Category: Finished Series: Action

Ah, glad to see a solid ending for this series. It’s not anything special, but it closed off this series very solidly, without leaving any threads open and with a satisfying conclusion that goes beyond the “save the girl and return home”. The final fight was also really nicely animated, the car-chase was pretty nice. About the only thing that didn’t feel right was Yayoi recovering so easily, and beating Lin so easily when she should have been heavily bruised, even if she did somehow regain her consciousness in time.

Overall, I can’t really say that this has been the best work for either the director and Brains Base: both Red Garden and Baccano were better than this series, but still it’s been an interesting ride, and like True Tears a very solidly written series, apart from a few inconsistencies here and there. Overall, it was a good series for a quick watch that doesn’t hit heights or lows.

Just like xxxHolic, after two weaker episodes, Kurenai is totally back on track. The finale might be a bit shorter than I expected (only two episodes), but this episode was an excellent conclusion, and it made up for a lot of time that got wasted on the previous episode.

In this episode, Shinkurou, Yayoi and Benika try to break into the Kuhoin main house, and the result is an utter failure. Yayoi gets beaten up to the brink of death, one of the servants (the one who helped Murasaki escape) gets brutally killed off by Lin, Murasaki is so afraid of her brother that she refuses to come with Shinkurou, so Shinkurou and Benika end up retreating. The episode ends with Shinkurou going back, while Benika was retrieving Yayoi’s body. A perfectly fine stage has been set for a solid ending.

Because things can’t go many ways from now (I mean, what else could happen but Lin getting defeated, Ryuuji getting humiliated and Shinkurou and Murasaki getting back together?), so it’s all going to depend on the scriptwriters for the final episodes. They’ve done some great work up till now, but writing a good ending still is something different, and I hope that they’ll be able to pull it off.

As this episode was mostly boring, I’m going to hijack most of this post for something completely different that caught my attention. I stumbled upon this post, referring to this piece of art, that rants against the lack of shading in the anime of the 21st century.

Ironically, it’s done by the same guy who posted those documentaries on fansubs. This means that there indeed is a lot of one-sided bias against today’s anime. The guy’s very selective about his examples: most of the images from the eighties are from OVAs, while the recent images are all from TV-series. Of course these have a bigger budget. There are enough anime from the eighties with cheap animation as well (Gundam, anyone?). The guy obviously is a narcissistic elitist, but I admit that he does have a point.

The fact remains that the shading in recent anime is usually minimal. I never really paid attention to it, but very rarely do I see a second shade-colour, let alone a third. I’m not going to deny that Hyper Future Vision looked absolutely gorgeous, with its distinctive art style, and it’s such a shame that today, so little anime try to experiment with shading a bit.

Of course, not every series needs shading. Porfy and Kaiba hardly have any shading at all, and yet they’re among the most visually pleasing series to currently air. But the fact does remain that creators could play so much with different kinds of shading, and you hardly see anything of it.

Nowadays, the trend seems to be incredibly detailed background art if you want to show off your budget. It would be interesting to see series break away from this trend, in order to focus more on different kinds of shading. There are of course exceptions here and there, but I do agree that things could be more varied, though I think I’m going to pay more attention to this in the future.

But indeed, there are enough exceptions and Otaking seems too stuck up to notice this. If he happens to read this entry through some strange reason, then I advice him to check out Shion no Ou. Obviously, the show had a small budget, but it’s the perfect example of a show that really tries to play with its own art style, and the best shots are absolutely gorgeous, with intricate shading, creative poses. It’s the perfect example of a visual feast that tries to think outside the box.

Anyway, a bit more about this episode of Kurenai: I guess my expectations worked against me for this time. For this series, I expected an action-packed finale, just like the first episode suggested. What we get is a Shinkurou who needs an entire episode to figure out that he wants to save Murasaki, wasting precious time for this series. This is especially aggravating since a similar series, Crystal Blaze, is about to finish with a huge finale that keeps building up speed, while Kurenai seems to slow down more and more as it goes on.

And so the climax of Kurenai has started. The OP and ED feel even more out of place now, but it also becomes apparent how much the building-up of the previous episode is paying off. The second half of this episode was really good, and I’m eager to find out what the creators have in store for us for the final three episodes.

As it turns out: Murasaki indeed is a legitimate child of the Kuhoin, but she was just never registered. She was just there as a tool for inside breeding, to keep the Kuhoin-family as pure-blooded as possible. In other words, brother and sister make children together. I recall having read somewhere how a child of a brother and sister has a larger chance at a personality-disorder, and looking at Ryuuji, I can indeed see why this Kuhoin-tradition has continued on for ages.

What surprised me was that despite Shinkurou’s godly power, he was easily beaten by Ryuuji’s body-guards. I guess that that female bodyguard never really gave Shinkurou the chance to show that strange elbow of his, suggesting that she’s been really well-trained for her job.

This episode somehow reminded me a bit about Sword of the Stranger, and there are actually a lot of similarities between the two: a powerhouse takes care of a small and innocent child that’s somehow vital to the plot of the bad guys, and as the story progresses, they get to know each other more and more. Now that I think about it, there are many more series who use this formula (Seirei no Moribito, for example), and it works surprisingly well. 🙂

Ah, its finally happened. Most parts of this episode was a calm before the storm, but at the end of the episode, Shinkurou and Murasaki are finally forced to leave their home and run away from the Kuhoin family. Something’s telling me that the best part of Kurenai is about to begin!

It’s amazing you can do with solid writing. The entire episode was clearly building up for something: for a random Kurenai-episode, it just missed the intense dialogue, drama or comedy that made the previous episodes great, and instead it went for a very quiet and peaceful approach, in which Shinkurou, Murasaki and the other went to visit a local shrine. They had fun through the afternoon, and went to have dinner at a restaurant together, as a way of saying goodbye to their lifestyles of the past few episodes, because the day after that a bunch of random Kuhoin-goons came up and beat the crap out of Shinkuro, and as an added twist: there’s a chance that Murasaki isn’t a legitimate Kuhoin-child: only her father’s two sons are legitimately registered.

I liked those two goons: they’ve got a personality, and throughout the episode, you can actually see them as they gather information on the situation. As it turns out, they underestimated Yayoi’s fighting ability so they retreated