Final Thoughts – Dragon Pilot: Hisone to Masotan

I’M FINALLY DONE – no, Arcane, hold the victory lap, you’ve got one more write-up to do.

Okay. Game-face.

I got to watch the premiere episode of Dragon Pilot at Anime Central 2018, long before it would ever see the light of day on Netflix, and I was pretty much stunned by Mari Okada’s newest vision. I’ll say that Dragon Pilot ultimately didn’t materialize into the So Ra No Wo To-esque war story I was kind of hoping for, but it did still manage to turn in one of the most well-done animal bonding stories this side of How to Train Your Dragon.

I’m gonna start with the visuals, because they are not gonna be everyone’s cup of tea. Studio Bones took a big risk with the aesthetic of this show, but I think it paid off beautifully, trading detail for very expressive animation in a fashion not too far removed from Ping Pong, though not nearly as stylized or alienating. That being said, a lot of still shots come off very wonky, so if you’re not able to fully get into the visual experience of the show, it’s gonna be a little weird. That being said, the dragon designs are delightful, and the hybrid plane armor looks cool as heck even on the adorable rubbery dragons we’re here for.

I’m also kind of stunned at how very fetish-y this show is without ever becoming trashy – all the girls involved are grown adults, the only time we see them in any state of undress is when it would make sense for them to not be wearing much, and yet this will always be known as a fetish show for an entirely different reason. We’re not gonna get into the vore thing, mostly because I don’t know if Okada is fully aware of it and I’ll admit that piloting a dragon from the inside by having it eat you makes more sense than anything else I can come up with, not to mention that it gets mined for a lot of good comedy.

Basically the big gripe I had with Hisone to Masotan was that, in its final third, it gets a little bit too bogged down in its A-plot without giving the subplots room to resolve naturally, and some of the story decisions feel kind of arbitrary. A lot of it has to do with Shinto spirituality (on which I am not an expert), but the whole virgin-maiden trope is definitely here in full-force, despite the fact that there are romantic elements of the show – it has the effect of essentially declaring the two budding relationships in the show to be plot tumors without letting the audience decide for themselves, while introducing a love triangle that continues past the point where it’s narratively needed and just ends up as an actual (if minor) plot tumor.

All in all though, compared to something like Sirius, Dragon Pilot just has so much more thought and creativity put into it that I have to award it at least an 8/10, even if I don’t think it quite reaches the Hall of Fame.

Final Thoughts – Sirius the Jaeger

It was going fine, right up until it got stupid.

The first half of Sirius is a well-produced action romp that competently executes a lot of well-worn genre tropes enough to make it at least cool fun, but about two-thirds of the way through, a major plot beat happens and pretty much everything following is just a downhill ride to a dumb and predictable ending.

That’s not to say that it’s irredeemable – the atmosphere and high production value of the first few episodes doesn’t peter out completely by the end, but it loses whatever originality it had along the way and looks noticeably worse as it goes on.

My problem ultimately becomes that it’s such a rote regurgitation of tropes that every single element introduced is resolved exactly how you would expect – I spent a lot of the first half joking around with my boyfriend about how “oh, look, it’s this trope, I guess this thing is gonna happen later” and every single one of my predictions came true.

It wouldn’t be a bad show for someone just getting into anime, but for someone who’s been watching for years, it’s just crushingly standard.

6/10.

Final Thoughts – A.I.C.O.: Incarnation

It’s so very “eh”.

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.

5/10.

Final Thoughts – B: The Beginning

I don’t know what’s happening.

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.

4/10.

Final Thoughts – Violet Evergarden

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.

Final Thoughts – High Score Girl

I would have regretted following my instincts here.

I almost dropped High Score Girl after the first episode simply because I didn’t find it all that interesting, but the buzz around MAL wound up getting to me and I went back and finished it all, and I was surprised by how invested I got.

High Score Girl is a romantic comedy focused around a boy who meets the titular character in an arcade and learns that she’s a fighting game prodigy, despite her classy upbringing and lack of a home game console. She never says a single word in the entire series, so the two of them most often communicate their feelings through video games (and, in her case, violence). I thought this was all I needed to know, but going back and finishing it was a worthwhile experience, because it evolves into a compelling story about the girl – Akira Ono – and her incredibly stressful home life, as well as about main character Yaguchi’s classmate Hidaka, who finds herself drawn to him, and then drawn to video games, finding herself to be a natural talent. We wind up with a pretty classic love triangle, and while normally that’s one of my least favorite tropes of all time, it winds up working here because Hidaka has the emotional maturity to understand that Yaguchi doesn’t see her as a girl, just as a friend he plays games with, and that’s something she has to work to overcome.

I don’t really have much to say about the video game elements of the story other than that they are effectively used as character motivations, but I do want to mention the show’s unique aesthetic. It’s entirely rendered in CGI and sticks as closely to the style of the source manga as possible, which results in a look that takes some getting used to. Basically, the characters’ faces are rendered in 2-D manga style on top of the 3-D models rather than trying to animate faces, and while by the end it was working pretty well for me, it can make them look like dolls for a while.

I’m also not thrilled by the ending, because it seems like the last episode is almost entirely setup for the three-episode OVA airing this season (which, Netflix being Netflix, we won’t get for a while) rather than resolving any narrative threads. While getting three more episodes is fine, I really have to wonder the point of doing things this way instead of just adding a thirteenth episode to this season and leaving the rest of the story to be adapted in a second season at some point, because it’s pretty unsatisfying to end on a cliffhanger, even if a continuation is guaranteed.

Overall, though, this was much more exciting than I thought it would be. I wouldn’t say it was amazing like some of the reviews I’ve seen – the American perspective on Ono’s upbringing seems to be one of abuse, even though this is pretty normal for girls of such high-standing families, and it’s not examined in all that much detail, instead being very suddenly a problem near the end of the show. I also barely noticed the music, which is surprising given that Yoko freaking Shimamura composed the score for this – I sort of wonder if it was a warm-up (or warm-down) from composing for Kingdom Hearts III.

Let’s see if it manages to wrap things up a little better in the Extra Stage OVA.

7/10.

Final Thoughts – Children of the Whales

This show is so confused, I don’t know where to begin.

I should stress that I’m not confused about the plot or anything, it’s mostly easy to follow, but Children of the Whales is a very beautiful show with a strong aesthetic and a lot of good ideas that seems to want to be too many things at the same time and throws far too many characters at the viewer without many of them getting a chance to make an impression.

It seems to be going for an epic story about a civilization on the brink, but it also doesn’t do a very good job of impressing that idea upon the audience. It’s honestly a difficult show to talk about because there isn’t any one bad thing to point towards, and the show itself isn’t awful, it’s just not very interesting beyond the visuals. Even something like Forest of Piano was able to get me more invested than this, and it’s frustrating because there are interesting things happening in the story that translate into dull, samey bores on the screen.

I think the problem is that Children of the Whales is just not a story that should have been adapted in the first place. Someday I’ll probably write a script about unadaptable media, but for now, I’m gonna tie off this rambling post and move on.

Final score: 5/10. Dropped after five episodes.

Final Thoughts – Lost Song

What a weird show.

Lost Song, for its first half, is a pretty enjoyable if not particularly original JRPG story where magic is performed by select individuals who can use the power of song to heal others and harness the elements. It almost reminds me of a Tales story, especially since in the second half, the tone shifts enormously and becomes a lot more mind-screwy, and it all wraps up in a messy, epic, enjoyable finale that doesn’t make a ton of sense but manages to be pretty thrilling anyway.

An original story brought to you by LIDENFILMS and first-time director team(? I think they’re two people, I can’t find a consistent listing) Junpei & Morita (whose only other credit is series composition on Occultic;Nine, interestingly), Lost Song appears to be almost entirely Morita’s vision, given that he is personally given most of the important credits. Luckily Lost Song manages to look decent if not spectacular, though the dynamic lighting usually works well in its favor, and the abundance of sky shots look beautiful, though the design isn’t going to turn any heads. The music is also relatively average, with the exception of the in-universe singing, which sounds excellent, especially on the part of debut actress Konomi Suzuki as Rin. That being said, I did switch to the dub halfway through, and wound up enjoying it due to the fact that Yukari Tamura seems very miscast as Finis, taking her airheaded aspects and playing them up in her performance of a character that is given a great amount of importance in the story. Melissa Fahn winds up sounding a lot better in comparison. Thankfully, Netflix didn’t dub the music or anything, so I got to enjoy Suzuki’s vocal performance anyway.

This is the best middle-card Netflix show I’ve seen yet, and I’m curious to see what the already announced “new project” might be, though we’ll have to wait until February for more information on that. I’m not really sure where it goes from here aside from a few easy predictions, but I’m excited to see more.

Final Score: 7/10

Final Thoughts – Back Street Girls -GOKUDOLS-

What on Earth were the licensing people smoking?

I would understand if Crunchyroll got this one, because they literally try to license everything, but I’m truly baffled over why Netflix would selectively license a show with such an offensive concept. For those who don’t know, Back Street Girls is about three Yakuza men who are forced on a whim by their boss to undergo sex reassignment surgery into teenage-looking girls in order to become idols.

You read that right.

Particularly with the current political climate surrounding trans people in the U.S., this show is a complete P.R. nightmare to release. It’s trying to be a comedy, but I was so disgusted by the concept that nothing was funny at all, because what kind of fucked-up person still tries to pass this off as a joke?

And what in the seven hells is Chiaki Kon doing directing this? This is the woman who directed Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, and I have to imagine she was desperate for work or something, because Back Street Girls also looks like garbage.

I refuse to give this any more of my time.

Final Score: 2/10.

Final Thoughts – Kakegurui

A waste of a pretty good production budget.

Kakegurui pretty quickly presents itself as one of Mappa’s best-looking shows, but I do not for the life of me understand why this specific show got so much hype around it while it was airing, because its tone problems are immediate and seemingly insurmountable. I was almost willing to forget my prejudices at the door (being one of the many people who saw Mother’s Basement brutally take this one down) and give it a proper go, but Kakegurui runs on two things – sexuality and gambling, and it flushes both of them down the toilet right away.

The sexuality aspect was always going to be lost on me because I’m not attracted to women and get no excitement from watching them sadistically (metaphorically) go at it, but the gambling just goes right out the window in the very first matchup, which happens very quickly – you would ordinarily see a show with the “psychological” tag at least taking its time, but halfway through the runtime of the premiere, we’re already almost done with the first gambling event, and our protagonist has pretty clearly been playing her opponent from the very beginning. After seemingly losing everything, she casually presents the room with $100,000 and dresses down the girl on the other side of the table, an alpha bitch who has been low-key cheating, beating her easily and demonstrating that she was in control the entire time.

While I’m fine with overwhelming shows of force by protagonists proving themselves in a first episode (it’s a staple of shonen and sports shows, after all), in a show primarily focused on the thrill of gambling, we immediately make Jabami’s stakes unclear, which might be okay if it didn’t set the tone of what I already know to be a future of her pulling massive amounts of money out of her ass at the drop of a hat and proving that she never really loses. That sounds boring as hell to me, so I’ll be leaving this after episode one, thank you.

Final Score: 4/10.