts of media, there’s only one show that I’ve talked and continue to talk about in this much depth.

So anyway, let’s talk about the Crystal Empire. This two-part episode is interesting because there’s a lot of things it does very well, and other things that are awkward and confusing. The awkward and confusing stuff mostly comes from the plot focus of the episode, which leaves the audience with more questions than answers, and has bothered as many viewers as it has inspired them to theorize about what exactly went down.
Some of the issue here is just clumsy writing. It feels awkward as early as the royal guard saying “IT has returned,” which is a phrase that I hate every time it’s used in fiction.

IT of course refers to the Crystal Empire, which is an enigma to the very end. Apparently, it’s disappeared off the map for one thousand years, and then reappeared in the same state that it had been beforehand. We don’t even know why it’s come back, or what was the real purpose of King Sombra vanishing it to begin with. The whole backstory is confusing, and it only becomes more so at the end of the episode when we find out that Cadence is the Crystal Princess. As an idea, Cadence being princess of the crystal kingdom sounds really great, but in execution, it leaves us wondering why she is the princess, how old she’s supposed to be, has she lived here before, has it really been gone one thousand years, what are we missing here?

And what did Celestia do with Twilight’s books in this shot?

Adding to the feeling of mystery is the presence of Princess Luna throughout this arc. Her purpose in these episodes seems to be foreshadowing, but we don’t know exactly what for. If she was only there for Celestia to bounce dialog off of, I don’t think she’d have such an imposing presence, nor would she show up with the Starswirl book at the very end of the episode. The presence of Luna and this book, along with the return of Cadence and Shining Armor as important characters, were what set me up to be constantly vigil in search of continuity this season, and so far it’s been paying off in a lot of subtle ways. The question of where it ultimately leads, however, remains unanswered.

Perhaps the most infamously enigmatic element of this episode is King Sombra himself, a villain who is more cloud than unicorn, and has maybe three lines of dialog and three minutes of screen time. On first viewing of this episode, I didn’t mind Sombra’s non-presence very much. I viewed him as being a similar villain to Lord Sauron from the Lord of the Rings, who isn’t really present in the story at all except as a thing which drives the heroes to go on their quest.

After I’d written about Sombra in this light, I later found people making the case that Sombra was actually a kid-friendly metaphor for depression, or even post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a very entertaining way of reading the episode, because it fits well, but it doesn’t have much of an effect on interpreting the main narrative, since the crystal ponies, like Sombra himself, are mostly an auxillary to the narrative of Twilight Sparkle.

Actually, that might be what’s so awkward about this episode. It’s such an elaborate setup with so much mythos behind it that isn’t really explored in-depth, and only serves the purpose of teaching Twilight a lesson. It’s a story setup which would feel at home in a series like Avatar: The Last Airbender which is all about following a grand narrative, and in which the Crystal Empire would’ve had its own arc to really flesh out everything within it. In the context of an episodic series like My Little Pony, it seems weird to cram in so much information when Twilight could’ve learned the same lesson under far simpler circumstances.

In spite of the awkwardness, however, there’s still a lot of stuff that this pair of episodes does well. A lot of it is small and nuanced, which just makes it even sweeter.
The episode highlights for me are the fun little character moments. It’s true that in this episode, the mane six ponies who aren’t named Twilight Sparkle are mostly boiled down to their core traits for dialog, since the episode isn’t focused on them. However, I think those traits have gotten to be pretty well-realized for a lot of the ponies, and it leads to some great moments, particularly in dealing with Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity. Here are a few:
(Rainbow trolling)
(AJ and RD at the statue)
(drinking straw)
(a rarity)

Pinkie Pie isn’t bad in this episode either, though she’s a little obnoxious. I didn’t notice at first that she’s actually yelling “FLUGELHORN” into the the Flugelhorn at this part:
(flugelhorn)

And of course, Twilight gets her small moments in addition to her big ones:
(you do. You really do)

The only character who doesn’t have any standout moments in this episode is Fluttershy, and this is something I’d like to address at length at a later date. Fluttershy is the least realized and most confusing character in this show, and one day I’m gonna get to the bottom of why that is.

Even more so than reminding me why I love the mane six ponies, the best thing this episode did was to sell me on Princess Cadence as a total badass. You may remember from my Sleepless In Ponyville analysis that I’m a big fan of sleep deprivation as a plot device, and I’m an even bigger fan of characters grappling against it while trying to be as strong as possible. Cadence’s incredible tiredness is the real driving force of the episode for me. While the fates of the Crystal ponies ultimately hang in the balance, the immediate threat of Cadence falling to pieces is what had me on edge as a viewer waiting to see this whole thing sorted out. The animators did an incredible job portraying the desperation in Cadence and Shining Armor to resolve this situation as quickly as possible, and it starts to become particularly tense towards the end.

Of course, the crowning moment of awesome comes from Shining Armor launching Cadence like a javelin to catch Spike and the crystal heart. That stained glass window really should have been a picture of this moment, because it’s one of the greatest moments in the history of fiction.

Suddenly I realize that I haven’t actually touched on the core of this episode’s narrative yet, so let’s talk about some moments in Twilight’s test arc, which runs through the second part of the premiere. The most interesting moments are when Twilight uses Sombra’s dark magic, which she learned from watching Celestia use it. When I saw her using it for the first time, I was left really uneasy, like there had to be some kind of consequence to this. My unease paid off a moment later when Twilight was shunned by the princess in a surprisingly unsettling scene. The even bigger payoff of this scene is the next one in which Spike faces his fear, as I’ve come close to crying every time I see it. It’s a scary moment and a very effective one.

The other day I watched the Bronies React to the Season Three premiere video, and just about everyone was wondering about why Twilight didn’t teleport down the stairs at this part. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Twilight can teleport, since she wouldn’t need to take trains and shit if she could. Twilight’s ability is more of a “blink,” which can take her a short distance. People also wondered about why she didn’t levitate herself, and I think the answer is mostly that it’s supposed to be very dark. It doesn’t look dark because the animators want us to see what’s happening, but Twilight tells Spike that it’s incredibly dark. The drop is also extremely long, as evidenced by a mathematical equasion that someone put together based on the time it took for Twilight’s rock to hit the ground.

In terms of Twilight’s overall performance in this episode, and as an interpretation of her character on the whole, I think Twilight’s greatest strength is that of a human-erm, pony resources manager. A tactician, if you will. She knows how to utilize the strengths of the ponies around her to maximize the efficiency of a situation. We already know this from episodes like Winter Wrap Up, and I think the real take-away from this episode is that Twilight should never be concerned about being the hero. She should always be more worried about knowing who to use to get the job done–in this case, Spike. This reading is a little forced, though I don’t think it’s much more forced than the idea that Twilight learned about self-sacrifice from this whole ordeal. After all, if it weren’t for Celestia’s confusing terms with regards to the mission, Twilight would’ve made that sacrifice without having to learn a god damned thing.

Anyways, with that, I’m finally caught up on videos for season three. Next week I might start from the very beginning, or I might take a completely different route. Who knows?! Thanks again to all of my wonderful viewers who have proven over the past six weeks that youtube comments aren’t always the worst thing in the universe. I hope you’ll continue to spam all of your favorite pony websites with my videos until someone takes notice.

Gargantia is awesome. It does an amazing job of suggesting an enormous amount of shit through visuals alone, even if that shit isn’t really delved into. For instance, the huge space battle in the first episode features all these fantastic patterns, formations, and suggestions about the nature of the main character and the current battle.

So what’s the show missing? Well, more of what it does best! Everything that’s shown in the series manages to suggest a lot; the problem is that in three and a half episodes of Ledo being on Earth, not enough has been shown! Ledo spends the better part of episodes three and four literally sitting on the mast of one ship in this huge Gargantia fleet, and while we’ve seen a bunch of short clips of Amy running through the town, and plenty of sweeping shots of the fleet, it feels like we’ve hardly even seen an ounce of this would-be fascinating location.

In episode four, Ledo finally gets off the starting boat and into town, but things are happening too quickly (not pacing-wise, mind), and he isn’t seeing enough. The episode is too quick to jump into a series of dialog dumps from its principal characters, instead of allowing Ledo to learn about them and their home organically.

While Ledo’s conversation with Bevel helped him start to comprehend these people, having this conversation is a wasted opportunity regarding what makes Ledo interesting. He’s a super-observant, quick-learning character, so if he’d been given enough time aboard the ship interacting with people, these emotions could have been brought out of him by way of his own observations, rather than hamfistedly being told to him by a slew of characters who probably won’t matter at all outside of teaching him things.

This hamfistedness is altogether the biggest trouble with Gargantia. It’s created a serious, involving world, with believably rational characters, but is too quick to tell them exactly what to do, like it’s working its way down a character development checklist. In episode three, the whole idea about Ledo not killing people is handled in a ridiculous manner. They still fight the pirates, and both sides assumably take casualties, so… huh? Was there no way to teach Ledo the importance of human life other than to take unnecessary casualties on their own team? Wasn’t the damage caused by Ledo killing in episode two already done, so at this point it didn’t matter anymore?

The Earthlings are not as logical of thinkers as Ledo, but having the military leaders apparently instruct Ledo not to kill seems a bit backwards. I expected them to let him off the reigns, at least towards the end when lives were in serious danger, but no one says anything, and Ledo persists in sparing lives (successfully, fwiw), because he’s not really on anyone’s side. I don’t question Ledo’s actions so much as those of the fleet.

Anyways, I’m still enjoying this show a lot despite these issues, and looking forward to what might come, especially after finding out this is an Urobuchi Gen show. In the coming episodes, I’d like to see the show pull back on the dialog a bit and let Ledo actually explore the Gargantia, preferably alone, without side characters constantly pointing out the significance of what he’s seeing. Flesh out this grand setting and make us feel a part of it, and let Ledo learn on his own, now that he’s past the first knowledge barrier.

Throughout the first two episodes of Kill La Kill, I felt that Kuroi’s costume design was meant for something a little more than fanservice. It’s not meant to be a commentary on the audience; sure, everyone who ogles her is represented as stupid, and she usually kicks their asses, but Kuroi is nonetheless embarrassed to wear it, and there’s nothing to actively punish the viewer for ogling it. The point is more about saying: it’s okay to have a sexy character design; and rather than be coy about it, it should be a matter of pride.

Kill La Kill is utterly absent of pretention. It seeks simply to be an incredibly badass technical action showcase, and it thoroughly succeeds. Hiroyuki Imaishi is perhaps the most influential and important animator in TV anime alive today, and his new studio, Trigger, has brought his style into its own life. Unlike his previous shows Gurren Lagann and Panty and Stocking, which felt like a blend of a huge number of styles from a large group of contributors, Kill La Kill feels focused and uniform in style. It’s also Imaishi’s best directorial work yet in my opinion; the pace is insanely fast, but it’s also very consistent, unlike Gurren Lagann which could feel all over the place at times. In every technical aspect, Kill La Kill is as good as it could possibly be.

The storyline is simple as they come, and the show pulls no punches in being as over-the-top with action and fanservice as it wants to be, not holding back anything for anyone. Episode three is all about embracing that naked, unashamed nature.

Matoi is embarrassed to wear her armor because it’s scantily clad, and guys are ogling her—but she always holds power over them. She knows that they don’t matter, but she lets it upset her anyways. This shame in the very thing that makes her powerful, ends up being her downfall. Not unlike a show or movie created to be an action vehicle, but bogged down in attempted realism or a pretentious/overwrought storyline, Matoi can’t be the epic fighter that she needs to be if she’s busy being ashamed.

The school president, meanwhile, doesn’t give a single fuck. She knows that she’s amazing, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks or says. She’s determined and true to herself—able to stand naked in her conviction and say, “come at me bro.” And in witnessing how the president’s determination trumped the opinions of those beneath her, Matoi is inspired to embrace the nudity that brings her power and fight with true conviction.

…

…did I just blog anime?!

When a sci-fi series in any medium tries to invent all kinds of everyday-use technology, it invariably ends up dating itself. A future filled with CRT monitors and gigantic cell phones is always going to mark itself as pre-flatscreens and smartphones, for instance.

Space Dandy, however, is atemporal. In its desire to be at once a futuristic sci-fi series, but also a throwback to the style of sci-fi pulp stories from the Space Adventure Cobra days, it elects to throw technology from different eras into a blender and create something that transcends time.

Dandy’s robot, QT, runs like an old, hunky PC, with limited battery life, outdated software, and printed-out punchcards. Meow uses a smartphone to take pervy pictures of the ladies in the Boobies bar, that seems to be running on a totally modern Android OS. Dandy’s ship can warp through space, but the teleporter is an “old model,” that takes about as much time to transfer people from one place to another as a camera did to take a picture in the 1800s.

The entire show is an anachronism. It’s digitally drawn, but Dandy looks like he walked out of the 70s. Aliens range from looking like menacing, planet-burrrowing space worms, to resembling adorable Pokemon. For that matter, it’s aspacial as well, with simultaneous releases in the US and Japan, each with their own dubs, so that it can’t be said where the show first aired. It’s an anime series which transcends space-time to occupy a totally unique plane of existence.

Now to watch episode two.

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Phrases like “good directing,” “good writing,” or “well put together” are used frequently by reviewers such as myself; but it’s difficult to actually articulate what good directing IS without extensively breaking down an example. It’s easier to do this when a show is presented in a really unique way, but there aren’t a lot of breakdowns out there of what good directing looks like in a fairly normal show.
Zankyou no Terror episode one is a perfect example of how a show can be beautifully crafted without being particularly stylized. Plus, being as its director is the legendary Shinichiro Watanabe, who previously directed Macross Plus, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Kids on the Slope, Space Dandy, and some excellent short films, it has the credentials to be under analysis with assumption that the director is largely responsible for the show’s quality. I’ll also be comparing this episode against the first episodes of other currently airing summer anime to explain what those shows are doing wrong in comparison.
Going into this, the two main threads we’ll follow are coherence and faith in the viewers intelligence. You’ll be shown how this episode manages to introduce its main characters and story setup, along with orchestrating two high-tension action sequences, without ever outright explaining to the viewer what is going on.
The first shots in this episode are of an armored van charging down a snow-covered road. Here, we have on-screen text supplying one of only a handful of direct explanations to the viewer. It tells us that the scene is set in Aomori Japan, just to give quick context. (For those who don’t know, Aomori is one of Japan’s northern prefectures, and it snows there a lot.)
Right after this, we see a young-looking guy driving the van and humming to himself. The fact that he’s in a gas mask is immediately unsettling, as it suggests that he’s doing something potentially dangerous. However, the fact that he’s humming so enthusiastically also suggests that he’s enjoying himself.
From here, we cut to some quick shots of an eyeball scanner, and another man in a HAZMAT suit unlocking a door. Before we even get to the next shot of the interior of an industrial facility, we already know that whatever’s inside is important enough to be behind two kinds of security. Right after this, we receive our second piece of on-screen context, with text that reads “Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Facility.”
Some heavy machinery is seen packing a small orb inside of a much larger containment orb. Whatever’s in this orb is obviously important, and potentially dangerous.
As the armored car drives up, it puts on police lights, confusing the people manning the gates to the facility. They make a call to the guardroom, which seems to be fairly relaxed. Quick shots reveal a young man, distinguished by glasses, manning a fork list, and then we cut to inside the armored car again. Now, the young man here is humming while twirling a grenade. At this point, we can assume that he’s up to some kind of mischief. The way he handles the grenade suggests a strong familiarity with this kind of weapon and an utter lack of fear for what he is about to do.
Inside, the other young man starts spraypainting on the ground, and from the reaction of the other guy near him, it’s clear that this isn’t normal behavior. The significance of the word VON is not yet known.
As the gates of the facility start to close, the kid in the armored car chucks a grenade and knocks the gate off its hinges. We can assume that the use of police lights before had been to confuse the guards long enough for him to get in close with the grenade before they could close the gates. This also gives the impression that this is a well-planned event on the part of the truck driver. Back inside the facility, the mysterious spray-painter is already removing the orb from its containing unit by the time others notice that something odd is going on.
The armored van crashes into the facility, and the driver takes off on a snowmobile from the back–while his accomplice inside is hauling ass, leaving confused workers in the dust. In this next shot, the young man on the inside looks up at the security cameras and points a gun at the object he’s holding. The reaction of the security team makes it evident that if he shot this thing, it would lead to disastrous consequences. A chase scene commences, and the two accomplices meet up, stashing the orb carefully inside what looks like a gym bag. A guard opens fire on them, only to be stopped by another guard, reaffirming that hitting the object in the bag would be a terrible idea.
Unable to use weaponized force, the security guards aren’t able to take them out, and the snowmobile driver completely outclasses the skills of the large truck drivers. As the culprits drive off, the driver throws up a hand and hollers, suggesting once again that he’s having a lot of fun executing this plan. The opening theme kicks in here.
In this first three-minute scene, we’ve established two extremely competent terrorist characters, who clearly are both experienced and take great pleasure in what they do. We know that they are now armed with a nuclear power of some kind, and that they are highly capable of destruction. And we learned all of this in the midst of an exciting, high-tension action scene without a single sentence of exposition.
Once the opening song is over, we fade in on a blazing sun and the sound of cicadas, which are trademarks of a hot summer day. This is a total contrast to the blizzard from the opening scene, meaning that we’ve likely chagned locations, and probably seasons as well. Shots of a road busy with cars indicate a highly populated city, which definitely puts us out of Aomori. The next cityscape shot indeed confirms with on-screen text that this is Tokyo, 6 months later.
The next shots are of a bunch of girls at what is most likely a school swimming pool, but they’re all in uniform rather than swim gear, and the pool is otherwise empty. Meanwhile, there are two young men walking across an overpass, and it’s pretty easy to deduce immediately that these are the same two young men from the opening scene. The fact that they are dressed in high school uniforms also suggests that they are teenagers.
At this point, I’d like to mention some of the techniques that are used throughout this episode to make the show feel more like a film, and therefore increase the sense of realism by calling back to the look and style of live-action movies.
The most persistent technique used in this episode is a subtle shaking of the frame, as if someone were filming these events on a hend-held camera. When dealing with animation, if you were to move the proverbial camera off-screen a little bit, there would ordinarily be a blank screen around it due to the size of the drawing. Therefore, in order to be able to move the camera around the screen, the image must either be drawn larger than the resolution of the frame, or the image must be zoomed-in on during editing and the frame moved around the image. Hopefully my on-screen example is making this easy to understand.
It’s too early to say this for sure, but so far I’ve only seen rips of Zankyou no Terror in 720p, leading me to believe that the show is broadcast in that resolution. I’ve seen other cases in the past, such as with FullMetal Alchemist Brotherhood, where a show was created in a lower resolution so that more of the budget could be allocated to the quality of the animation; so it’s possibly that Zankyou no Terror is deliberately made in a resolution just above 720p so that it can afford to have the camera move around the frame like this. That is purely specualtion on my part, though, and I have no idea how likely it is.
We also see in this scene on the overpass that the so-called camera deliberately goes in and out of focus, once again suggesting that there is a camera man trying to get these shots. The blown-out lighting also adds to the sense of realism, as if you filmed during this very hot time of day, people would come out looking really pale.
After our characters trade some dialog about the summer heat, one of them refers to the other as “Nine.” Right away, this suggests a lot of things about these characters. People being named by number immediately brings to mind test subjects and human experimentation. Strict numbers like this evoke formal systems like government, military, or scientific organizations. So right away, there’s a feeling that these characters are related to something like that, which fits in with the extreme and unatural actions that we’ve already seen them taking.
All of this is reinforced when Nine responds by referring to his companion as “Twelve,” and telling him to try his best not to stand out, and to act like a normal high school student. For this to be worth mentioning, it must mean that they are NOT ordinary high school students.
Twelve is quickly distracted by a little mascot character drawn on a bus called Kururin, which Twelve thinks is cute because he loves ants. We get the impression that Twelve has a flighty, easily distracted personality, and possibly a childish heart with how he gets excited over a cutesy mascot. This is also a small setup for events that will happen later in the episode.
Twelve gets distracted once again by the smell of chlorine. This time, his unnaturally strong senses suggest some kind of superhuman smelling capability, which again reinforces the abnormality of his character. A powerful sense of smell also calls to mind things like police dogs used for drug or bomb hunting, so again there’s a sense that this character has a background in being trained for government enforcement work of some kind.
Back at the pool, we witness a steriotypical bullying scenario as a girl named Lisa is goaded by her classmates to jump into the pool with her clothes on. When Twelve comes onto the scene, he reacts by saying, “Oh, I know! This is called bullying!” This dialog isn’t so much for the viewer’s sake, as we probably figured out what was going on already. Rather, it’s to further establish not only Twelve’s distance from the typical behavior of high school students, but also his role as an enthusiastic observer of these traditions. It’s possible that as someone who’s never lived a normal life, he’s extremely interested in the behaviors of normal people his age.
When the other girls lie to him and say that Lisa is doing this of her own volition, he feigns ignorance not for their sake, but so that he can test Lisa’s reaction. She responds with weakness and a pain in her eyes that Twelve will bring up again later. He then makes a running jump into the pool himself. Whether he did this to diffuse the situation and save Lisa’s ass, or simply because he intended on doing so from the beginning, isn’t clear, but it’s likely a combination of both. Whatever the case may be, it seems to have a profound emotional impact on Lisa, who takes notice of Nine as well. We then get a title card, which is used to very quickly bookend the scene and transition into the next one.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciated this show’s use of scene transitions after watching shows like Tokyo ESP and Aldnoah.Zero, both of which bounced around so much that I kept finding myself saying, “oh, I guess we’re in another scene now.” It’s difficult to take in and appreciate a scene when it doesn’t begin or end with any breathing room. Leading into a scene with establishing shots, and leading out of scenes with fades or transitions is a basic of filmmaking, and yet we have shows that ignore this rule and end up feeling like a total clusterfuck as a result.
The next scene begins with establishing shots of a school, and of Nine transferring into class under the codename Arata Kokonoe. Amazingly, the sense of blown-out lighting and intense summer heat is kept up in the indoor scenes by having all of the lights off in the classroom, with the windows open. While natural classroom lighting is fairly common to anime in scenes set during the late afternoon, it’s pretty rare to see this in daytime scenes, and it’s especially cool because in reality, schools often turn the lights off on overly hot days. I also think it’s noteworthy that the classroom has an overhang TV, which is another thing I saw in a lot of classrooms in high school, but have rarely seen in anime.
Elsewhere, Twelve is being introduced as Toji Hisami, by a confused-looking teacher. He looks around the room, entranced by the site of an actual high-school classroom, and yells “Jumbo!” I found a theory on the fansubber’s page that he’s actuall saying “Jambo,” which is Swahili for, “hello,” which seems likely, and adds more to the exoticness of his character. It turns out that Lisa and her bullies are all in his class as well.
Our next scene transition happens fairly quickly, depicting another building, and an office inside of it. I have to admit that the first time I saw this episode, I didn’t notice the scene transition and had assumed that this was a teacher’s lounge inside the school, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that this is actually a police office.
Inside are two older men, one of whom is quite literally watching cat videos on youtube, while the other plays a game of shogi by himself. The first detective ends up on a mysterious terrorist threat video and oh my god, it’s real youtube! Like, seriously, up-to-date current youtube, on what is either Windows 7 or 8! Most shows go for off-brand versions of websites and operating systems, but this one is painstakingly accurate. They’ve even gone to the trouble of putting a bunch of word documents and application launchers on the guy’s desktop. Now THAT’S attention to detail.
If you look at the close-up shot of the video, several related videos have CNT logos, which in this context is most likely a fictional news organization, suggesting that this video has probably found its way to the news media, which is why the detective came across it. The video consists of two young men in Super Sentai masks referring to themselves as Sphinx, and giving a cryptic warning for a terrorist attack. Attentive viewers will notice that in the background is a blueprint for the building that they will take out later that day. Also, for us, it’s extremely evident that these two kids are Nine and Twelve. Oh and remember what I said about attention to detail? When Twelve gets up close, you can see the camera they’re recording on reflected in his mask. I can’t tell what kind of camera it is, but it looks like it could be the outer camera on Nine’s iPhone 5 that we see him with later in the episode.
When the duo’s boss comes in the room, he tells the shogi-playing man, named Shibasaki, to stop acting like he’s a detective. It’s not clear what this means or what his actual job is, but he responds with a defiant smile, and plays another tile on the shogi board. We don’t know much about this guy, but it’s obvious that he’s got a history as a possibly troublemaking detective, and is going to be a major player in this show’s game.
Before I move on from this scene, I also just want to point out how much I love the shots that are used throughout. We get an incredible sense of space from throughout this scene as we view the room from several angles, and even at one point have the so-called camera stashed inside a bookshelf, which gives the impression that this room is too cramped to get a good wide-angle shot. I’m a big fan of scenes that establish what a room looks like from every angle, so this was much appreciated.
Returning to the school once more, we get another ludicrously detailed shot, where you can even see students moving inside one of the windows. Inside the classroom, Arata is being swamped by women asking for his phone number. He’s obviously listening to his headphoens to ignore them, as is the traditional technique of anti-social teens, but his attempt is for naught.
For the life of me though, I could not figure out why one of the girls asks if Arata has an IR transmitter. An IR transmitter is the device used in remote controls to send signals to other electronics. If you hook an IR transmitter into a smartphone, for instance, you can use applications to have it remotely control a TV or camera or something. I don’t know why the hell one of the girls would ask this, unless he does have one and she somehow detected it. In any case, Arata lies that he doesn’t have a cellphone, right before we hear a string of texts being received in his pocket. This girl on the left knows what’s up.
Of course the texts are smiley-laden demands from Twelve to meet on the roof for lunch and oh wow, that is one legit iPhone 5. Again I find myself wondering how they got the rights to use this stuff, considering they’re pretty much saying that iPhones and youtube are tools of the trade for terrorists.
Nine and Twelve share another quick banter on the roof, accusing one-another of drawing attention to themselves. In this scene, we learn of Twelve’s apparently extreme memory, as he’s learned the names of students who aren’t even in his class somehow. He also shows his perceptiveness by catching that Lisa is planning to eat her lunch in the outdoor bathroom to avoid the bullies that are always hounding her. It’s probably safe to assume by now that Twelve is some sort of genius. Nine tells him not to get involved, but Twelve is obviously going to anyways.
Inside the bathroom, Lisa looks at her Windows phone, which I’m actually not sure is a legit brand because all the pictures I found of Windows phones online had the buttons in a different order. She’s received a ton of texts from her mom which the fansubbers didn’t translate, but going by my limited Japanese knowledge, all of them seem to be asking if she’s eaten yet and if the food tastes good. Her mother is obviously fretting over her and has probably heard something about her not eating. Lisa gets sick at either the sight of this, or the smell of the bathroom, and tosses her food in the toilet. Most likely, she’s suffering some kind of stress-induced eating disorder as a result of the bullying she’s subject to.
From here we cut to an almost hellish segment, as high-pitched, noisy guitars screech over black and white footage with orange spot-coloring for fire. This seems to be some kind of memory, and a dramatic one in which Nine and Twelve were able to escape from somewhere that a friend couldn’t make it out of. It turns out to be a dream Nine is having, which oddly justifies the black and white coloring and vignette borders, as many people actually do dream in black and white vignettes with only splashes of color.
Nine wakes up covered in sweat in a sizeable loft apartment. Given that this is Tokyo, an apartment of this size would be outrageously expensive, meaning that these two kids are operating on some kind of serious budget.
When Twelve wakes up, we get yet another example of where the show uses dialog that informs the viewer, but also informs the characters. Twelve asks if Nine had “that dream” again, which informs us that this is a recurring nightmare that Nine has, but he also suggests that the reason Nine is having this dream is because Lisa had the same eyes as the kids whom they’d left behind at the institution.
Recently, when my brother and I talked about the first episode of Aldnoah.Zero, we pointed out how the characters were constantly explaining things to one-another that they should have already known, as a way of informing the viewer. One character would ask another, “do you hate that guy?” and the other would recount the entire history of racism towards that guy’s people which their conversant should’ve already known. This is totally immersion-breaking dialog because there’s no reason that these characters would need to explain these things to one-another.
If this was how Zankyou no Terror was written, then Twelve would’ve said something like “you’ve been having those nightmares ever since we left the institution and all of those kids died,” which is shit Nine already knows. However, since Twelve is actually telling Nine that it’s probably thanks to meeting Lisa that the memory is dragged up, he manages to inform the audience of Nine’s history without telling him shit that he already knows.
Nine goes on to muse about how both themselves and the others were too weak, and that’s why they couldn’t save them. Now, however, he believes they are different. With this, we get the sense that Nine is operating with a lot of resolve, because he doesn’t want to relive the weakness that he felt in the past. We’re halfway through the episode now, and with the commercial break card, we get our next scene transition.
The second half of this episode is really one long action scene, but whereas the opening scene was more focused on very fast, silent action that unfolds quickly, this one is a slow buildup of tension that ends in one big payoff. I think it’s likely that as this show goes on, we’ll see more scenes done in this style, probably over the course of entire episodes, leading to some truly epic moments. For now, though, we’ve got a pretty simplistic setup that sets the tone for where this series plans to go. I’m not going to break this down shot-for-shot like I’ve been doing so far, because frankly this video is getting way too fucking long, but we’ll have a look at what this scene does to create a feelings of realism and tension that make it thrilling to watch.
After establishing that everyone’s bags are checked on the way into this building, we see a number of Twelve’s classmates, lead by his teacher, walking in. It seems that his class is on a field trip to this building. Nine informs Twelve that there are three minutes until the power goes out, followed by a twenty-six minute window before the backup generators come on. Twelve plays with the little Kururin dolls that he mentioned earlier, and responds to Nine’s concerns with confidence, as if to get them both fired up. Seemingly upon realizing that she can’t get away from her classmates all over the building, Lisa retreats to the bathroom. Once again, there is a trail of texts from her mom asking her about food. Our players are in place, and with Lisa’s declaration that she wishes everyone would disappear, we launch into the action.
It begins with a crane knocking out a bunch of power lines, which we see knocking out the power all over the city. How this was orchestrated isn’t clear, but it’s possible that there are more personnel in this operaton than just Nine and Twelve. When the lights go out in the detective’s office, Shibasaki catches on that this is what the youtube video earlier was referring to. The shots we get of people evacuating and general confusion are all to establish a feeling of tension. Nine and Twelve leave a bunch of Kururin dolls at key locations, while Lisa finds her way to a stairwell. Here, she runs into Twelve, who mysteriously instructs her to hold onto a Kururin doll until he tells her not to.
After the generators kick in, Twelve reveals to Nine that he found Lisa in the building, just as Nine has called in for the Kururin dolls to start exploding. I’m not sure what kind of chemical it is that melts down and sparks in such a way, but it most likely is related to the nuclear ball that the two collected in the opening scene. In any case, it was cool to see the way this scene was handled, with the stuffed animals not ouright exploding at first, but instead causing things like fire extinguishers to explode. It’s possible they did it this way so that people would be alerted to the danger early on. Not only was the building being evacuated from the power outage, but the early explosions would signify the danger of being in the vicinity before the final explosions take out the building.
Twelve reveals to Nine that the reason he gave a Kururin doll to Lisa was so that they could either decide to leave her for dead, or to rescue her from the burning flames as they had failed to do in the past. He’s set this up in the hopes that Nine won’t be plagued by nightmares anymore if they succeed. Nine informs Lisa that she can either die where she stands, or become an accomplice to their actions, seemingly a test of her will to live. Once her desire to live is confirmed, Twelve springs into action.
As explosions continue to rattle the building, the tension starts to shoot up, with shots of explosions, Twelve hauling ass on his motorcycle, and shaky blur effects as Lisa runs down the stairs. I have to admit that while I understand what they were going for with this blur effect, it ends up looking kind of cheap. By Nine’s instructions, Lisa blows a hole in the building’s overpass, and then makes a leap of faith into Twelve’s arms… I think. That’s when we get our incredibly well-animated depiction of the building falling apart, as the payoff to all the tension buildup. Nine takes a picture of their handiwork, tells Lisa that there’s no turning back, and the episode ends.
In the end, what’s so impressive about this epidode is how, in spite of more than half of it consisting of action sequences, one of which has almost no dialog, and the other of which is mostly a long build-up of tension with a fairly cool payoff, we still managed to learn so many things about the characters without ever being outright told anything. We learn enough just from the way the characters are animated and the way that they talk to one-another that extended expository dialog is unecessary. I’d hate to see this show go back on its style by explaining things outright in later episodes, which I’ve seen some shows do, but for now I’m just basking in how well this episode was put together, especially in comparison to other action thrillers being released this season.
And before anyone tells me that I’ve been reading into this show too deeply, or that it’s not as special as I think, or that no one thinks about this stuff while watching anime, let me clarify that it’s not like I was breaking the show down like this while watching it for the first time. After all, I haven’t told you anything about the characters or setup that you didn’t already know, right? I mean, it’s possible that you missed some things on your first viewing, but if you’ve seen this episode already then you probably came to the same conclusions that I did about the characters.
The point of this analysis isn’t to explain to you something you didn’t notice, it’s to explain what the people making this show did to cause you to notice those things. It’s about how you already knew that Nine was a professional terrorist who really enjoys his work before you ever even saw his face, because the show communicated that so well in the opening scene. It’s to explain to you why that building falling down felt so much more satisfying than just some random explosion, because the way it was executed was so unique, and so well animated, and came after such a long tension buildup. The building blocks of what makes a scene work may not be something you notice… but your brain does. And when it all comes together like this, you can tell immediately that a show like Zankyou no Terror is something special, even if you’re not really sure why.

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Spring Season anime is in full bloom, and I’ve snuck a peak at each and every available episode to get a sense of what’s hot and what’s not so much. Not including sequels to great shows like Baby Steps, Nanoha, or Danna ga Nani, and notwithstanding the yet-unaired Ninja Slayer, which seems to be some kind of net exclusive series, I’ll be listing off the ten shows I’m most likely to watch a second or third episode of in the coming weeks, by order of how excited I am for each.

Kekkai Sensen, otherwise known as Blood Blockade Battlefront, is an adaptation of a manga by Yasuhiro Nightow, previously famous for creating the Trigun series. It sees studio Bones very much in their comfort zone, animating high-intensity action sequences with a deftness that makes them look effortless, with additional visual splendor brought by director Matsumoto Rie, in her sophomore effort after directing the 2013 buried treasure Kyousougiga.

Its colorful band of rogues have a great habit of looking and sounding like Guilty Gear characters, and emit little sparks of personality which leave me hoping to see some interesting plot and character setting emerge. At present, however, the main guy is kind of a boring sod, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be willing to wait to see him grow into a badass. If you’re down for nice-looking characters and very well-directed action sequences, without the overwrought drama of something like Owari no Seraph, then give Kekkai Sensen a watch, but if you’re tired of wimpy male leads and action isn’t a strong selling point for you, then maybe hold off on this one until a few episodes have passed and others have formed an opinion on it.

Mikagura Gakuen Kumikyoku is a show about a cute lesbian otaku, and that’s about as much as I could figure out from watching the first episode. There’s a hyperactive mouth on this girl, and the gags come quick, but aren’t particularly funny, so unless some more interesting story developments or character growth happens in the next episode, I probably won’t be watching this one for long. Still, I like seeing a main female character who drools constantly over the pretty girls around her, in a show that actually doesn’t have much in the way of fanservice. There’s a kind of innocent, fun-loving spirit to the show, and the opening scene had hints of nicely-animated action sequences, so there might be something to this in the long run for those who find themselves enchanted with the tone and characters already. Doga Kobo has been on kind of a roll with modest but entertaining shows for the past year or so, and I could see this being one of those, but I hardly see it turning into anything I’d rush to recommend.

Plastic Memories is a quaint sci-fi melodrama with just the right balance between self-aware comedy and overwrought heartstring-pulling to keep it from being obnoxious. Once again, Doga Kobo seems to shoot for modest enjoyability, but in this case pour a noticeable amount of flourish into their animation in a way similar to how they did with Engaged to the Unidentified last year. Taking place in a world full of androids who only live for nine years, the story follows a team who collects the memories of androids right before their deaths; and faces resistance from the owners of those androids who don’t want to see them go. Our main man is partnered up with an android near the end of her lifespan, gripping with her loss of functionality as she realizes that she’s no longer capable of being the best at her job.

I can’t say this is the smartest, best-written, or most exciting show of this season, but its willing to tackle some pretty heavy themes right from the get-go, and does it while keeping up a high dose of levity and likability, so I could actually see this turning into a sleeper hit. Worth a look at least if the concept sounds interesting you, or if you think the characters are cute.

Arslan Senki is a high-concept historically-styled fantasy series, based on a manga from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist and Silver Spoon, which is itself an adaptation of a novel series from the creator of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Pedigrees don’t get much better than that, but the first episode admittedly didn’t give me the impression that this would live up to that pedigree in a big way. It’s nice-looking and quick to get into the themes of why war is terrible, but its directing and staging felt very flat and unmemorable, and left me feeling that it would really have to stand on the weight of whether its story and characters can hold the show together. Neither grabbed me in this episode, which mostly acts as a prelude to the main story, but I’m very willing to stick it out for a while and see where this one goes. This could easily turn out to be a massive hit, or a curious mediocrity–but either way it’s worth having an eye on.

Kyoukai no Rinne is the latest manga adaptation from Rumiko Takahashi, famous for creating Inu-yasha, Ranma ½, Urusei Yatsura, and Maison Ikkoku, among other things. While I’ve found every Takahashi series to be a roller coaster of great and terrible spots, I’m willing to give another of her’s a try for as long as it can hold my attention. So far, Rinne seems to focus on light-hearted comedy with its typical shounen ghost-busting story backdrop, and the jokes have been making me laugh with modest success, so it’s doing its job. Studio Brains Base can usually be counted on to keep a show looking decent, and I dug all of the voice acting choices. If you checked out the insanity that was the first episode of Punchline, then watch Rinne afterwards and wrap your head around the fact that Marina Inoue played both main characters.

Ore Monogatari is a very old-school, traditional-feeling romantic comedy series from studio Madhouse whom, in spite of a pretty rocky track record over the past few years, are still one of the best anime studios out there. Likewise, director Morio Asaka is in my opinion among the best and most underappreciated anime directors alive, having impressed me constantly with his work on Cardcaptor Sakura, Gunslinger Girl, Chihayafuru, Galaxy Angel, Aoi Bungaku, etc. This team brings their talents to an imminently likable shoujo manga adaptation, distinguishable by its unlikely shoujo manga protagonist, in spite of feeling every bit like a typical shoujo series in its execution. If you’re into cute anime romance, then you probably can’t go wrong with this one.

Show By Rock is some sort of acid fever dream by Studio Bones that I’m still trying to fully process. Based on a rhythm game for mobile phones by Sanrio, it stars a ludicrously cute girl who’s watched way too much K-On, and gets teleported into a crazy phone world where everyone can transform into adorable CG mascot characters and fight enemies with pop music. It’s spastic, densely-packaged madness with no hint of an overarching plot as of yet, but the design work alone had me hooked by the teeth from square one. The CG sequences look incredible and were a blast to watch, and the ridiculous slapstick comedy bits in the later part of the episode had me laughing at just how bizarre they were. This one has me excited not out of the possibility that it will be great, but merely out of getting to witness where it goes from here.

Shokugeki no Souma is a manga adaptation by J.C. Staff following the tale of a kid whose cooking is so intense that it makes people orgasm. The first episode is a near frame-by-frame translation of the manga, but with ridiculously intense music and imagery to bring the orgasmic eating scenes up to a place of transcendence. There are signs that the adaptation may be overdoing it a little to kill time, and indeed the show will have a hard time staying interesting if it stays at the pace of this first episode, but it’s hard to begrudge a concept this amazing, when the music alone had me on the edge of my seat for much of it. I’ve heard great things about this manga for years now, so I’m quite excited to see where this thing goes.

Hibike! Euphonium is the latest outing from Kyoto Animation, who still somehow seem intent on raising the bar for anime visuals beyond what any other studio seems capable of. This is seriously several fathoms above what anyone else is doing this season, and the best part is that it’s got the writing to back it up. While K-On is my favorite anime series of all time, I feel I should clarify that I’ve been a fan of very few KyoAni shows, and that I haven’t liked the majority of output from this director. My favorite KyoAni shows were both directed by Yamada Naoko, who’s got the role of “series production director” on this one, which is a bit out of my depth to explain. Still, this one actually feels pretty unique from any other KyoAni show, and carries a lot of their best attributes, from the subtle character acting and writing, to the use of ultra high-detail settings. This was the only episode of new anime that I watched this season in which the writing and characters grabbed me right off the bat, and I’ll be extremely happy if the entire series can live up to any aspect of this episode’s quality.

That only leaves the best new anime of Spring 2015: Gintama. Okay, it’s actually the third season of a show with nearly three-hundred episodes, but I’ve been trying to finish season one for like six years, and at this point I’m like fuck it, I’ll just watch the new one week by week, since it’s an episodic series anyways. Gintama is far and away the funniest anime series ever made, and the new season starts off completely on-point. I don’t care if you have no idea what a Gintama is or why you should care, just give this show a watch. If nothing else, it’s already been proving for nearly a decade now that it’s the most consistently fantastic long-form television series in human history, so get on the boat while the getting is good.

That’s all folks, see the description for a list of all the shows and where to watch them, and see the comments for an explanation of what the hell you just watched.

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Whenever a batch of new anime series make their seasonal debut, a handful of shows tend to have a hype train behind them right from the beginning–followed by a train of people wondering what the hell that hype is all about. Nowhere does this conflict of hype make itself more apparent than in the reactions to new shows by Kyoto Animation–a studio which is practically known for their divisiveness among anime fans in English-speaking communities.

This consistency of controversy comes as the result of the studio’s signature style of typically low-key, high school-based comedy, romance, and drama stories, with adorable, big-eyed characters and ludicrously high-quality animation. To anyone who hasn’t taken the time to engage with each of their shows and to figure out what makes them tick, it can look from the outside like KyoAni keep repeating the same formula over and over again in creating just one type of very divisive show.

Of course, anyone who actually watches each of these series will quickly realize that they convey different atmospheres, themes, and writing styles, which make each of them distinct. While the plot description of Hibike Euphonium may read an awful lot like the plot description of K-On, the actual content of the series is quite different. Both are about adorable high school girls joining music-based clubs, and both go out of their way to create a realistic, heavily-detailed setting for those girls to inhabit; but the motivations and personalities of the characters, the nature of their clubs, and the overall tone of each series is completely different.

Both K-On and Euphonium make their central themes apparent from the start of the first episode, and are driven from the perspective of the main character. K-On is a story about the idiot savant Yui Hirasawa trying to find a place to belong and something to do with her time upon entering high school, and stumbling her way into four powerful friendships and a passion for guitar playing with her joining the light music club. While the club activities are integral to the narrative in the long run, as each of the band members becomes legitimately attached to their role as musicians, the point of the story is to show how that group of friends comes together, and how they grow as people by being friends with one another.

Meanwhile, Hibike! Euphonium is a show about the different kinds of relationships that a musician can have with the activity of playing music itself, and stars a protagonist who is struggling to understand the nature of her own relationship with musicianship.

The central conflict of the series is painted right in its opening scene, with Kousaka Reina and Oumae Kumiko learning that their middle-school band didn’t make it to the national competition, even though they won a gold medal at the regionals. Reina is so upset by this that she bursts into tears; but Kumiko asks, in confusion, if Reina really thought they could have made it to the nationals, creating a fjord between them.

As we learn throughout the first two episodes, Reina is someone who takes playing the trumpet very seriously, and even takes lessons outside of school. It’s clear that she has a passion for playing the instrument and is desperate to reach some kind of success in her band career. Similarly, contrabass player Sapphire states a desire to stake her life on the instrument, and has nothing but optimism about the idea of making it to nationals.

Her determination takes a different form from Reina’s–Sapphire seems to relish in the idea of doing anything it takes to play her instrument as best she can, whereas Reina seems more propelled by a fear of failure, and is more determined to win in the sense that failure is not an option. Both of these players are very passionate in a similar way, yet exhibit their passion through the filters of very different personalities.

Kumiko, meanwhile, doesn’t have a passion for playing in band–or at least isn’t aware of it if she does. She tries to deliberately avoid joining band, but ends up doing it because the first friends that she makes in high school join; and she ends up playing the Euphonium again by way of peer pressure. Kumiko doesn’t seem to understand the way that others are passionate about performing, or is possibly afraid of believing in that passion. She sees herself as a normal person passing through life in a normal way, and doesn’t take musicianship seriously as a passion or career option. The irony in all of this, of course, is that she happens to be talented.

Not only has Kumiko been a member of a band that made it very close to national-level competition, but when she shows up at her new high school, she can instantly detect the lack of skill in their band club, even when others can’t. Funnily enough, she even carries around an enormous tuba figurine on her school bag at all times, signaling a clear interest in brass instruments; yet none of this has translated into the drive to actually perform her instrument–and that’s not surprising! Speaking as a big time music fan with a lot of big time music fan friends who all used to play instruments in high school and don’t really anymore, I’ve seen firsthand how even being pretty attached to and skilled at an instrument doesn’t necessarily translate into a passion for starting a career with that instrument.

Nevertheless, Kumiko is almost haunted by her history as a euphonium player. She remembers her older sister teaching her how to play, and remembers the performances that she was a part of to earn the school’s gold medal. She even takes some enjoyment out of watching her novice friend Hazuki excitedly purchasing and practicing to use a tuba mouthpiece, without even understanding what it is. It’s clear that Kumiko has a fond attachment to music and performance, yet can’t get over that moment when she had to face off against Reina’s passion.

It’s possible that Kumiko is afraid of Reina’s passion–or, simply, that she doesn’t want to become passionate about performing in band. She doesn’t want to put stakes on her enjoyment of playing the euphonium, and would rather live casually without getting properly invested in anything. As we can see from the people around her, it’s really the dour commitment shown by Reina exclusively that’s so scary. Everyone in the club clearly cares about their instruments, and all of them but one raise their hands when asked if they’d rather play with the goal of competing nationally, even though it’s hard to imagine that many of them would be nearly as crushed as Reina would be if they didn’t make it.

The only player who raises her hand to keeping the club casual is Kumiko’s former elementary school bandmate, Aoi, who reveals later that her decision was made as a somewhat cynical defense mechanism. She explains that she doesn’t expect the others to take their commitment seriously based on her past experiences, but admits as well that it’s partly out of fear that she, herself, might not care that much. Again, it comes from the fear of being let down–to be crying their eyes out like Reina was when they find out that they didn’t make it–to sincerely open their hearts to something and to give it their all, knowing that they could possibly fail.

What Kumiko fears is authenticity. Just as she can’t bring herself to sincerely apologize to Reina, she can’t sincerely admit to herself that she wants to play the euphonium; or, that if she really did give it her all, then there’s a chance that she could win. She fears emotional investment. This girl, who chose her high school based on which one had the cutest uniforms, describes her first day of school as “meh,” and agonizes over having caused a pain that she either doesn’t want to understand, or doesn’t want to admit that she understands, is being put face to face with an overwhelming opposition of sincerity from all of the people around her–and I’m willing to bet it’s only a matter of time before she slowly gets turned around to the other team.

Unlike Kyoto Animation’s high school comedy manga adaptations such as K-On, Lucky Star, or Nichijou, all of which are typically paced around scene-by-scene gags reflecting the four-panel nature of their source material, Hibike Euphonium is paced around complete episodes, and integrates its punchlines more naturally into the flow of its scenes. While the show is rife with hilarious moments, largely created by its most comedic character, the heart-stoppingly beautiful Tanaka Asuka, it would be difficult to regard it as a comedy show in the same way as the other three that I mentioned. Euphonium’s comedic and dramatic moments rise naturally out of the situations that it presents, but the show isn’t structured around them. Instead, it’s structured around the subtle melodrama between Kumiko’s inner conflict and the attitudes of the people surrounding her.

The uses of fluid animation, consistent depth-of-field cinematography, and high-detail backgrounds, are all typical of Kyoto Animation; though Euphonium isn’t as showy or dramatic with its use of lighting and effects as shows like Kyoukai no Kanata or Hyouka. If anything, it’s probably most visually comparable to Free!, though it comes off as restrained in comparison, due to the lack of fanservice. The character designs have a bit more sharpness and complexity to them than those in K-On or Tamako Market, and with more curliness in their hair and eyes than those in Hyouka, but without quite getting into the realm of overwhelming hotness that Kyoukai no Kanata went for. It’s the perfect combination of saccharine cute and grounded realism, which keeps the show feeling relatable on top of being pleasant to look at. Little touches like the hard-ass teacher chastising girls for rolling up their skirts do a lot to position the show squarely in real life, and out of the fantastical realm of most high-school anime; and the series makes great use of earthen tones everywhere without feeling like it’s an Attack-on-Titan-esque nightmare of browns.

With likable characters who seem to have sparks of excellent chemistry between them, fantastic visuals, an interesting storyline which takes the unique stance of following a character who is talented, yet lacking in passion and authenticity, and excellent pacing in its comedic and dramatic elements, I think that Hibike! Euphonium is something worth being hyped about, and is certainly the series that I’m most excited about to come out of the spring 2015 season.

If you’ve watched the first two episodes of this show, then let me know what you thought of them in the comments below. Subscribe to see more videos like this, and consider supporting my channel via patreon or paypal, or by sharing the video around. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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Anime critics have a tendency to throw around phrases like “rushed” and “bad pacing,” without stopping to analyze what those terms actually refer to. There’s a tendency to equate pacing issues with the amount of things that happen in an episode’s story; even though other factors, such as the timing and editing of visuals and music, contribute heavily to the way that an episode feels. In cases such as the first two episodes of this season’s Kekkai Sensen, many have accused the series of feeling rushed because of the amount of story elements put into each episode, even though other shows like Tatami Galaxy and Shirobako pack every episode full of story content without feeling rushed. Likewise, one may accuse the first two episodes of this season’s Kyoukai no Rinne of feeling too slow for lack of anything significant happening, even though other currently-running shounen comedy adaptations like Shokugeki no Souma and Yamada-kun to Nananin no Majo are debatably more engaging while getting just as little done.

Getting to the bottom of why these shows feel awkwardly paced, I’m going to analyze the second episodes of each; sidestepping the issue of what actually happens in the the stories, and instead looking at what’s going on in the cinematography.

Almost every shot of Kekkai Sensen is visually impressive on its own, with tons of experimental and unique shots that you wouldn’t find in any other series. Particularly memorable from the second episode is this montage of Zapp Renfro stealing pizzas from Leonardo, as seen through the lenses of security cameras around the city; as well as these incredible low-angle shots wherein different elements are moving in different depths of the frame. Did you see that streetlight change color in the background? We actually see one turn red when the bad guy starts talking, and another turn green when he stops, signaling the pause and play in the action of the scene. Pretty neat, right?

Unfortunately, where Kekkai Sensen turns into a clusterfuck is in the lack of cohesion and apparent meaning between each of its shots. For instance, when Leonardo is tied up in the back of a van, we get several shots of the van’s interior as reflected in this blue orb thing. When I first watched the episode, I assumed it was some kind of enclosed security camera watching Leo, especially when he looks directly into it–but eventually I realized that it’s probably supposed to be one of the light bulbs, even though they appear to be shining brightly in all of the other shots. The bulb is irrelevant to anything else going on in the scene, leading me to believe that it was only included as a way to change up the visuals. While I agree that it would’ve gotten boring to watch Leo sitting there for upwards of three minutes, these shots only ended up distracting and misdirecting me, since I kept wondering what the deal was with the blue bulb instead of concentrating on what was happening.

Kekkai Sensen uses these kinds of pointlessly stylized shots constantly, as if it’s terrified of showcasing a normal image–and a lot of it is just distracting. Stuff like putting the character names on-screen in big flashy letters, or showing a brief recap of the previous episode in the screen of a tablet sitting on the desk melts decently into the pacing of the scene; but then there’s this shot of Leonardo that looks like it’s from the perspective of a TV monitor, when he’s actually looking at a map. It does seem like the map is some kind of holographic projection, but the surface of it is perfectly flat, so what’s up with the fisheye lens?

This shot wherein Leo and Zapp traverse a hallway lined with mannequins, and then run into a real girl at the end of it is pretty cleverly done, and this cutaway gag to a youtube video which Zapp just described is not so bad; but these shots wherein Leonardo seems to be hacking the eyeballs of all the monsters in the truck don’t make any sense at all, especially since it’s never established exactly what he’s doing. I’m also not sure what the idea was behind this shot wherein the car gets all close to the screen and blurry, and it’s hard to tell what’s going on.

It looks pretty cool when Sumeragi following Zapp’s blood trail is represented by lines moving across a city map, but this makes the interwoven shots of the others in a car taking a totally different, vaguely unexplained route all the more confusing. Once the action starts, the camera is all over the place, and the spacial relationships between actors is impossible to keep track of, leaving it all a weird, unsatisfying mess.

By constantly throwing all of these experimental, jarring, and pointless shots at the viewer, Kekkai Sensen causes them to lag behind on comprehending the situation. When it takes a second to figure out exactly what the hell you just saw, you have to mentally play catch-up to process the following shots–and this show leaves little breathing time to think about what’s going on. In terms of what actually occurs in the episode, there isn’t much happening, yet thanks to the constant changes in location and perspective, and the weird, asinine cuts that have nothing to do with anything, the episode feels like it’s going by too fast and trying to do too much.

Kyoukai no Rinne suffers from the exact opposite problem. Most of the shots are very flat and boring, and linger for just a little bit too long. There’s a tendency for each shot to keep going for a few seconds after a character stops talking, even though it seems like there should be an immediate follow-up to the last thing that they said, which causes the viewer’s brain to become disengaged from what’s going on. While watching this episode, I constantly felt like I was suddenly waking up when a character spoke, because I’d start to lose concentration during all of the awkward down-time during shot transitions. As a result, even though I found most of the individual jokes in the episode pretty funny, the amount of space in-between them left the entire thing feeling kind of slow and boring.

Looking through the chapters of the manga which correspond to this episode, it’s obvious that a lot of stuff was added in to pad out the length of the story, and that all of these shots linger for so long because there wasn’t enough content to fill the entire episode. It’s also apparent that the flatness of most of the shots is the result of taking a pretty flatly drawn manga which is very sparse on background art, and drawing it exactly the way that it is in the manga while filling in a background behind it.

Again, while it would be easy to write off the problems with the anime adaptation as the result of trying to stretch out the manga chapters, it doesn’t take much looking to see how an adaptation can do this without breaking engagement. Shokugeki no Soma stretches out the manga’s chapters to a ridiculous degree, but uses over the top visuals and music to keep the energy and investment up. Kyoukai no Rinne has the laziest, most boring soundtrack of anything I watched this season, and uses so many flat chest-up shots that you might spend parts of the episode thinking it’s a show about talking busts.

When people blame the pacing issues of shows like Kekkai Sensen or Kyoukai no Rinne on the number of manga chapters being crammed into or stretched across each episode, they ignore the fact that other shows are packing in or stretching out chapters without any problems. Not to say that it’s impossible for some shows to legitimately have too much or too little going on, but in a lot of cases, it’s the awkward timing and editing of a show’s cinematography which causes the end result to come off jarring or boring.

In spite of how I feel about the pacing in each, I think that Kekkai Sensen and Kyoukai no Rinne are both shows that have a lot going for them, which is why it kind of hurts to see them missing their full cinematic potential. If you’ve watched either of these episodes, then let me know what you thought of them in the comments below, and subscribe to my channel to see more content like this in the future. If you enjoyed this video, consider supporting me via patreon or paypal, or just by sharing the video around. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

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Oscillot’s related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8CUOMIT4Yc

Any review of an anime series with a noteworthy soundtrack will likely stress the importance of music in creating the tone and character of a scene or series. However, it’s pretty rare (including in my own content) for anyone to take a closer look at what exactly that music is doing to get its effect. Today, for a change of tempo, I’ll be joined by anime reviewer and musician Oscillot to take a look at some of the current season’s soundtracks, and to see how they’ve been constructed to maximize the impact of their visuals and storylines.

–Shokugeki no Soma/Food Wars–

Oscillot: Food Wars stretches its source material so thin with prolonged and repetitive reaction shots that it probably wouldn’t be watchable if not for its dramatic soundtrack. A lot of people have commented that it sounds like Hollywood blockbuster music. That specific style of composition is often referred to as Neo Romanticism, which always strives to push Classical conventions to their extremes. The first wave of Romanticism saw Beethoven breaching the taught and well-oiled form perfected by Mozart. Thus these kinds of bombastic film scores are always trying to push more out of the average ensemble, going to drastic lengths by having a perpetual sense of movement and employing unconventional instruments in key scenes.

What the hell does this have to do with food? Well, Romanticism is all about pushing to extremes and transcending the everyday to reach something divine; it’s focused on subjective emotion which is why it…sort of makes sense in the context of eating food. As a comedy show, Food Wars wants to find the most striking and amusing ways to show just how goddamn amazing Soma’s cooking is, so it creates out-of-body sequences in which the eater is transported to a fantastic location. In other words, they transcend their mundane place and experience something more grand. The humour comes from the fact that you can’t get any more mundane than cooking food at a diner, yet every vegetable-chopping montage feels quite comfortable with exhilarating action-flick music.

Digibro: The angelic imagery of each episode’s transcendent climax is accompanied by choir singing, and a shift to calmer, more atmospheric music, as though the eater has literally died and gone to heaven, wherein each forkful of orgasmic nourishment is being hand-fed to them by God himself. These long, intense musical builds in the cooking scenes climaxing into a holy afterglow helps to sell the sexual implications of the fanservice-laden reaction shots, as if the soundtrack itself is blowing its load along with the characters.

Even outside of the big climactic cooking scenes, the music in this series doesn’t slouch. Episode three opens with a jazzy saxophone and guitar-lead song that wonderfully sells the nostalgia of its small town memory. This music is harshly disrupted by booming drums and a horror-movie piano chord as the brutal reality tramples the nostalgic past hopes of the character. All in all, this series utilizes its varied soundtrack with skill in maximizing the emotions of every scene, be it the haughty attitude of the school’s students walking around, or the dumpy, discordant melodies of a small-town girl worried about dropping out.

–Kekkai Sensen–

Oscillot: The city of Lot is diverse, crowded and boisterous, much like its biblical counterpart. The style Kekkai Sensen seems to be going for has it cramming together a patchwork of jarring visual and auditory ideas. Not only is the show filled with all manner of strange looking animals, aliens and humans, but its musical selection also spans quite widely; there’s jazz, ballads, techno, impactful rock, English lyrics, Japanese lyrics and even classical references. Episode 3 featured an extended sequence set to the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony with equally auspicious visuals. This sequence was actually preceded by a rather minimal composition based on very UN-classical microtones, so it was all down to the general pacing and use of silence to not make the change of genre seem distracting. Indeed this show is directed very tightly even in the sense of music, containing an exceedingly high amount of deliberate rhythmic visual cues. As Digi discussed before, this overproduced style has its downsides; when too much gets thrown at the audience it’s easy for the story to leave them behind or be dwarfed by an individual moment. While I agree with the points he’s made I might be willing to argue it’ll work in the long run once I’ve seen some more.

Digibro: In many ways, the melting-pot, all-genres-welcome approach to portraying Lot is typical of how New York City itself is typically portrayed in film. It certainly is far from the first work to portray the hustle and bustle of moving about the city using frantic jazz tunes–even the other famously New York-based anime series, Baccano, used a similar-sounding jazz-based OST. However, I’d be hard-pressed to find any other series incorporating these droning, avant-garde minimalist tracks used to make the outerworld feel, well, otherworldly, besides maybe the work of Yoko Kanno. If this singing is in any real language, I’d love to know what it is. There’s a strong willingness in this series to use vocals in its background music, often high in the mix, and without too much concern for raising the voice acting volume high above it, adding that much more to the cramped and hard-to-parse feelings of the series.

–Ore Monogatari–

Oscillot: Ore Monogatari doesn’t take itself seriously; it’s a very laid back, old school romance story with a basic premise–and that’s the simple beauty of it. The team makes use of a lot of visual tangents and alterations since the screenplay is more or less a pizza base. At a glance, I really wanted to hate Ore Monogatari due to it seeming like “Shrek The Anime” but soon I was convinced that there was nothing to get annoyed over!

Madhouse really banked on this show’s refreshing honesty, using tracks that almost seem like genre parodies. Seriously, the piano pieces have ridiculously easy counterpoint and are as sickeningly sweet as they are simple! It makes sense in the scheme of things since the show generally maintains a very light colour palette, only occasionally decorating it with some comedic throwaway moments that utilize different art and animation. The music also dabbles into this idea by using melodies based on the pentatonic scale. These kinds of scales hold particular significance since this is an anime, since a lot of pentatonic scales originate from traditional instruments used in Japanese Buddhist chants. With these scales we get a lot of leaps followed by a series of steps, as well as melodies accompanied by a lower voice in parallel 4ths.

Essentially, all that gobbledygook means it sounds more similar to Japanese koto music; but it never goes too far with this idea. The oriental-sounding melodies are still accompanied by regular common-practice harmonies, so it never goes extensively far down one path, keeping everything feeling natural and relaxed, while that slight oriental touch adds a little nostalgia to the whole mix. Call it manipulative, but that’s what this whole game boils down to: tricking you into thinking a scene has atmosphere when all it is is a bunch of chums on their instruments.

–Show By Rock!!–

Digibro: Show By Rock is set in a world where music is everything and the capital is called Midi City, though its focus falls pretty squarely into the pop spectrum. I’d almost say that it doesn’t earn the “rock” in its title, except that the drums in the opening theme and some of Plasmagica’s other songs are actually pretty kickin’. One of my biggest problems with a lot of J-Pop is the lack of kickass drum fills, so this show goes a little way in scratching that itch, even if its main songs lack the bombast of its contemporaries in shows like K-On.

There’s an odd contrast in the insert song performances, wherein a lot of the instrumentation sounds like it was made digitally, yet the vocals are given an echoey effect to make them sound more live; and the show frequently does cutaways to the audience wherein the music is made to sound distant and live-y, in spite of the actual performance not sounding live at all.

Like a lot of pop music groups portrayed in anime, the music in this series is often built around the image of the band, from the cutesy pop of the girl bands to the more sexy and rambunctious attitudes of the boy bands; even though pretty much all of the song structures and styles are exactly the same. These kinds of heavily structured J-Pop songs are the type whose quality comes down to the track-by-track basis of whether the tone of each instrument, the mixing of the tracks, or the vocal performances manage to be attention-grabbing; and unfortunately I don’t think this show has any real stand-out songs. If you’ve going to sell garden-variety pop, you’ve gotta pick the biggest flowers in the greenhouse, and I’m sad to say that none of these songs had enough going on to grab me the way a Tom-h@ck track would. The actual BGM is cutesy and fun, but definitely nothing to write home about.

–Hibike! Euphonium–

Oscillot: Hibike is actually the most downplayed of the whole bunch. It’s always interesting to see how a music-based show will use its soundtrack. You can appreciate how some insert songs were written at a high school ensemble’s level of difficulty, and even when it’s not played by orchestral instruments a given is the low number of instruments playing (or voices if you wanna be technical) at a given time. It’s a little reminiscent of Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad, which had a soundtrack pertaining to the show’s musical subject of live-house rock. While that show took to never playing music that didn’t come from an on-screen source, Euphonium tracks are bright and perky but still sparse. Perhaps it reflects on the ensemble’s lack of connection with each other, and who knows what it’ll be like at a later stage.

Digibro: It does feel a bit odd. Most of the BGM is the sort of meandering, milquetoast stuff they’d be bouncing jokes off of in K-On, but it doesn’t quite have the dexterity to fit into Hibike’s consistent tone shifts and more heavy, dramatic moments. Something a bit more tailored to fit with each scene would’ve been nice, though I don’t think the music is distractingly off-putting or anything that extreme.

Oscillot: Fortunately, the staff behind Hibike from Kyoto Animation are absolute sticklers for details, and made sure the insert tracks were distinct from the music played by on screen characters. Everything from the unedited slides to the leaky air and lack of phrasing is totally indicative that these are instruments played by students without an audio editor or substantial diaphragm or lip strength. Trust me, I spent five years in a band like this in high school! The visual direction makes good use of repeated sequences to mark the passage of time, but the level of flash for this show is arguably the lowest Kyoto Animation’s ever worked with and at this stage that’s what this soundtrack seems to be working towards. We’ve had glimpses of how the show will represent its cast playing music and I can’t wait to see how it ends up!

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Digibro: That about wraps up our thoughts on the music in current-season shows, but we’d be curious to hear what you have to say not only about the music in the shows that we’ve discussed, but in other Spring 2015 anime as well. Share your thoughts in the comments, or in your own videos if you’re so inclined. While you’re at it, be sure and subscribe to Oscillot’s channel to catch his own upcoming video on music in anime reviews, and to check out his awesome analytical writing about Haruhi and Trigun. You can also follow both he and I on Twitter by following the links below. If you enjoyed this video, then be sure to share it around, and consider supporting my channel via patreon so that I can keep making videos like it. Thanks again for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Every time I participate in the Anime Blogger Secret Santa project, I try to take on all three of the shows that I’m recommended at once and make a point to finish at least one of them. This year, I received three totally fascinating choices which had me anxious to check them out, but I also ended up with the least time that I’ve had in a while to afford to them and only ended up watching a little bit of each.

If you know much about me, then you probably know that I’m often a lot more interested in the meta side of anime consumption than I am in actually watching things. I like putting shows into a grand narrative or context and trying to uncover greater truths about anime via the things that I watch. The recommendations that I got this year were perfect in that only one of them was a show which I’d already been planning to watch because I thought I’d enjoy it, whereas the other two could lead to fascinating avenues of meta.

The first show on the list was Petite Princess Yucie–possibly the least-known of all the major GAINAX productions–which came out in 2002, and which is actually a spiritual adaptation of their Princess Maker series of PC games from the 90s. Learning about the history of this show was pretty interesting, and quickly led me into a huge project: to consume and eventually make a video about all of the lesser-known GAINAX productions, as well as the ones that aren’t usually associated with the studio’s style.

So, I only ended up watching two episodes of Yucie, and otherwise ended up watching like 5 OVAs, all of Oruchuban Ebichu, and four episodes of Mahoromatic. At that point I sort of got bored, and the writing I was doing about the history of these shows didn’t seem all that interesting, so I put the project on hold. From what little I watched of Yucie it seemed like a pretty cute show, but also like a very slow burn. It’ll be hard to tell for a long while if it’s the kind of show that feels like it pays off by the end, or if it’s just kind of middle of the road, but I’d for sure like to find out for myself.

Next up, the most totally baffling recommendation was for the 2006 Fate/Stay Night adaptation. For the eight or so years I’ve been hearing about this show, all I’ve heard is people ragging on it for being a weak adaptation, and for its godawful animation. I once watched about half of episode 15 so I could see the CGI dragon sex scene (holy shit), and I remember thinking it was the worst-looking show I’d ever seen in terms of animation. Not to mention there’s been a recent adaptation of Unlimited Blade Works that was way more praised and which is beautiful to look at, and absent from my anime list.

At first, I actually thought that I might like the 2006 version better than what I’ve seen of UBW. I definitely prefer the character designs from this series over what they’ve become in every other anime adaptation of the Fate series, especially the ugly shovel-faces of the UBW anime. It was also interesting that, in spite of the low animation quality, the show actually does a lot of interesting things with shot composition and is, if nothing else, very interesting to look at. I’d attribute this to having crazy man Yuuji Yamaguchi as director, given his track record of madness.

As interesting as it was to look at, though, I could only make it eight episodes into this series before giving up. I honestly just do not understand the appeal of the Fate series outside the character designs of Saber and Rin. I get that people really dig the mythology of it and all, but I just find it stupid and boring, and I think it handles the death game idea very poorly. I find myself struggling to care about anything in most iterations of this series, with Zero being the exception just because it bothered to have characters with pretty interesting ideals and motivations. Anyways, whatever hopes I had at first of watching this leading to me dissecting the differences in the Fate adaptations has evaporated, as I realize that I don’t care about any of them.

The last recommendation was Kiniro Mosaic, which is less of a show that I’ve been interested in on a meta level, and more just one that I’ve been meaning to watch. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of a lot of cute-girls-doing-cute-things shows, and that blonde lolis are my favorite category of character design in the known universe, so I had to get to this at some point. I think my biggest fears with this series were that the design of Alice would inevitably be a lot cuter in the cover/promo art than she is in the actual animation, and that the show would be kind of middle of the road and not leave much of an impression.

After three episodes, the show is cute as hell without a doubt, and definitely a bit more ambitious than Wakaba Girl, which came from the same author. It very much takes an approach where things being cute and dumb are more important than them being logical or realistic–which is fine, though not my preferred kind of show of this type. The characters are just a bit too dumb for me to really get invested in them or see them as much more than walking vessels of cuteness. It also does that thing where it ends each episode on an explosively saccharine moment which can be a bit much at times.

Still, the show is cute enough that I think I can finish it, and the animation has been more consistently nice than it seemed like it would be at first. I can’t say that I like it nearly as much as Gochiusa for cute loli girls du jeor, but it’s still a fun show full of all the adorable blond loli I could ever ask for.

Even though I didn’t end up watching a whole lot of any of these shows, I’m pretty happy with what I was recommended this year. If nothing else, it felt like whoever my santa was had a pretty good grasp of what I’d find interesting–or otherwise it was a fluke and they just happened to pick stuff I’d find cool for weird reasons. Either way, it was fun participating once again, and I’ll probably finish Kinmoza and Yucie some day in the future.