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!
I’ll start by saying that, like many people, I’ve never seen Boogiepop Phantom, but I’m well aware of its reputation and have certainly heard a lot about it. Having not seen the previous adaptation, I can’t say how Others is doing in comparison, but the thing that I can compare it to is the very slow-burning premiere episode of Serial Experiments Lain, which is a bit more imaginative but otherwise carries a similar moody atmosphere.
They were also similarly confusing! It’s not enough to make me want to drop it, but the end of the episode left me seriously wondering what had happened in the last act – Boogiepop appears to tell the main character that apparently someone else took care of the monster hiding in the school, so he doesn’t need to be around anymore, but we don’t get a confirmation on the identity of the beast or who killed it, which I suppose will be the big mystery going forward, but it did come a little out of nowhere. I simply felt like the situation could have been visually explained a little better, even if the characters are in the dark about it.
What may actually end up doing this show in for me is the lazy production work – if a character isn’t important to a scene, they will not have a face or move at all, and the movement we do see is as minimal as possible. This is a damn Madhouse production with direction from Shingo Natsume, the man behind the first season of One Punch Man and both seasons of Space Dandy, the two best-looking TV anime ever created, so I have absolutely no idea why it looks more like it came from Studio Deen or something, Was ACCA a better indication of what he can really get out of his people?
The audience for this one seems to not have much patience for it, so time will tell if I wind up keeping it in my watchlist, but for now, I’m willing to tolerate it given that I just dropped three shows in a row that I liked a lot less.
Look, I gave Magical Girl Site way too much of a chance last year, I’m not falling for it again.
From the director of Strike the Blood comes yet another project that continues the reputation of LIDENFILMS as a studio that will take on basically any project with a staff for hire (their only projects in the last three years that I’ve actually finished being Boarding School Juliet and Hanebado, both of which were good-not-great) and this one continues the trend of magi-girl adaptations that just bleed edge all over your floor, except this has neither the engaging premise of Magical Girl Raising Project or even the Shadow the Hedgehog Hot Topic Try Hard syndrome that made Magical Girl Site at least a little interesting to watch.
Let’s start with the production! It’s awful. It’s not as bad-looking as Saint Seiya but it is another action show that clearly has no budget for action scenes, because there is very rarely motion happening onscreen and it pretty much always looks bad. The characters aren’t always hideous, but their designs are very inconsistent and every attempt to put the heroine in a flattering outfit makes her look hilarious (especially given that her bust noticeably changes size depending on her shirt). Even in an unrevealing school uniform, her shirt clings to her awkwardly and her skirt is so short that it would be showing her butt, except she doesn’t appear to have one. Idon’t normally spend this much time criticizing fanservice, except that this is just such a failed attempt at it that it kind of ruins the rest of the show. If you’ve not seen the manga, every cover shows one of the magical girl characters with heavy clothing damage, hinting that this is trying to be gritty and sexy, and dear lord is it ever not.
Speaking of gritty! The story is handled so clumsily that I found myself laughing at the gratuitous gore seen in just the first episode – we see innocent people executed by gunfire near the end in a manner so comically handled that it makes Modern Warfare 2 look positively classy in comparison, as the horrible-looking villain dude just arms himself and his accomplices in the middle of the street and appear to be running around just shooting anyone they can find for completely unclear reasons. Conveniently, the main heroine gets PTSD flashbacks from seeing mascot characters, but not from the sound of heavy gunfire and screaming. Basically, what it seems to be going for is Madoka Magica meets Call of Duty, but without the writing of the former or the production value of the latter, so it just ends up being stupid and lazy.
Tatsunoko Production celebrates its 55th anniversary with an original project that looks like it was copypasted from A-1 Pictures and reads like discount Macross for kids, and I’m sorry, I’m really picky during Winter since it’s the only season I go “light” on, but this first episode was just not impressive. A lot of it was spent on a meaningless fight and setting up how hard it is ruling a country as a twelve year old princess, and I’m not down for it at all. Sure, there have been plenty of child rulers in anime, but they’re usually portrayed as either being proxies (like the Emperor in Akame Ga Kill) or highly intelligent, capable prodigies (like Sora and Shiro in No Game No Life), not just normal children who inexplicably appear to be making authoritative decisions despite having no desire or skill for it. I understand that the point of the show is that she doesn’t know that war is happening on her own border, but honestly, how much of a show can you really extrapolate from that?
The mech fights don’t look terrible, but given that they look about as good as the ones in Planet With, which I only tolerated because of the strong writing in the premiere, it’s not a good enough reason to give this show a pass.
I’ve been debating for a while whether I could even justify doing Impressions for Winter since I’m so late on finishing last year, but I finally started with this early premiere from December, and twelve minutes in I decided that I needed to say something, because dear God, this is awful.
Let’s start with the most immediately obvious thing: this show looks like garbage. I don’t know how Gonzo has found the staff to produce three shows airing at the same time (this one, Hinomaru Sumo, and Conception) and this one definitely joins Conception in the produced-on-$10-an-episode club. It looks like a bad HD re-render of a show from the nineties, but the character designs are even worse. I don’t know whose idea it was to give every single character eyes that are way too far apart, but it looks hideous in practice and makes the entire cast look evil and ugly.
Next! This is an all-female iteration of a show that normally features a male cast, and apparently that means it’s Sailor Moon, if Sailor Moon had a tentacle rape scene halfway through the first episode! I can’t even begin to express how awful this is to sit through, it’s something that has to be seen to be believed, but when the main character’s sister shows up to save her, her creepy facial expressions make it look much more like she intends to finish what the tentacles started.
I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch this, and looking at MAL (where it currently sits with a 6.10), it seems like most people agree with me. I’m going to be even less charitable, though.
2/10. What a rotten start to the year, enough that I almost want to just abandon it with last year’s dregs even though the majority of it is airing in 2019.
Netflix threw around a lot of money last year in directly helping to produce several shows, like B: The Beginning, Devilman Crybaby, and least of all, A.I.C.O., which launched with such a disastrously bad dub that they wound up re-doing the entire thing.
Of course the dub isn’t really my issue with A.I.C.O.. My problem lies more in the fact that it’s a little bit of a ripoff of Parasite Eve, only handled with a lot more tonal inconsistencies and with a 3rd Birthday-era level of stupid plotting. I only got halfway through and I could predict all the twists I wound up looking up, and none of them are even all that meaningful, up to and including sharing an entire Tomato Reveal with said 3rd Birthday. A.I.C.O. is just dull and lacking in substance or even a decent production value, as aside from a couple of moments of fluid motion, this is easily the worst looking Netflix-financed show of 2018. When you consider that A) this is Bones, who apparently spent much more on making My Hero Academia and B) that unlike B or Devilman Crybaby, this is a direct adaptation of source material – meaning a great deal of the work was already half-done – I don’t get where the money went here. It’s not the worst-looking show of the year by any means (not in a world where we had Master of Ragnarok and My Sister My Writer) but it just doesn’t live up to Bones’ standard at all. I’m really hoping that they can give the upcoming Fire Force adaptation the same love they give MHA.
While it had the advantage over B because the plot actually makes sense, it loses way too many points for the plot being stupid – again, it’s a near-direct ripoff of Parasite Eve, down to the biological catastrophe being caused by a medical procedure gone wrong, but without any of the thought that went into most of Eve – and six episodes in, I didn’t have much of a desire to see it through.
I’ll start with the easily observable: B: The Beginning is a gorgeous production from Production I.G. Three episodes in, I’ve seen some very good looking, well-directed fight scenes that I wish were in a better show, and the setting – while not particularly original – is at least rendered beautifully.
But wow, is this show incomprehensible. I feel like we’ve made some vague plot direction by the end of the third episode, but I have no clue what’s going on with the title character because he has only barely appeared, and the only thing I’ve really come away with is that a) I’m not even slightly invested in what’s happening, and b) this show really wants to be Death Note. And I’m not the biggest fan of Death Note but at least you had some understanding of what was going on. B: The Beginning seems to be trying to jam together Death Note and Psycho-Pass but has failed to tie anything together and feels more like two shows jammed together into one runtime without consideration for cohesion.
This is all the vision of Original Creator Kazuto Nakazawa, whom I’ve never heard of and seems to have very few directorial credits on anything I’ve ever heard of – he’s worked on episodes for quite a few good shows, including Digimon Adventure, Kids on the Slope, and Samurai Champloo, but seems to have no idea what to do when given the reins to his own project and a Netflix budget to work with, leading to the aforementioned fun fight scenes but nothing meaningful to tie them together, since the supernatural fight scenes just feel completely separated from the police drama and they have nothing to do with each other.
I’ll give it a 4 just for the great animation, but I have no emotional investment to speak of and won’t be watching any further.
This season dragged on me a lot, and I attribute that mostly to the fact that I moved right at the end and it put me way behind schedule, but also because a number of shows looked like they were going to really go the distance and wound up with one big disappointment or another.
That’s not to say that there weren’t gems – in fact there were a few – but this was yet another season where my “Hall of Fame” looked woefully light. That being said, I’d really like to get this over with since I have other shows to finish and three more lists to make for the year, so as usual, let’s start with the stuff I skipped entirely:
* Tokyo Ghoul re: Second Season & Gurazeni Season 2 because I didn’t watch either of their previous seasons.
* Senran Kagura Shinovi Master because Senran Kagura as a property is built entirely on half-naked girls with big boobs and that’s not going to jive with me.
Wow, that’s really it? Fall was the beginning of a lot of shows that won’t be finished until sometime in 2019, so the other shows I skipped will appear next year on the Multi-Cour list. So, moving right along, from bottom to top…
DROPPED
* WORST OF THE SEASON: TIE
UZAMAID!, My Sister My Writer (1/10)
We did have multiple entries into the Hall of Shame this season, with not one but two shows being offensive enough that they landed a 1/10 score from me, for an easily identifiable and familiar reason: actively glorifying pedophilia! That was pretty much UZAMAID!’s biggest problem, but My Sister My Writer aged up the target character in exchange for recycling the plots of OreImo and Eromanga Sensei, with all of the bullshit and none of the production values. Happy Sugar Life has even further convinced me that there is absolutely no excuse for this garbage anymore.
* Conception (2/10)
A video game adaptation that strips away the actual gameplay elements and focuses entirely on the main character figuratively fucking a lot of fantasy women to make world-saving babies, and it doesn’t even have the courtesy to look like it cost more than $5 to make.
* Ulysses: Jeanne D’arc and the Alchemist Knight (3/10)
I didn’t get far enough into this one to get to the real garbage (I’ve heard it’s another show I should probably throw in with the worst of the season) but the very first episode bored me to tears with its rote anime nonsense. I’m pretty well convinced that the only way I could ever find a Joan of Arc anime interesting is if it were an adaptation of the Level 5 PSP game.
* Between the Sky and Sea (3/10)
I can’t deconstruct this any better than Mother’s Basement did but it is just the most asinine thing I was subjected to for the whole season. Cute girls don’t fix a terminally stupid concept like “all the fish have moved into space and so now we train teenage girls to be astronaut fishers”.
* Bakumatsu(3/10)
I dropped this one an entire point from when I first reviewed it simply because I had entirely forgotten it even existed and cannot remember a single thing about it except that it was generic.
* As Miss Beelzebub Likes It (4/10)
I found this one’s first episode to be cute but entirely devoid of substance. Also, the poster still hurts my eyes to look at.
* DAKAICHI -I’m being harassed by the sexiest man of the year- (4/10) & Bloom Into You (4/10)
Proof that actual gay people just cannot have nice things, the most explicitly LGBT shows to be made in a while both suffer from the same problem: a supposedly sympathetic character having no ability to take “no” for an answer. True fact: not all gay relationships start with rape, and this is the kind of entertainment that fosters young people into not knowing how consent works.
* ReRideD: Derrida Who Leaps Through Time (4/10)
I guess everybody else saw this one coming before I did? It was the first post-premiere show I dropped because I thought the first episode showed an interesting setup, and the following episodes just completely abandoned the apocalyptic setting very quickly to show that society was pretty much fine, there were just robots roaming the earth like random D&D encounters. Man, sci-fi cannot catch a break these days.
* Ms. vampire who lives in my neighborhood. (5/10)
I can see why this might appeal to some but it’s basically just a low-rent Miss Kobayashi’s Maid Dragon and I wasn’t feeling especially charitable towards it.
* Double Decker! Doug & Kirill (5/10)
I really thought this one could get to be more interesting, but it failed to really commit to being either anime’s Brooklyn 99 (which, for the record, we have, it’s Blood Blockade Battlefront season 2) or being a serious tale about the dangers of Tide Po-I mean, drug usage, and wound up just being an uninteresting thud.
* The Girl in the Twilight (5/10)
This one really could have made it if only it had taken things a little more seriously and not made me wonder why the cast are even friends as they seem to have nothing in common. I can’t believe that the creator of this project was the guy who wrote the script for Punch Line, one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.
* Tsurune (6/10)
I literally just finished my write-up for this, but I do not understand why the same company would make both this and a continuation of Free! airing in back-to-back seasons, it just makes this one look like a copycat even if it’s not a bad show.
UNSCORED
* Gakuen Basara: Samurai High School because I’m not familiar with the source material and that seems to be the barrier for enjoyment here.
SPECIAL
* Anima Yell! (6/10)
If you need a reminder, I dropped Anima Yell after the first episode because even though I enjoyed it, I found it too similar to Comic Girls and didn’t particularly want to go through the effort of finishing a show I was already pretty ready to score, even if it was going to be a positive one. I simply didn’t have time.
FINISHED (Note that Tumblr has completely broken and I’ve had to re-edit this portion a dozen times because it keeps randomly bolding paragraphs and losing GIFs, so if anything got lost here, I’m very sorry but there’s nothing I can do about it.)
* Boarding School Juliet (7/10)
A pleasant little romantic comedy that wasn’t what I was expecting from the first episode but was charming nevertheless. Would have been better without the involvement of attempted rape on school grounds in the premiere though.
* Release the Spyce (7/10)
A thrilling and surprisingly brutal little spy show that wound up being overshadowed by better shows with similar concepts but was a fun watch nonetheless, even if it dragged in the middle.
* Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (8/10)
I stand by what I said before – this one would have easily scored higher with a better ending, but Bunny Girl Senpai is certainly the most approachable show of its genre and its strengths as a romance are not to be understated.
* Zombieland Saga (8/10)
Another Very Good show that could have been better with one simple change – it’s hilarious and very well-written, but those performance sequences are just awful to look at and the heavier focus on them towards the end did not help.
* Iroduku: The World in Colors (8/10)
A stunning treasure that needed a little more character work for the writing to really impress me, but with a very satisfying ending and a ton of visual creativity.
* Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san (9/10)
A fucking hysterical show scientifically grown in a lab to appeal to me, Honda-san could have been the new INFERNO COP, SAVIOR OF ANIME if more people had given it a chance.
* BEST OF THE SEASON: SSSS.Gridman (9/10)
I don’t know what else to say other than that this is easily the most criminally underappreciated show of the year. A lot of people seemed to be turned off by giant robots fighting kaiju, and those people are dumb.
And that was Fall! I’ve got a few Netflix shows left and I have to finish Classicaloid 2, and then I’ll be all done with 2018, so get ready, I’ve got a few more lists on the way!
I know I sat on this one for almost a year but the wait was worth it.
Violet Evergarden is a show I was not expecting to be especially impressed with. I saw headlines about how astounding it looked (which, yes, I will happily give it, but it’s not difficult to make sakuga out of a show with very few action scenes to have to budget out and the assistance of the biggest streaming platform on the planet) and heard about what a tear jerker it was, and that was about it.
And Evergarden is definitely a scientifically engineered tear jerker, in fact, it might be the first show I’ve seen try to make the audience cry in every single episode, and while it didn’t always quite get the tears rolling, I fully admit that I was putty in this show’s hands from the first episode. Violet Evergarden has a great many themes – that of memories, of feelings that need to be shared, and of how society handles war – but central is that of a girl who has recently lost the closest thing she’s ever had to a parent, and her complicated relationship with this man who died to protect her. He wasn’t her father, but her commander who was forced to take her into lethal battles in the recently-passed war when all he had ever wanted was to send her home to live a normal life. Her insane proficiency in combat and ability to strike fear into her enemies just by the mere sight of her was too indispensable a tool for the higher-ups in this war, and so he had to take her to the battlefield and watch as she became a killing machine that depended entirely on him and his commands – and then, he died, the war ended, and a fourteen year old girl who had only ever known life as a soldier was forced out into the world, told by his dying words to “live”, and three words she didn’t know the meaning of:
“I love you.”
So, in her desire to understand what his last message meant, Violet takes up a job as a proxy letter writer – an Auto Memory Doll – to try to better understand the emotions of others so she may better know her own. This leads to a string of incredibly well-done episodic stories of Violet travelling around the country and meeting people – some affected by the war she fought in, some less so – and briefly experiencing life through their feelings. A lot of these stories are somewhat predictable, given the overall tone of the show, but I want to specifically highlight episode 10, the first time one of the short stories (those unrelated to the main plot) really broke open the floodgates for me. Full spoilers for that episode, by the way, but considering the show came out a year ago I feel less cautious about such things.
***EPISODE 10 SPOILERS AHEAD***
So, episode ten sees Violet travelling for a week to a mansion in the countryside, having been summoned by the lady of the house, to whom we are introduced in bed, surrounded by well-dressed people. This is instant and simple shorthand – the woman is dying and the people around her are trying to get her to put her affairs in order. Knowing Violet will be here for some time, this sets up the expectation that Violet is working on what will essentially be this woman’s last will, which would also explain why she won’t allow her young daughter to be in the room where the writing is taking place. Over the course of a week, the daughter Ann befriends Violet, believing her to be a literal doll come to life, and we watch as she becomes more and more frustrated with how much of her mother’s time is being taken up by Violet and the letters they are writing together because she wants her mom to play with her, until we finally learn that Ann is very aware that her mother is dying and is angry that these letters are taking precedent over spending the last few days they have together.
This episode sets up a lot of well-worn dominoes – since we’re introduced to the mother sick in bed, she’s not going to be alive by the time the episode ends, and we expect a lot of really sad, upsetting time to be spent at the funeral where we’ll watch Ann react to her mom’s death and find out what was ultimately in her last will.
That is not what happens.
Violet leaves, and we see a montage of the mother disappearing from all of the places she used to play with her daughter, until we’re given a silhouette shot of the funeral where everyone but Ann slowly vanishes from the scene.
And then a small time skip, and we find out what her mother was really doing with Violet: preparing fifty letters to be delivered to her daughter each year on her birthday, a series of messages and kind words from a mother who knows she will not see her daughter grow up but intends to remain an important, guiding presence as Ann grows into a woman.
This subversion of my expectations was so beautiful that I’m almost crying again just talking about it. The source material for Violet Evergarden is one of the most lovingly crafted tales that I’ve ever seen adapted, and though I’m not sure I want to see a sequel (knowing that one is definitely happening and also knowing the implications of the final shot), I’m happy to say that I have absolutely no complaints or problems with giving Violet Evergarden a 10/10.The complex world and characters will pull you in, but the masterful writing will keep you completely hooked.
Not an especially interesting offering from KyoAni.
Their big project this year, Violet Evergarden, makes Tsurune look so pedestrian by comparison that I can’t even put it into words. It’s not bad, the execution is alright, but it’s not memorable at all, and it’s because I’ve seen this show before. A kid who returns to his sport of choice after being absent due to some kind of mental hangup and is faced with a hostile teammate and a coach with a weird way of teaching?
I’m hardly the first person to say that Kyoto Animation themselves have made this show already, and it also got a third season this year (which I haven’t seen yet, for the record). And in a year with a lot of more interesting sports shows (to name a few, Major 2nd, Umamusume, Harukana Receive, hell, fucking Megalobox) I am feeling a lot less forgiving towards this one just phoning in an easy B-.
I’m also not finishing it, a decision I should have made long before it finished airing (three weeks late, I might add, a decision which baffles me). I’m willing to give it a 6/10, but not more of my time when I have other things I need to finish and it’s the very last Fall show on my list.
The Arcane Archive 