Final Thoughts – After the Rain

Yeah, yeah, I know, Winter 2018 show, but it was the most notable one I hadn’t covered yet.

From Wit Studio and the director of a lot of Doraemon projects (and also Mysterious Girlfriend X, apparently) comes the story of a high school girl whose track career was put dramatically on hold by a sudden injury that leaves her with a lot of free time and not a lot of friends, so she fills that void with a new part-time job…and a massive crush on her middle-aged manager. Ultimately it’s a lot more nuanced than that – there are many implications that her father isn’t in her life, the manager is divorced with a son he doesn’t see as often as he wants to, and our heroine Akira is not the loner she thinks she is, having very close friends that she essentially abandoned for this part-time job and an obsession with a man thirty years older than her – and it’s nice to see that the show does not intend to let Akira go unpunished for her behavior. This concept is ripe for exploitation and it gets very little, being that manager Kondo is rightfully confused about the entire situation and is now faced with the problem of letting this teenager off without completely destroying her fragile emotional state.

I wanted to like this so much more than I did, though, because it doesn’t quite commit by the end to a resolution. It leaves things very up in the air by only really resolving one plot thread. While we do get what is definitely meant to be an emotional climax, it feels too ambiguous to really hit home the way that it should, and the ramp-up to it is underwhelming, and if you’re going for straight drama the way After the Rain is, it’s really important to make your climax feel like one. This issue might be a problem with the source material – it seems like After the Rain is intended to be a complete adaptation, but with ten volumes of material and only thirteen episodes, it was inevitable that it felt rushed. (That being said, if it does diverge from the manga I don’t know yet, as only the first two volumes have been published in the U.S. thus far.)

As it is, though, it is still enjoyable drama, but it’s hampered from being great by its lack of a meaningful conclusion. The production work (and direction, for that matter) are both certainly up to the standards of Wit Studio, but the story feels unfinished – like they got about 90% of the way there and called it a day, so that a continuation is unlikely since all that’s left is the very end of the story and unlike, say, Working!, it doesn’t seem like we’ll get the last part.

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.

Final Thoughts – Forest of Piano

Weird flex, but okay.

So, some backstory. Forest of Piano was produced by what is supposedly Studio Gainax back from a long slumber, but is in actuality a subsidiary studio operating as Gainax, hence why it’s labelled improperly on MyAnimeList – it would be inaccurate to say that Gainax itself worked on this.

And that’s not to say that it looks bad or anything – there are certainly oddities about the production and I wouldn’t say that I really like the motion-capture CGI scenes of the pianists – but more that it shouldn’t carry the pedigree of the studio that Anno built. Indeed, I feel like Gainax would have injected a little more personality into this one.

What we have here is an adaptation that’s essentially presenting itself as a prestige piece in execution, a very classy story that spends a significant amount of its runtime in a concert hall, but which carries with it a lot of outdated tropes that grind on a lot of audiences, most notably the utterly constant character shilling.

See, our main character Kai is a genius of the piano, and while I don’t mind that in and of itself, the fact that it is commented on by every individual character multiple times per episode is incredibly grating because at a certain point it makes me stop believing them. See, this kind of thing can certainly happen in real life, but the story paints Kai as basically a god come down to earth to bless the people with his piano skill, and when there’s this much shilling going on, it has the effect of turning anyone against him into a philistine who wants to hold him back, or someone who simply doesn’t understand how amazing he is.

I will say that this aspect didn’t completely stop me from enjoying Forest of Piano, and indeed I will more than likely watch the second season when it comes out next year. The earnest exploration of classical music paints it as a strange and interesting contrast to ClassicaLoid, and the show is very good at atmospheric sound when presenting its performances, often transforming any venue into the titular forest to beautiful effect. What I’m hoping for out of the next season is something more personal, though – in Kai’s meteoric rise, we very often are not really presented with what music even means to him – why does he pick the pieces he does for the Chopin competition? And I would like to see a better exploration of the side characters, most especially Ajino, as by the end of this first half I am pretty unsure of what his role in the story even is at this point. The show also pretty clearly sets up several characters in the final few episodes that are meant to carry more weight than they do simply because of their limited screentime. I want a more fleshed-out cast that aren’t just constantly bowing to Kai Ichinose.

Final Score: 6/10.

Final Thoughts – Aggretsuko

A pretty shining example of Netflix throwing their money at the right horse.

Eight months divorced from the flood of Aggretsuko thinkpieces, I finally managed to sit down and watch all of it over the course of an evening, and I came away with something not only satisfying, but incredibly impressive. It starts with such a simple premise and then works its way outwards into a series of incredibly relatable stories and characters.

You wouldn’t think that what looks like an extended series of Flash animations would cohere nearly as well as the first season of Aggretsuko, and indeed I wouldn’t have been surprised if this had merely been an episodic series revolving around challenges at the office, but instead the narrative closely follows Retsuko’s personal life and turns her into someone that pretty much anyone my age can relate to – she hates her boss who thinks he’s the best thing since sliced bread, she doesn’t know what she wants to do for the rest of her life, and she has to secretly hide her incredibly extra aggressive side from the view of the people it’s directed towards. And if that had been the extent of the joke, again, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but she actually branches out and makes new friends whom she can trust with her secret and whom are older than her, but very supportive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that dynamic play out in a work comedy before, but it’s very nice to see how quickly things develop and how the status quo doesn’t ever really go away, but it does prove pretty flexible.

There are elements that hold the show back. While the Flash-style animation is used to pretty decent comedic effect, it’s not great at conveying a lot of visual clues. The metaphor used in the last few episodes ends up needing to be focused on a lot just to make sure the audience remains aware of it, and the ending is enough of a cop-out that it wouldn’t terribly surprise me if the next season fully disregards it, but if we can keep the continuity ball rolling, Aggretsuko could be a steady and highly enjoyable franchise that I’m looking forward to seeing more of.

Oh, and a side note, I do like that Netflix seems to be using the same renewal treatment for its original animations as it does with its fully in-house productions, so if the industry could get into that habit of not leaving people desperately in suspense for years at a time, that would be pretty great.

Final Score: 8/10 (9/10 if the ending actually matters next season.)

Final Thoughts – Hero Mask

What a baffling way to start a show.

I don’t have a ton to say about this one, since I’m absolutely dropping it after a terrible premiere that wasn’t even the fun kind of garbage-y terrible, mostly just a this-all-could-have-been-avoided kind of bad. It’s incompetent rather than insulting.

First things first, I noticed right away that the editing in this show is awkward as hell and a lot of cuts end quicker than they need to. This was an ONA, there was no need to keep a strict episode length, so I don’t get why nothing has any time to land, it just keeps moving from scene to scene in a really awkward way that makes it difficult to follow along sometimes.

Second, we’re starting in medias res, and while that’s definitely not a flaw in itself, here it seems more like a way to just skip the entire beginning of a story – a named and supposedly important character dies in the very first episode, and the scene is framed in such a way that we’re supposed to be shocked and emotional, but the actual reaction is more along the lines of “I barely know who this person is, and now suddenly she’s dead, so why was I meant to care?”. Ordinarily, this would be accompanied by some sort of audience surrogate character, but not in Hero Mask, and I can barely tell what’s supposed to be happening at all.

The production also looks bad even for Pierrot standards. They tend to go for crowd shots but didn’t have the sense to even just make them bad CGI, and the lack of inbetweens makes them look choppy and awkward, especially with the level of detail they’re going for.

Lastly, the very first impression the show makes is one of the most boring openings I’ve ever seen, which in contrast is strictly CGI and consists of a paper-folding visualizer just counting upwards with a dull instrumental track behind it.

I do not understand why Pierrot was the one given this project. I’m not seeing a lot of potential here regardless, but this sort of prestige-mystery is not their bag and it seems like they’re trying to make a 12-episode budget stretch for 15. No wonder I’d heard barely anything about this one until right before it came out.

3/10, dropped after one episode.

Final Thoughts – RerideD: Derrida who leaps through time

This went downhill fast, huh?

Literally in the second episode we basically nuke the cool tone of the first episode and set up something much more conventional, and much easier to pick apart. By episode three, characters are making stupid decisions, and so are the writers. There is a scene in which the main character’s bodyguard has a handgun before he starts chasing the assassin, but once the chase has begun the gun suddenly disappears entirely so that they can have a hand-to-hand fight and he can get injured, and we’ve totally killed the apocalyptic setting by showing how many people are just going through life as normal. Yes, I understand that ten years later, some kind of society would have formed, but the show has already completely written off the robot invasion as just being a nuisance rather than the world-ending disaster it seemed to be in episode one.

It just lost me so fast. I was really hoping for something much darker than this, but what RerideD ended up with was just a poorly thought-out mess that has cool ideas but can’t act on them. What a shame.

4/10.

Final Thoughts – The Ancient Magus’ Bride

I know I’m late on this one, like, desperately so, but I have compelling reasons for not wanting to talk about it.

The discussion around Magus’ Bride has swung back and forth, both during and after its airing, and I will say that I don’t think I was ever completely
sold on it, but it took me a while to figure out what was bothering me
so much. WIT Studio has created something that looks very good, but has
some…p r o b l e m s when examined critically.

But let’s start with what Magus’ Bride does well. As I’ve said before, it looks great for a TV production. It’s not quite at the level of Made in Abyss,
but it stands up to WIT’s other productions. The artwork also does a
great job at commuting a sense of wonder to the viewer as we get
absorbed into the classical fantasy world applied to a modern setting.

But
that setting is the first of the problems I have with this series –
it’s ultimately completely wasted. This story takes place very much in
the modern day, in the real world, but it’s so irrelevant most of the
time that it may as well be in a generic Victorian alternate universe.
Something that I greatly appreciated about the later Harry Potter films was that they added more interaction between the major characters and modern-day London – Magus’ Bride
sort of feels like it shows us a smartphone, but then we just stay in
Diagon Alley for the entire rest of the show. While the cast does
occasionally visit London, it’s so incidental that, again, the
modern-day setting really doesn’t matter.

But ultimately, that can
be mostly overlooked. More pressing are the issues with our main
characters, and I’ll start with Elias, who very frequently fails to come
across as the sane, calm voice of reason he seems to want to be. His
behavior reduces him to basically just being Edward Cullen – a needy
boyfriend who doesn’t exhibit or understand emotions other than sadness,
and who spends a lot of time telling his supposed loved one what to do
in the interest of “protecting” her. While occasionally he is called out
for his behavior, he never really faces consequences for his lack of
understanding until the very end (and even then they’re temporary and he
gets away without owning up to it), so his character arc ultimately
just drags on forever, as he continues to behave appallingly and make
incredibly selfish decisions with no regard for the feelings of anyone
else.

Chise is very nearly as bad, because despite Elias’
habit of throwing destructive tantrums and manipulating people, she
essentially swears her devotion to him in a story that is meant to be
about her finding her self-worth. So many Beauty and the Beast
reimaginings end up totally failing to make their main couple actually
fall in love convincingly, instead taking for granted that their
audience will understand the coding and fill in the blanks themselves,
and Magus’ Bride takes way too many shortcuts in this department.
Even worse, this particular Beauty is, and I’m really sorry to point
this out, a full-on Mary Sue. She’s an audience surrogate character
whose issues with her own worth are ultimately only played as evidence
of how wonderful and selfless she is in her actions, and much of the
dialogue in the show is dedicated to people talking about how special
she is. She is always one hundred percent set on doing the right thing
and is never tempted to act in self-interest.

And in the end, the
status quo is restored and they both just continue the relationship with
Elias never actually having to apologize.

This show is sort of an inverse of Twilight,
honestly. The world building and side cast are great, but the setting
is totally irrelevant to the story, and at least Edward Cullen
ultimately realized what an asshole he was and how dangerous he was to
be around, and even acknowledged that Bella was smart enough to take
care of herself. Right up to the end, Elias treats Chise like a six year
old who can’t make decisions for herself, and ultimately, that kills
this show for me. In the very last scene, Elias attempts to promise
Chise that he’ll never do anything to make her unhappy again, and I do
not for one second believe he would ever actually consider her feelings
before acting.

I’m willing to be charitable and give it a
6/10, because it’s beautiful and funny, but I likely would have placed
it into the Hall of Fame with a 9/10 at least, if only the central relationship weren’t toxic and awful.