Tantei Opera Milky Holmes – 23

Uh guys… this was actually the penultimate episode. Why did you end with a climax here? Are you really ending this series with this? Did you intend the pig guy to be the final antagonist of this series all along? Don’t get me wrong, this episode was awesome, but it was completely different from what I expected.

Still though: this show did it again: again we’ve got ourselves a great climax for a Milky Holmes series. Both were really over the top, but the differences are… there. The first ending still took itself considerably seriously: it was an over the top and action-packed ending and knew it, ending with a great anti-climax. This though… this episode was one giant joke. This completely took the piss out of your typical anime ending.

This episode was just like your typical overblown ending, with all of the cliches there. The only thing is that the subject material was just completely bizarre. Mot final bosses are generic bosses with a ton of power that need to be taken down. Here though… we have the cast fighting a giant lard monster. It was hilarious how he tried to build up this epic atmosphere, using nothing but lard. It’s been a while since I watched something so ridiculously camp,and have it actually work out. The same kind of energy that the entire series had also worked really well with this.

The animation was interesting here. It’s the kind of episode where the budget clearly was limited, yet they try to make the best of what they have while caring nothing whatsoever about consistency. The result was an episode that had everything: still frames, bland faraway shots, fluid action scenes, very creative camera shots, actual moving cameras (which are really hard to do in anime besides the usual panning) and very creative images (seriously, give these artists an applause: they somehow managed to do the impossible and pulled off an entire episode focused on nothing but lard, and they made it look awesome).

Overall, JC Staff has the potential to become as bad as AIC and Xebec, but what sets them apart from all the other companies that focus excessively on moe is that they do put in effort to make their series actually good, and they do allow for experimentation. Or at least with a much bigger frequency than most of those other companies. And as for Artland… if there’s any company who baffles me the most, it’s got to be them. I mean, these were the guys who animated Mushishi. They made significant contributions to Legend of Galactic Heroes. And then they come with series like this. In fact, all of their moe shows are much better than usual, even though their series usually look very cheap. This was by far their best animation since Mushishi.

Also, do I want to know what next week will be about? Will that be the real ending, or some random side-story?
Rating: *** (Awesome)