I may not have watched Hand Shakers but that doesn’t mean I don’t have something to say about this project…which is that it’s really, really sad. Director Shingo Suzuki (and co-director Hiromichi Kanazawa, promoted from series comp for Hand Shakers) really seem to think they’ve got something in this concept that is just not there, and they’re throwing all kinds of money behind it but absolutely do not have the talent to actualize it into something watchable.
Let’s talk about the production for a second, because we don’t often get to see cases where the production value and directorial ambition are running high but are completely wasted on people with no talent to utilize them! We get a short fight in the beginning of this episode that easily illustrates this point – having the camera swing wildly around all over the place costs a lot of money in anime, and the animation actually doesn’t look half bad, but the editing is so incompetent (and the camera crosses the action line so many times) that it becomes so confusing to watch, I didn’t even realize there were more than two people fighting. I only realized it when I went back and rewatched that minute of the episode, but it’s also completely unclear what’s actually happening since it immediately follows a timeskip and appears to take place in The World That Never Was from Kingdom Hearts II. The individual cuts don’t look half bad but the directors (and the storyboard for that matter) are so awful at putting them together into a cohesive scene that it falls right the hell apart and you just get a vague sense of people swirling around the screen and swinging things at each other, but your eyes can’t quite digest it, hence why I didn’t notice their faces.
And, already knowing by reputation that the writing in this is going to be absolute trash, I see little worth sticking around for, but I did want to at least comment on what I could parse from the first scene.
2/10 for wasting perfectly fine art! Dropped after one episode!
The Arcane Archive 