Premiere Impressions – Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

ufotable hasn’t made a television anime in two years, and if that was enough time to make something as lavish and awesome as this premiere, I judge the wait to have been worth it.

Demon Slayer is one of the most anticipated shows of the season – the manga was licensed in the U.S. last year and has been flying off the shelves – and the fact that ufotable, which hasn’t made a show since 2017′s Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu because the Heaven’s Feel films have been keeping them busy, was the studio to take it on only fueled the fire. I was floored pretty immediately, because, well…

This is exactly what I wanted from Golden Kamuy. I wanted a show that treated itself with the seriousness of its gruesome premise and leaned into heavy fantasy melodrama while subverting my expectations. I’ve seen plenty of setups that start this same way – oh, the hero’s sister is his only family left but now he has to kill her despite his hope that there’s a cure for her Zombie-Ish Disease – but I’ve never seen one where the protagonist has to follow through on his intentions rather than murdering her for the sake of becoming a grizzled hero. This idea is impressive in its sheer novelty, being essentially a show about the origin of Michonne from The Walking Dead, and I’m pretty instantly excited for what Demon Slayer is going to do from here.

Oh, and a soundtrack from Yuki Kajiura isn’t going to hurt things, either.

Final Thoughts – Mob Psycho 100 II

Now here’s a good sequel.

In fact, in light of the instant backlash to the upcoming sequel to its sister show, this second season of Mob Psycho kind of displays just why people are so upset about the fall of One Punch Man – here’s a long-awaited followup that improves on the already-good first season in almost every way, and more immediately, it looks marvelous. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to predict that Mob Psycho 100 is going to be the best-looking show of the year, and I doubt many are going to fight me on it.

Which is why it’s even more amazing that it’s such a crazy-deep show that matches in meaning what it’s got in looks. The story behind Mob has so many layers that it’s no wonder the internet has come to love even con master Reigen so much – we know so much about his character that his blatant lies are more endearing than anything else – these characters are so fleshed-out that the defining trait of Shigeo’s foes is their humanity. Mob Psycho is effectively a show about Clark Kent trying to save the world without his powers, knowing that being the strongest man in the world isn’t fulfilling if nobody likes you.

Look, I don’t have a lot of deeper analysis here because this show does a brilliant job of telling you everything it wants to say, much like its protagonist. Frankly, in a season as ‘meh’ as this one, Mob is the hero we truly need.

10/10.

Final Thoughts – Kaguya-sama: Love is War

The best romantic comedy since Gamers.

You’ve heard people raving about Love is War all season, for very good reason. The cast are great, the jokes are hysterical, and the premise is comedic gold. The production is also excellent, easily one of A-1′s most creatively-made projects (interestingly, romantic comedies seem to be treated well by the producers), so I’m pleased to say how many comedic extra details from the manga are carried over into this adaptation.

The one thing I can’t quite get over is the fact that the premise hinges on there being no actual progress of any kind in the story – the two of them already know they like the other, but the moment they begin a relationship, the entire concept of the show goes out the window. In a world where this is likely the end of the adaptation, it would have been nice to get some closure, rather than just an assurance that the hijinks continue from here, but I also know how weirdly toxic people are about anime-original endings, so…Shrug.

Nevertheless, it’s easily funny enough to get past the fact that not much happens, and the final episode contains one of the most heart-wrenching romantic displays I’ve ever seen in anime, so…It’s great, I’d say go watch it, but you almost certainly already have.

8/10!

Final Thoughts – The Morose Mononokean II

A good followup to a good show from which I was hoping for a little more.

The Morose Mononokean is not a particularly ambitious show, but one that has solid execution of good ideas. I wanted a little more than we ended up getting out of this second season. Like ClassicaLoid’s second season, it does a better job of spreading its plot out rather than dumping it all at the end, but it loses a little of the charm it built up in the first season.

I do, however, want to specifically mention the ending theme, because it’s a great idea paired with a great song that I didn’t skip a single time. Set to the very bubbly “1%” by Wolpis Kater is a series of images taken with the effect of a 360-degree camera, of the cast enjoying a day off. It’s an idea that I don’t think I’ve seen executed this well in drawn form before, and it’s simple, but it works, much like the show it’s attached to. It’s hardly, like, “Kakatte Koi Yo” amazing, but it’s a cute little idea for the low budget the series is working with.

Oh, and a funny note – on MyAnimeList, this second season is the second highest-rated production in the history of Pierrot Plus, which speaks less to the quality of Mononokean, and more to the historic fall from grace of the Tokyo Ghoul adaptation project, since Pierrot Plus handled both seasons of Re. I’m just saying, it’s funny, I don’t have a lot to talk about here.

7/10.

Final Thoughts – Endro~!

Oops. Spoke too soon, huh?

I have spoiled myself enough to know that there’s a conflict and story coming in the last few episodes of the show, but having just finished episode eight, I’m just really bored, and evidently so are the characters, given that said episode revolved around the princess convincing Mao to kidnap her so she can watch Yulia save her. The problem I face with Endro! is that it’s cute and I like the idea well enough, but that idea sort of ran its course and it spins its wheels a lot while running out the clock, so we can have the usual Dramatic Two-Part Finale Where Something Actually Happens, but in the intervening time…

There’s been no character development for any of the four party members, at all. The show won’t admit that Mao is its main character by virtue of being the only one with any kind of arc, while Yulia and friends have been static basically the entire time. I just don’t find it very stimulating, honestly, and I don’t feel invested enough to make it to those last few episodes when I could be finishing The Morose Mononokean or Mob Psycho, or catching up with my massive backlog of older shows.

For a brief moment, the show looked like it was going to gain a cute yuri angle as the princess fell in love with her hero, but that hasn’t actualized into anything at all, just like every other idea presented, so…meh.

5/10.

Final Thoughts – Girly Air Force

I liked them better when they hated each other.

It only took two more episodes of Girly Air Force for me to lose all interest as the plane-girls put their philosophical differences aside and began fighting over who gets to partner up with the protagonist, and suddenly I just do not care. (We also introduce another girl, like five episodes before the end, who seems to be much more of a plot device than an actual character, as she takes on the appearance of the girl whoever sees her is closest to…which, really?)

I’m sure there’ll be some re-escalation of the dramatic stakes in the last few episodes, but I’m just not really invested enough anymore to want to see them. I still think this show had some potential, even if it lacked originality, but at this point I don’t think too many people would care if I just dropped it, and I’m not having fun anymore, so I’m gonna do just that.

5/10. Probably the last casualty of the season, considering that all I have left are heavy-hitters and The Morose Mononokean, but hopefully I’ll knock the rest out in the next few days!

Final Thoughts – The Promised Neverland

The best horror show to come around in a long time is not without its faults.

We all know The Promised Neverland is good and scary, it was easily the most anticipated show of the season – save for maybe Mob Psycho – and the manga was flying off of store shelves long before the adaptation was even announced. So, yes, it’s a very effective slow-burn of horror with great production work, much better than the director’s previous attempt at a show with such a tone – The Perfect Insider – and you’ve heard plenty of people tell you to watch it. I’m one of those people, but I do want to make sure that in the boatloads of positive hype this show has generated (and will continue to, since it’s getting a second season), I get the opportunity to talk about a few of its mistakes.

Mistake #1 – This story does not seem to know how to keep its own secrets. We get shown far too much too soon, and – minor spoiler – in the last episode, we get several shots of the once-terrifying demons, fully lit, in broad daylight. The mystery of what they look like is just very suddenly taken away, and mystery is pretty important for a continuing horror story.

Mistake #2 – Lying to the audience. A very large portion of the last few episodes are spent enacting the big plan they’ve been building to the whole season, and over and over again, the show goes with “you’re going to pretend that this is the plan, but really this is the plan” in the effort to keep a specific character in the dark, and by the end, it gets to the point where I can see a sizeable portion of the audience getting apathetic because there’s so many different deceptions happening at once, and it’s hard to keep up.

Otherwise? By the end, the story has pivoted much harder to the dramatic side over the horror tone it had for most of the run, and I’m eager to see if it’ll swing back around at the beginning of the next story arc. Hopefully the studio can keep up the aesthetic of the show now that we’ll be outdoors more often and probably more lit than the frequently dark first season.

I’ll stop rambling now! 8/10!

Final Thoughts – My Roommate is a Cat

Highly Relatable Content: The Show.

My Roommate is a Cat is a pretty good rebound for director Kaoru Suzuki, previously best known for Dive!, a transparent attempt to get in on the Free! fujoshi crowd that bored me and didn’t make its characters look mature enough that anyone should be ogling them in swimsuits anyway. Roommate gives me much more Sangatsu vibes, actually, what with its intensely antisocial protagonist, and though it’s not nearly as artsy – Studio Zero-G is relatively new and has only made one other show I’ve wanted to finish, Grand Blue Dreaming, so that’s probably to be expected – it’s a nonetheless enjoyable work that I came away wanting a little more from.

The production on the show is actually pretty okay-looking for the most part, particularly the fluid animation given to the titular cat Haru. It’s clear that the studio knew she would be the big draw, and they wisely gave her shots the most love and attention – but I still think that the strongest element at play is just the realistically depicted cat. Cats in anime are often pretty docile or overly cute – see Luna from Sailor Moon, Chi from Chi’s Sweet Home, etc. – but Haru is an intensely temperamental little hellion that tears up the house, gets mad at strangers, and doesn’t understand why her owner is so bad at eating.

Basically, she’s a real cat, and that in and of itself makes her interesting, because we get to live in her head for a good chunk of each episode and view what goes on in her house from her perspective, for frequently funny results. If you don’t know this, cats generally don’t think much of their owners’ intelligence, with most of them seeing us as just really big cats who are bad at being cats, hence why many cat owners get “love presents” – our felines are trying to feed us, since we won’t go out and hunt for ourselves. Just watching that play out from the cat’s perspective is entertaining in its own right.

That being said…

I don’t think that a full-length TV series was the right way to go about this one. I feel like a shorter, perhaps twelve-minute series told entirely from Haru’s perspective would have been better, while letting details like her owner’s behavior and living conditions tell owner Subaru’s story in the background – as it is, the formula of half of each episode being the human/cat point of view gets a little too repetitive, and can come across as padding the runtime occasionally if Haru doesn’t have anything to add to what’s happening. Just a thought, though.

As it is, My Roommate is a Cat is a charming little show that carries a pretty obvious recommendation for pet owners, but needed to stray from the formula a little more for its own good. 7/10.

Final Thoughts – The Magnificent KOTOBUKI

I really feel like that first episode was more of an indicator of what was to follow than it seemed – it looked great but didn’t tell us much about the characters, and four episodes later, that’s more or less still what KOTOBUKI is in my opinion.

It’s rare for a show that relies on CGI to also look very good when it’s being traditionally animated, so I do want to start by giving KOTOBUKI credit for that – there’s plenty of character to its animation, even if the inconsistency with which it employs that CG is rather jarring from time to time, and the flying sequences still look great pretty much every time.

But there’s still the problem of it being yet another show going after Princess Principal’s formula, and not quite getting all of the elements down. The visual direction is undeniably great, but I’m just not invested in any of these characters because the show hasn’t quite established a point of view character or even really given me a good idea of who any of the girls are and what they’re doing in a mercenary flight corps when several of them don’t appear to even be adults yet.

That being said, if you’re a visuals-before-writing sort of viewer, by all means check this one out, because it’s still a stunner only a step behind Land of the Lustrous, and the number of people who haven’t checked it out yet shocks me seeing as it’s probably the best HIDIVE had to offer this season. (I swear, Sentai was doing so much better for licenses when it was working with Amazon…)

6/10, dropped after four episodes

Updated Impressions – Endro~!

It’s very cute and has a lot of good ideas, but it’s just not gripping me the way I want it to yet.

To put it plainly, what I’m looking for out of the second half of Endro~!
is plot. We’ve set up this very Pratchett-esque setting where the
princess falls for the hero even if the hero is a girl and NPCs stand
outside to warn the party about the danger of the nearby dungeon with a
dead-eyed stare into the void, but by the end of the third episode, the
Demon Lord herself has effectively given up on her own plot and resigned
herself to being a teacher, and I’m having trouble dealing with the
lack of conflict that decision has brought to the story. The Hero’s
Party rarely fights amongst themselves and the only real story we’ve
gotten is that of what actually happened in and before the first part of
episode one…So where exactly is it going?

I have some hope that
Mao will un-abandon her plans to seize power, or her even more powerful
counterpart shows up and kidnaps the princess, or something a little
more interesting than this pleasant little plot-vacuum happens to pull
my opinion up, because halfway through, Endro~! is coasting instead of developing its characters, and I’ve dropped shows for less than that.

Score so far: 6/10