Fall 2021 Summary – Week 8

Super Crooks – 1-2

Wooper: I went into Super Crooks completely blind, so I had no idea it was a superhero – or more accurately, supervillain – series. Turns out it’s a “mature” take on the genre in the same vein as The Boys or Invincible, which in this case means comically large-scale violence and implied sex. The violence showed up in episode 1, a high school origin story for newbie hero Johnny “Electro Boy” Bolt, with all the Spiderman theft that entails (the “hero” even has a crush on his bully’s girlfriend). Compulsory scenes of Johnny confiding in his nerdy best friend and trying on his first costume had my eyelids drooping, but the over-the-top carnage of his superhero debut (which ended with a bunch of dead pigs in a public swimming pool) managed to wake me up. Cut to episode 2, set in the present day, where an adult Johnny is released from prison and the exposition begins to flow. Tales of powerful enemies and a shadowy villain organization were all over the second script, but they were neither illuminating nor tantalizing enough to hook me. For all the show’s clunkiness, it’s amusing to see Bones tackle this material, even if its stiff visuals tell us it was hardly a priority. The substudio that produced it is also working on Mob Psycho 100’s upcoming third season, but hey, I doubt anyone would protest that Super Crooks was sacrificed at the altar of Mob’s wondrous animation.

Komi-san wa, Komyushou desu – 5

Wooper: I haven’t been keeping count, but it seems like nearly every episode of Komi-san thus far has featured original animation during the ED. Sometimes they tell their own story (as with this week’s umbrella-sharing vignette) and sometimes they’re continuations of the episode proper (as in the premiere, if memory serves). Komi-san’s first episode had so much effort poured into it that it seemed like the rest of the show couldn’t possibly measure up, but little gestures like the uniquely storyboarded EDs still mark it as an attentive adaptation. Tadano and Komi’s rainy walk home was a nice sign-off for an episode that frequently paired them together – both the home visit and ramen shop segments were centered around the two of them plus Najimi, resulting in an episode I quite enjoyed. Tadano in particular was at his most likeable, owing to a fun flashback that detailed his chuunibyou middle school phase and led into his current, consciously unremarkable personality. New character and present-day chuuni victim Nakanaka was no exception to the “Everybody Loves Komi” rule, but her fixation was easier to handle than Agari’s or Yamai’s, couched as it was in her already-obsessive personality. Good stuff all around – I’ll try doubling up on Komi next week to get current with the show, since it’s holding up to my expectations so far.

Star Wars: Visions – 6

Wooper: If the previous episode was a high point of the Visions anthology, this one was a low point. That’s due not to the simplicity of its ‘Astro Boy meets Star Wars’ premise, but to the condensed nature of the story, which tries to do too much with too little. A droid named T0-B1 discovering his destiny to be a Jedi is a cute idea, but layering in an action-oriented dream sequence, multiple scenes of planetary exploration, and a vague ecological message made the episode feel overstuffed. There was no time to show the conflict between the Tezuka-esque Professor Mitaka and the Sith Lord who killed him; T0-B1 went to sleep, woke up in what seemed like an instant, and Mitaka was gone. The droid acquired his lightsaber with very little trouble, being gifted its handle and discovering its crystal within himself after a bit of voiceover telling him to “use the Force,” making the climactic fight with the nameless Sith a little boring. The sound design during the battle was really strange, too, with the dialogue and lightsaber effects drowning out everything else, including music and instances of environmental destruction. If this episode has a particular strength, it’s art direction, as seen in the sandy shots of Mitaka’s workshop and the once-barren planet he shared with his creations. That bright spot aside, though, “T0-B1” is a victim of its scattered ambitions and short runtime.