Basquash! – 17

Yeah, with this there is no question possible about the swap of directors: the directional style of this episode was really different from anything we’ve seen in this show so far. This is Kiss Dum. I was expecting this to be the moment for this show to completely jump the shark, but what the hell, it actually works!?

But yeah, this episode had a lot more emphasis on music. The new director likes to swap hot-blooded action scenes together with quiet exposition scenes, and so the atmosphere of this episode changed a lot of times from one to the other. It’s interesting how he didn’t mess up the continuity and developed it at the same time, though. You can see that the new animation director takes a lot less risks, and so the graphics don’t look as good as in the beginning of this show, but nevertheless I’m glad that the awesome background artists are still there, because at least they made sure for a lot of eye candy.

In a way, this change of direction was exactly what Basquash needed. I’m not sure what made the old director lose his touch, but ever since the desert episodes this series seems to have been missing the chaos of the first couple of episodes, and despite the character-development, this series became rather… generic, with not a lot of things that stood out. However, I can really see a hot blooded GAR finale work for this series. The past number of episodes were at least good at building up, and if the new director at least manages to use this build-up this can turn into a pretty exciting finale. What this series needs to pay attention to the most is to keep the level of cheese in check. While the drama thus far was mostly subtle, this episode definitely upped the cheese-level. That was one of the downsides to this episode.

Nevertheless, I like the new additions to the cast (especially the moon giant has lots of potential), this episode had lots of stuff going on and plenty of new revelations. Finally I’m getting a bit more excited with this series.
Rating: * (Good)