Author: Lenlo

Fall 2023 Impressions: S-Rank Musume, Frieren, A Girl & Her Guard Dog

by Lenlo, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

My Daughter Left the Nest and Returned an S-Rank Adventurer

Short Synopsis: An S-Rank adventurer wants nothing more than to visit home and see her father, but work keeps popping up and people keep needing saving. Just how hard is it for a hero to get a break?

This one was actually kinda cute. No world-destroying demons, no overpowered bland-faced protagonists, no isekai bullshit. Just a young girl trying to visit home despite all the work that keeps popping up. Despite its high-fantasy nature, it’s actually pretty relevant to real life. That desire to see and be with family and the inability to do so because of adult responsibilities. Split that core emotion into 2 separate stories, Ange’s young working life and Bel’s country nostalgic musing, and you have a solid little fantasy family show. My only gripe is that the production seems to be rather weak. The action is dull, the movements stiff. It’s really carried by the character’s emotions and desire to see each other again. And even that I doubt S-Rank will be able to keep up for its entire run time. It’s going to have to transition into something else sooner or later. I can only hope it has that same familial core to whatever high fantasy adventure it drags this father/daughter pair into.
Potential: 50%

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

Short Synopsis: The adventure is over, the heroes return home, time passes and friends age. All except for Frieren, the elven mage destined to long outlive her companions, who must now face how little she truly valued the time she spent with them.

So right off the bat Frieren is cheating a bit by releasing effectively 4 episodes at once for its premier. Luckily that doesn’t matter though, because these aren’t 4 “basic” episodes. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if each one of these 4 were, individually, better than any other premier I watch in the coming days. Everything about it is just so… good. The art style and animation is gorgeous, having just the right amount of detail and personality to draw you in without being so complex no one is allowed to move. The pacing is patient and methodical, giving scenes room to breathe, Frieren isn’t in a rush to go anywhere. And the stories? God I cannot believe how well Freiren captured Frieren’s elven indifference, how little time means to her and how easily she can be sidetracked because of it, as well as the consequences such an attitude has on her relationships with others. I love the dichotomy of how short that 10 year adventure was, but how much it meant. How all these random spells she learns end up meaning something special to her, from spawning flowers her leader loves or turning grapes sour since her friend enjoys them to a demon’s magic being outpaced by the passage of time. You can see how much they mean to her, despite her outward indifference, and how important the idea of Time is to the story. Simply put, it’s really really solid, and I wasn’t expecting that. I’m a little concerned about this journey to the north, but the fact that it’s retreading the same adventure she took over 80 years ago means it’ll probably still be very emotional. I hope so at least, because Frieren has set some high expectations with this premier.
Potential: 95%

A Girl & Her Guard Dog

Short Synopsis: A young girl is raised by her Yakuza grandfather and one of his men. Now she’s grown up and attending highschool, only to find that the same Yakuza is attending as well to keep her safe and away from boys!

A friend of mine wrote something about Guard Dog that I can’t help but agree with: “If this was a feel good Slice of Life I would love it, but since I know it’s a romance that just makes it weird”. While Slice of Life isn’t my genre, Guard Dog would definitely be better served as one. Make it a feel good show about a shy girl trying to make normal friends in a normal school while her overprotective Yakuza guardian scares them all away, eventually realizing his little girl is growing up and doesn’t need him anymore. Instead what we get is some weird sort of age-gap grooming romance where the guy is twice her age, has raised her since she was a child, and actively prevents her from mingling with her peers. It’s all just so weird and the knowledge this is a romance tints every interaction they have, every scene they are in. Maybe some will be able to look past the whole “This guy has raised her since grade school” and just see the admittedly cute/moe interactions the two have. Add in a decent art style, I do actually like the line work and designs, and I’d understand why someone would enjoy it. Personally though? I can’t get into a groomer romance.
Potential: 5%

The Big O – 1/2 [Roger The Negotiator/Dorothy Dorothy] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, The Big O, Throwback Thursday

Welcome all, to the next season of Throwback Thursday! After being on the list for years it’s finally happened, Bruce Wayne and his giant robot finally got picked. That’s right, it’s the Batman The Animated Series knockoff, The Big O! Now without further ado lets dive in! Also in case it wasn’t obvious, that was a joke. Even if some of the staff worked on both.

Starting off lets talk visuals. By now many of you should know that I absolutely adore cel animation. There’s just something more… real about it, something that pops, where you can tell that each frame is hand-made. Combine that with a film noir atmosphere and an art deco aesthetic and The Big O has a winning formula. Seriously, I cannot understate how much I love its use of heavy blacks and contrast. There’s nothing complex about the designs, no ludicrously detailed fabrics or faces. Just simple colors, heavy contrast, and strong direction. And to top it all off? The effects work. My god the effects work. From explosions to debris and dust clouds, they all move so cleanly. While we don’t know how it will hold up as we go, I know it switches to digipaint in season 2, I can’t help but love The Big O’s style.

Continue reading “The Big O – 1/2 [Roger The Negotiator/Dorothy Dorothy] – Throwback Thursday” →

Undead Murder Farce – 13 [The Culprit’s Name]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Undead Murder Farce

Welcome all, to the grand finale! This is it, the final episode Undead Murder Farce! There’s a lot that needs wrapping up this week. Will the series manage it? Or will it continue to stumble right at the finish line? Lets dive in and find out!

Starting off, did Undead Murder Farce manage to fix its lackluster visual production by the end? Well to be honest, not really. We still got shitty green screen compositing, poorly lit night scenes generally dull movement. Those have been stables since the show first aired and they are still here now. One thing we did get though was a pretty damn good cave sequence. It only lasted for a minute, sure. But it feels like that scene was every ounce of creative energy the show had condensed into a single minute. It was legitimately pretty great. The use of line work and different colors for different characters, the use of negative space, bright reds for wounds and such. Add on to that some… creative, if a tad nonsensical, scenes like Carmilla’s and at least as far as finales go, Undead Murder Farce didn’t do half bad I don’t think.

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Undead Murder Farce – 12 [Where the River’s Flow Changes]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Undead Murder Farce

Welcome all, to a rather late episode of Undead Murder Farce! Sorry for that, I’ve been writing some reports and getting back into Path of Exile. Not the best excuse, but hey it’s fun. Enough about me though, lets talk about our current seasonal murder mystery!

Starting off, Undead Murder Farce continues with it’s questionable production this week. I know I harp on it every time, but I’m going to continue to do so until it stops being a problem. It’s just to dark, to hard to see anything, and they still haven’t figured it out. On top of that, what decent animation we did get in the fights was still kind of rough. The way Tsuguru used his environment was nice, but I can’t say it looked good. And that’s not even mentioning the power-point levels of editing that were the last few moments of the episode. Seriously, what was that zoom and pan shit? Is this a professional project or is it babies first production? It’s damn shame. Undead Murder Farce never looked great, but it’s fallen even from those mild heights recently.

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Jujutsu Kaisen S2 – 9 [Shibuya Incident – Gate, Open]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Jujutsu Kaisen

Welcome all, to another week of Jujutsu Kaisen! This week is the climax of Gojo’s fight. We all know how this ends, so the real question is: How hype was it? Lets dive in and find out!

Starting off, lets give some praise for Jujutsu Kaisen’s animation team this week because that was great. Gojo got to go hard and show off exactly why he’s the fan favorite. Whether it be running around at the speed of sound killing some monsters or schooling some spirits in hand-to-hand, it was a great time. It’s a damn shame about the dimming though. I get it, it’s required by law, Porygon’s existence continues to affect anime to this day. Doesn’t change the fact that it made a couple of scenes look worse than they otherwise would have though. Still, at least fans have something to look forward to when the blu-rays come out. And it’s not like it ruined every scene either. To bring it back around to positivity, Jujutsu Kaisen’s focus on facial expressions this week was great. From Jogo to Geto to Gojo, I loved them all.

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Kemono no Souja Erin Review – 71/100 – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Anime Reviews, Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction, Finished Series: Slice of Life/Drama, Kemono no Souja Erin, Reviews by Lenlo, Throwback Thursday

Seirei no Moribito has always been one of my favorite anime. Oh times change, I grow older, new shows come out or I find old ones I had never seen. Slowly it moves down the list, falling to newcomers like Ping Pong the Animation, Mob Psycho 100 and Keep Your Hands off Eizouken. But it never really left my mind, I always end up revisiting it every few months, either looking it up on YouTube or listening to its OST. So imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to learn that Moribito’s author, Nahoko Uehashi, had gotten another adaptation, animated once again by studio Production I.G. It is that show, Kemono no Souja Erin, directed by Takayuki Hamana and with music by Masayuki Sakamoto, a story about a young girl struggling to survive and keep to her ideals in a country at war with itself, that we’ll be talking about today.

Be warned, this review contains minor unmarked spoilers for Kemono no Souja Erin. It also contains major spoilers in some sections however these will be heavily marked to avoid accidents. Continue reading “Kemono no Souja Erin Review – 71/100 – Throwback Thursday” →

Jujutsu Kaisen S2 – 8 [The Shibuya Incident]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Jujutsu Kaisen

Welcome all, to another episode of Jujutsu Kaisen! This week sees the villains show up, gives us our first fight of the arc, and lets Itadori show off a bit. Plenty to talk about, so lets jump right in!

Starting off, production wise this week wasn’t anything to great. It wasn’t bad, but it’s obvious Jujutsu Kaisen is saving the big stuff for later. Instead this week was mostly a rather standard display of Gojo’s power and a weird hallway CGI scene with Itadori. As awkward as it was at times though, I would still call it an improvement from Season 1’s poorly composited sewers and forests. Part of that is probably that the environment was a lot less ambitious, really just being two rectangular hallways side-by-side. But I think they’ve also just legitimately improved at it, full stop. The textures were better, they slowed the camera down and let the animation do most of the work. If anything the complexity of the Curse’s design was what held them back the most. Hopefully it continues to improve as we get further and further into the arc.

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Undead Murder Farce – 11 [Where the Wolves Dwell]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Undead Murder Farce

Welcome all, to another week of Undead Murder Farce! This week adds another layer to the murder mystery, we meet a bunch of werewolves, and Shizuku gets an actual episode all to herself. It’s good stuff! So lets dive in to it shall we?

Starting off lets get the obvious out of the way. The night time scenes still look like shit. This sucks. Especially when Undead Murder Farce actually had some decent nocturnal lighting near the end during Shizuku’s little investigation. It’s like the show is learning, just not fast enough to really matter. Putting that dead horse aside though, the most important thing about this episode to me was that it was all Shizuku. Tsuguru and Aya make small appearances, mostly to push them towards a reunion, but Shizuku gets the majority of the screen and it’s great. She’s really needed something separate form Tsuguru and Aya, some time to away to come into her own as a character, and that’s what we got here. Not only in terms of her limitations, she isn’t the brains of their group, but also in how she treats people outside of our main squad.

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Zom 100 Bucket List of the Dead – 7 [Truck Stop of the Dead]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Welcome all, to another episode of Zom 100! Enjoy it, because it’s two weeks before our next, and then another three after that I think. Man the production behind this show must be falling apart. That or they are putting a lot of care into it. Still, this is anime production, which do we really think it is? Enough with that though, on with the show!

So to be frank, part of what made this post take so long was just how dull I found this episode. As a metaphor for how soul crushing and downright abusive corporate life can be, how modern corporate values affect families, how many in positions of power do not actually deserve to be there, just the whole package about how corporate culture has sucked the joy out of life, it worked. That was all successful. No question. But as a piece of entertainment, as something that was meant to be enjoyable to watch and make me feel something? It just didn’t. There was some disgust, sure. And some small vindication at the end. But as a 23 minute experience? It was more depressing and unsatisfying than anything else. At least for me.

Continue reading “Zom 100 Bucket List of the Dead – 7 [Truck Stop of the Dead]” →

Jujutsu Kaisen S2 – 7 [Evening Festival]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Jujutsu Kaisen

It’s here everyone, Jujutsu Kaisen’s Shibuya is beginning. The event that’s going to be talked about for the rest of the year, and will inevitably get me yelled at. Before we dive into that though we need to finish up with Mechamaru. Does he survive his meeting with Mahito? Or is he the first victim of this coming war? Let’s jump in and find out!

Starting off, at it’s core this episode looked good. We had a nice fight in the first half, filled with Evangelion references, an Itano Circus and lots of just really cool moments. It’s a shame about the dimming though. And the after-images that almost ruined a number of scenes, like Mahito running through the trees in various forms. I get it, the anti-seizure law is important and exists for a reason. But part of me wishes these studios would animate within the confines they know they will be able to air, so that edits after the fact don’t ruin it. Another part though doesn’t want to restrict them, so we can get the wildest shit imaginable. Either way though, I know one thing for sure: The Jujutsu Kaisen Blu-ray is going to be well worth it when it comes out. Get rid of aaaall that dimming.

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