Category: Senkou no Night Raid

I originally meant to just ignore this episode and go for the streamed one, but in the end I do want to make this small post about it. Because seriously, for a recap it was pretty damn good.

This really is one of the more interesting trends that anime has followed over the past five years: creators are realizing that cheap recaps are very often annoyed, and they are used way less often when compared to ten years ago and before. And when they’re used, they’re actually pretty good in about 50 percent of the cases. A trend really has been to have them as more than a cut and paste job, but instead tell a story of their own.

That was this episode: it skillfully cut together a compilation of the past six episodes and created a flowing narrative out of it, combining it with a few minutes of new footage: a bit of the past of some of the cast members, as well as foreshadowing about whatever that girlfriend of Aoi may be up to. What especially striked me was how the mood of this episode was completely different from the series: the series is usually slow-paced, but here they chopped all of the key scenes together into a surprisingly action-packed one. Especially for this show I can understand the need for a recap, and it’s good to see that they’re actually putting effort into it.

This show has something. I have no idea what, but it’s got this X-factor that draws me into it, and it’s something that I actually did not experience with Sora no Oto. In any case, tomorrow morning I’m going to hunt the real episode seven down. The past week definitely made me hungry about what direction this show will go into.
Rating: * (Good) – Especially for a recap.

So this episode shows Yukina’s brother. I’m not sure whether I understand his plans, though, but the dialogue was surprisingly complex in this episode. I just fail to see the reason why he would kidnap Natsume, just to show him an international conference between the Asian leaders, in which he did nothing but talk about how he wants to create a united Asia but doesn’t have any plans to back them up with.

However, this all does show that we’re about to get to the historically sensitive part of the story. Especially considering this. I don’t know anything about Chinese history, so I looked up the “Mukden Incident” in Wikipedia. Apparently, the Japanese staged their own attack to give themselves a pretext of invading a part of China. The controversy about the whole incident is that some Japanese actually blame the Chinese for it (note: this doesn’t mean all of them).

The interesting thing here is that either the broadcasting station or this series is going to be in the wrong, considering that it’s not going to air. There are two possibilities here: the series doesn’t shy away from blaming the Japanese, and the broadcasting station didn’t agree with it, or the series mixed in some weird conspiracy theory that probably has something to do with Yukina’s brother causing the whole incident, which is what the broadcasting station found too much to air.

I’m actually very much interested in the next episode, no matter what the cause turns out to be. It’s been established by now that this is historical fiction: all historical stories end up screwing real history in one way or the other. The danger of these things is of course to not delve into useless nationalistic propaganda. Either way though, I’m very interested in how the creators actually decided to solve this matter.
Rating: * (Good)

I’ve been thinking… most of the criticisms for this series stem from not the fact that it’s bad, but rather because of its ambitions. If this was any regular series, I’m sure that I would have cut it a lot more slack than I’m doing now. This series may indeed not be realistic in some ways, but on the other hand I consider this to be along with Yojou-han the most innovative series of the season.

I mean, compare this to Rainbow: there, the acting is just bad, no matter in which context you put it. But because of the huge risks this series took, it’s much harder to pull this off correctly than, say, a romantic comedy. What I actually love is how Anime no Chikara has really been trying to put an international flavour to anime, and not just by focusing on one culture at a time, but blending a whole lot of them together. Most series that focus on foreign countries usually just focus on one of them at a time, but here it’s different. Sure, it may be funny to listen to the “German” that Kazura gargled up in this episode, but would the alternative (just pretending that everyone can understand Japanese) really have been better?

So you know what, screw the criticisms of this series: I like its guts. This episode was actually very good, despite not being that realistic. Kazura’s past acquaintances however were handled with a lot of subtlety: they worked on opposite sides, and yet the creators didn’t try to turn it into some cheesy drama. Instead they gave Kazura the chance to see his friends one more time, knowing that it was only a matter of time before he would get assassinated.

Also, I’m glad: the photography really remains a major theme throughout the series. It’s a chance to see the characters busy with something that isn’t life-threatening, and adds a bit of character to them, instead of being just a one-episode gimmick to never return.

The big constraint is obviously going to be time. I swear that this is looking like a 24-episoded series at this rate. It’s in any case completely different from what I expected when first starting this. To think that the creators would go for the episodic approach to flesh out the setting and characters. It’s definitely more varied, but what about the climax? Please don’t let it go down the same path as Sora no Oto.

I’m also digging the character-designs more and more. It’s definitely better than the big-eyed brightly coloured style that anime has become infamous for. Also, is it me or do the creators get better and better at their detail? Look at the corpse at the end of this episode and the way it was twitching. Very well drawn.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Ah, the spy genre. Where our lead characters have to take care of dangerous threats, international bombings, diplomatic turbulence… and obese felines who steal photographs.

So obviously this was a bit of a silly episode, but at least it gave us a bit of a chance to get to know the lead characters, which is also important. I would have preferred it if the creators just dumped that strange photograph subplot and just showed the characters as they are on their days off, but this episode had its charms.

On a side-note, at first I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but on second thought I’m beginning to like this series’ tour of the world with languages more and more. I now understand why it was impossible for the creators to find a good voice actor for the lead character: is there really someone who speaks fluent in Japanese, German, Chinese and Russian all at the same time? And who knows how many more languages are going to be featured? In any case, it shows that Shanghai is growing into the international metropolis that it is today. For the series’ faults, you can at least say that it’s not looking down on its setting. Or not in a way that I can see anyway.

Also, the animators choose the strangest places to use their budget at. Most of the times, filler episodes like this don’t receive much of a budget to play with. Take a look at how well that fat cat was animated; I’ve hardly ever seen cats animated this life-like in such a TV series. Also, the crowd shots in this episode are also really well done: you can see that the streets are alive with people, who may not all be moving, but all have their own designs. And then there also are these things as the food, and the camera that they used in this episode. All were really well drawn.
Rating: * (Good)

I was too busy ranting last week to notice, but I failed to notice how good the OP of this series is, especially in terms of the visuals. I’d probably rank it the second-best OP this season, after Giant Killing. It’s full of nice ideas and animation.

In any case, for me this was the episode that sold me on this series. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but the characters have some kind of strange charm that even Sora no Oto did not have. I felt like this episode treated the characters seriously and like adults, giving them the time to shine without overdoing it. The acting also felt much better.

What I also liked was how this episode showed that the powers of the characters aren’t exactly special: in this episode we meet someone with the exact same powers as Kazura. On top of that, while the series may be episodic, there are a ton of threads that keep it together, most notably Yukina’s brother.

As for the combat: I was very pleased with how this episode handled it. One one hand you’d wonder what happened to the police, but the scenario of the fight itself was very nice, balancing the stealth, bomb disposal, child rescue and gunfights with each other. It all stayed nicely down to earth instead of going over the top, and I appreciate that.

This is a bit of a strange series though. On one hand it’s very down to earth, but on the other I’m also questioning why the bomb guy used such elaborate means to just contact Yukina. Didn’t he know where she was or something? And even then why would bombing a building guarantee her arrival?
Rating: * (Good)

As for the series I’m not going to blog:
– Mayoi Neko Overrun’s second episode was actually pretty terrible. Badly produced and every way as obnoxious and unfunny as I originally feared it to be.

In any case, Night Raid is going to be the 10th series that I’ll be blogging this series (I guess it’s pretty obvious what number 11 and 12 are going to be with the way that I’ve kept hyping them), but do note that there’s a good chance that I’ll drop it if either Uragiri or Rainbow’s second episodes are really good, because I do have my problems with it.

First of all there is of course the cheese, which doesn’t exactly mix well with the mature setting that the series is trying to portray. Here we have an original series about international spies, and the best thing would obviously be if
the creators really took their liberties and delivered a series about actual spies: the way they operate and blend into a crowd. But alas, instead we get a supernatural adventure series in which the characters edge more to James Bond than actual spies.

But yeah, that doesn’t mean that the series can’t be awesome. And really, the script for this series is excellent when you look at this as a fantasy-series. The writers don’t excel in their research, but rather their imagination. By now it has already shown that background is very important, and so we get to see a ton of flashbacks.

Here’s one of my big issues with this series, though: this feels like a series that has a great script, but not the means to execute it. Because A-1 Pictures has had to handle so many series this season, I already feared this, but they just don’t have enough manpower to make each of their series excel. Ookiku Furikabutte is as well animated as ever, and I’m sure that Working also has no problems in the graphics department, but with Senkou no Night Raid feels to have received the shortest straw here in terms of A-1’s best staff. Because of that, the acting feels a bit shoddy. The lead characters also doesn’t really help when he’s got voice actors who can’t act half of the time, trying to fluently speak three different languages (to the Russian people who happen to visit this site: how bad was his pronunciation this time?). And then there’s the young teleporting-guy, whose voice actor really hams it up pretty badly.

Plus, this show only has 13 episodes, which is probably my biggest issue with the series at this point: with such a short series, will it be able to deliver, or just end up as another spy flick? I’m especially worried due to the “spy of the week”-theme. I may seem strict and nit-picky in this entry, but with a season in which there are a ton of shows that have big potential among big flaws, I really want to be able to pick out the best ones. Night Raid, more than any other series this season, has a setting that screams “take me seriously”, and therefore I’m currently taking it more seriously than if it just pretended to be a fun action-flick where the main point is to kill bad guys.
Rating: (Enjoyable)