Category: Macross Frontier

Okay… so that was a disaster…

Don’t get me wrong, it was without a doubt a fun disaster, but there’s got to be some kind of limit on how many face-palm moments you can include into one single episode. Ranka in a carrot-suit already was strange, but at that point, I had no idea that the rest of the episode would feature both Ranka and Sheryl joining Alto’s class (feels like a bad teenaged soap, doesn’t it?), Sheryl’s panties ending up stolen by a random fluffy animal, every single male in the school would obsessively hunt said panties, and Sheryl chasing said creature in a flying-suit, wearing nothing but a dress. Not exactly my idea of quality entertainment.

Still, thankfully the banter between the different characters has been getting better and better. As much as I’d like to hate this episode, I have to admit that some parts were downright hilarious, especially Sheryl, finding out Alto’s “nickname”. And as an added bonus, the final minute of the episode showed how the “bad guy” met Ranka when she was alone with the above-mentioned pet. That serious scene worked surprisingly well.

I’m also wondering, since this is a show about idols: will the creators step on the topics of overly obsessive fans? This episode already made it clear that every single male in the school is a drooling fan of Sheryl, but what surprised me is that they all kept their distance from her, and only went after her panties. No autographs? No attempts to get close to her? It’s a rather strange message: an idol’s fanbase isn’t based around her talents or her personality, but instead on her panties. Everything suddenly makes so much more sense. 😛

Ah, finally some action. This episode gave me some more faith in the second half of this series. The two previous episodes may have been rather dull, but this episode made up for it pretty nicely. Although I do hope that this series won’t try to beat Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in terms of huge mechas…

This episode also finally shows us the main antagonist, though the guy didn’t do much. Still, it’s a nice enough introduction, as long as the creators remember to develop the guy. I also liked the Varja-battleship that suddenly appeared. The only dull part in this episode was when Sheryll got sentimental about Alto in front of her audience, but at least that part was meant to develop both her and Ranka some more.

I like the new ED a lot more than the old one. I’m not a J-pop fan at all, so these songs have always been a hit or miss. This one turned out to be pretty nice, thankfully.

Another rather boring episode, but at least you can see that it’s building up for something. The next episode should prove to be interesting. And is it me, or was Ozma bothered by a rather bad case of constipation this time?

In any case, this episode was mainly meant to develop the love-triangle a bit more, and it was meant to send the Macross crew into space to a place called “Galaxy”, because it was attacked in a recent Varja-assault (it’s going to be pretty bad if Ranka starts singing while that entire fleet is gone :P).

I’m also getting more and more the impression that Ranka saw her parents or other loved ones get killed in front of her eyes. She was even too scared to move when they were just featured on an ordinary video-screen. At the moment, her love-triangle with Alto and Sheryl is more annoying than it is touching, but I do wonder what the creators will be able to do with it once this series hits its second half.

I didn’t quite like Sheryl’s song at the end since I’ve never been a real fan of the ED-song, although I admit that the animation-budget was rock-solid.

At my April summary, I remember noting how this series is a bit too silly for it’s own good at times…

Well, this episode definitely didn’t solve that problem, as it basically degenerated into a dating-sim/love-triangle/idol-episode. Sheryl and Alto have a little date, while Ranka and Mikhail also spend the episode together. Predictably, at the end of the episode Ranka finds out that Alto is starting to fancy Sheryl. Been there, done that. Ah well, at least this episode was enjoyable. I remember how Souko no Strain was one of the very few series who actually made such an episode work, but that series took much more risks than Macross Frontier does right now.

Still, thankfully the episode could have gone much worse. At least this episode gave some background on the Zentradi for those who’ve never seen anything of Macross like me. Before this episode, I really thought that they were some kind of lost race with just a handful members still alive, though it seems that they’re still living in quite large communities. We also know that Ranka’s song somehow strengthens the Varja, which does explain why one of them suddenly popped up, just as she started singing. For that, I have to give the creators of this series credit: I originally thought that they just timed Ranka’s song and the battle together for more excitement, but there is an actual explanation for why that happened.

Ranka’s song this episode felt a bit wrong, though. I wish that the creators would stop to make a huge spectacle about Ranka’s songs. In that mood, an a cappella-song would have suited much better, but instead the creators suddenly introduced instruments from nowhere and made no attempts to hide the fact that that song was recorded in a studio. Series like Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club and Red Garden have shown that songs that sound spontaneous sound much better than the over-rehearsed ones.

Okay, this episode was fair enough. It did a good job in pointing out the inexperience of the two main leads. I don’t like how easily Alto managed to learn to perfectly control his craft, but at least he still doesn’t understand tactics yet. What also surprised me was that Ranka didn’t end up winning the miss Macross Frontier-contest. At that point, things seemed so obvious that I thought that the creators were just trying to give her an important role in a quick way, but thank god I was wrong, and the creators turn out to be a bit more subtle than that. After all, it’s probably the first time she sang in front of such a huge audience, she felt out of place, she was full of nerves. It would have been a very glaring plot-hole if she did end up winning that contest.

This episode also introduces a bunch of new characters, among which a big-boobed giant with bright blue hair who can turn into a little girl whenever she’s not piloting. She offers another hint as to why Ranka’s special: her brother rescued her ten years ago from god knows where, so who knows what happened in her past? At the same time, this giant, when she’s in little-girl form also has bright hair that has a mind of its own and it’s just as brightly coloured. They could be of the same “race”.

We also learn that Saotome’s father is some kind of famous person, though they seem to hate each other. No sign of his mother yet, if I’m not mistaken. This episode also introduces a human factor in the enemies, as this time, a manned mecha comes to attack Macross Frontier. One thing I hope for this series is that it’ll provide enough attention to these “bad guys”, and doesn’t focus too much of its screen time on Ranka, Alto and Sheryl. I’ve seen many series that screwed up with their villains, simply because these people weren’t fleshed out enough. A damn shame.

In other news, the animation was different from usual. It seemed much messier than the previous three episodes. I like this kind of animation; it makes the characters feel alive, rather than a bunch of drawings in a series that just uses minimal animation.

The quietest episode of Macross Frontier up till now, but for once everything felt right in it. There was a silly fanservice-joke in the beginning, which made me fear for the rest of the episode, but that one joke turned out to be used well in the rest of the episode, both for Sheryl’s character-development, as lightening the mood for a short moment, because only minutes later we switch to Ranka, seeing her “brother” wounded in one of the mecha.

So far, the only thing that this series has really suffered from is the classic “shoujo-syndrome”: no matter how big the world is: the major characters will always run into each other. This one got taken to the extreme in Code Geass, and I was starting to fear about this series, but thankfully this episode didn’t feature any of these coincidences, and it seems that the characters just used this in order to introduce the storyline.

The thing I like a lot about this series is Ranka’s fears, surprisingly enough. Even though she’s your usual traumatized girl, and in no way lives up to her counterparts of Shion (Shion no Ou) and Mina (Porfy no Nagai Tabi), but I loved that little scene where her hands just refused to let go of Alto, even though she tried to get them loose at all costs. At the end of this episode, she also showed that she’s not the whiny girl who won’t do anything but cower in fear (okay, auditioning with a song won’t exactly save the universe or something, but it’s glad to see her actually do something so early in the series).

Ah, why not? I’m going to blog this series. Thanks to L.A. for pointing out that I missed this series. This series is basically THE powerhouse in animation-budget for this season, plus Yoko Kanno’s work is very impressive as well. The second episode was also much better than the rather underwhelming first episode, something of which I’m very glad. The series isn’t perfect: it still combines military with teenagers and characters tend to coincidentally run into each other (how often do you meet a famous pop idol that happens to be near anyway?), but I really like how the creators showed the fear in that female character’s eyes when she got dragged into the sky during the big fight.

The staff behind this also looks quite promising. The animation-company behind this series is Satelight. The thing with Satelight is that their most recent series have been really underwhelming. Their line-up from the past few years just consisted out of Shugo Chara, Kamichama Karin, KISS DUM, Angelique, Galaxy Angel-Rune and Glass Fleet. On the other hand, they DID produce the stellar Noein (which was absolutely beautiful), Chikyuu Shoujo Arjuna, and two series with rumoured excellent graphics, but which I still have to see: Aquarion and HeatGuy J. It looks like they’re really trying to go back to their old roots with Macross Frontier, back to their quality-series. I now know why Kiss Dum, Kamichama Karin and Shugo Chara managed to win me over when they first aired: Satelight definitely know how to make graphics look good, it’s just the execution that was really buggy.

The other staff behind this series is interesting as well, but my biggest worry right now is Shoji Kawamori, the chief director. I’ve checked his profile on ANN a bit, and he’s really worked on a lot of different series, but mostly as the mechanical designs. So, yes, he does know how to produce good graphics, but I was a bit disappointed to see the series he directed before. While I can’t judge on anything of Macross that he’s done, I have heard some things about how Aquarion was to be a series with great production-values, but hardly anything else. Arjuna also could have been much better in my opinion, Spring and Chaos was a disappointing adaptation of one of Kenji Miyazawa’s stories because it didn’t know where it wanted to go, and in the end the only non-graphical thing that I can really praise him for is his role in the creation, screenplay and supervision (but NOT the direction) of Visions of Escaflowne.

Luckily, the director of this series looks more promising. He did some pretty strange series as a hentai-one, Saint Seiya, but his repertoire also includes episode 15 and 22 of none other than Noein (especially the last one was nothing but awesomeness), he directed Black Heaven (talk about something completely different) and strangely enough he was also behind the key animation of episode 11 of Ergo Proxy, which was without a doubt the trippiest one of that entire series.

So, yeah, this series can go both ways, but I’m interested to find out in which direction this series will go. This also means, however, that my Thursdays will be absolutely packed from now on. I’m not entirely sure on which other shows I’ll be blogging this season, but if Toshokan Sensou also has a good second episode, that means that I’ll be blogging SIX shows on the same day. I think that some kind of new personal record. So, you can indeed expect lots of activity from me around Tuesday and Thursday, while the other days will end up relatively quiet. Seriously, why do all the good shows air at the same time?!