Category: Anime Reviews

The Stardust Memory Gundam caught my attention mainly because one of its directors: Mitsuko Kase. While I’m also a bit of a fan of her, her directional style is completely different to the stuff we usually see in Gundam: both the early Tomino Series and the later incarnations.

And seriously, the work that she pulls off here belongs to her best. The animation is beyond incredible, and the battles all know how to not go over the top. The weaknesses of the different pilots in combat play a huge role here, and this makes the battles much more intense than your usual Gundam battles. The tension between the different characters is great, and the characterization, despite throwing in lots of Gundam archetypes (most notably, ignoring orders) gives an entirely new dimension to the Gundam formula.

Oh, how I would have wished to sing these kinds of praises for the entire 13 episodes of this OVa. Unfortunately, Mitsuko Kase only directed the first five of them. Derailing is a big word… but that’s exactly what this show does after that point.

And I’m not kidding here. Few series I’ve seen have transgressed from so good, to so utterly bad in such a short amount of time. I really wish I could, but aside from the animation I just can’t say anything positive about the mess that this show eventually devolves into. As the characters move into space, the show loses all of its subtlety and battles simply turn into the endless repetitions that we’re known of Gundam. The characters all lose their charms and devolve into generic archetypes. The male lead once was an interesting new version of Amuro Ray due to his rookie status, but he soon develops a bad case of constipation, somehow gets to be the only one who can pilot the Uber Gundam of this series and has as much personality as a brick wall.

There is a plot, and it would have been a fairly good one if only the execution wasn’t so ridiculously stupid. Plot twists are pretty much pulled out of the creators’ asses. Is your Gundam destroyed? Well, conveniently people have been developing a brand new one behind the scenes. Need some extra drama? Well, you wouldn’t believe the stuff that this show pulls in order to get there. Not to mention the godawful ‘foreshadowing episode’ (you’ll know which episode I’m referring to, right when you see it due to its elephant-like subtlety). Even for Gundam’s standards, the plot twists are just BAD beyond belief.

I often see people praise the UC Gundam timeline, and how it’s so much better and superior than the other Gundams and stuff, but I disagree. For me, Gundam has been a string of series that actually disappointed in their second halves more often than that they didn’t, often derailing the plot completely into pointless angst or stupid plot twists like this one. Oh, let’s hope that the currently airing Gundam Unicorn can avoid this because for me, it’s likely to be the most overrated franchise in anime at this point.

Storytelling:	6/10 – Starts off tense and realistic. Ends incredibly unbalanced, wastes too much time, and pulls random plot twists from out of nowhere.
Characters:	5/10 – Start off full of promise, ends with a ton of archetypes and caricatures, a ton of emo and pathetic romance.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Starts off amazingly fluid with an excellent soundtrack. The animation dulls in but it’s still very good, aside from a cop-out at the climax. Oh, and the good music somehow disappears.
Setting:	6/10 – You’ve got to love, how at the end some disclaimers and Deus ex Machina are pulled to fix the continuity errors that this show created…

Those who have been reading this blog for a while now probably know that I’m a big fan of those compilation-movies: the ones that challenge all kinds of different artists and storytellers to produce a short animation film of 10 to 20 minutes, and combine them all together into one. The fact that Halo Legends is based upon an American franchise makes it even better, giving these films an international flavour, combining east and west.

Overall, even though I’ve played none of the games, I was very pleasantly surprised by Halo Legends, there are some true gems among these stories. Here are some individual comments on all of them:

Origins – I – Just a background story of the world the games are set in. It’s a standard post-apocalyptic story, but well paced. It’s got a great soundtrack all-round, and the art looks pretty nice. The animation however… not so much.

Prototype – I went into this without any background story whatsoever, so I did miss who these characters were, but that was the beauty of this episode: it possesses enough characterization and background to make them stand apart anyway, and the holes in their background added to their mysterious characters. This one produced a great feel of the battlefields that the Hal-games envisioned.

The Babysitter – This one starts out mundane and boring, but ends as the best one yet. Despite the weak set-up it continues to push the right buttons and even gets some development into the short time-frame. The graphics also move from rather ugly to utterly gorgeous, and you can really see that the guys from Studio 4C are trying out a ton of different animation techniques.

The Package – Entirely rendered in CG – yes, even the characters’ faces. It looks great, but this episode tries to be a bit too much like a game, and the formula hurts a lot. Game adaptations are great, just because out of all possible adaptations they require the most input from the creators of the adaptations, in order to really work (there’s no way to animate game-over screens, after all), and this one took too little liberties, and just went for the eye-candy. I like eye-candy, but not when I don’t care about the rest of the story.

Homecoming – Whoa! Another excellent example of how much you can do in just fifteen minutes. Instead of showing a random story, the creators succeeded in showing a character here, one with actual depth that gets explored perfectly in such a short time-frame. Oh, and best soundtrack yet, and the backgrounds are also gorgeously detailed. The characters’ faces were a bit too much of plastic, though.

Odd One Out – And now for something completely different. Odd one out has no depth, it’s got a basic story, premise and lacks any sort of intelligence. What it is, however is a fun ten-minute shounen episode with lots of loud people fighting. Nothing special, but the characters all have their charms, and that’s what I think the creators of this one tried to achieve.

Origins – II – Oh, the graphics in this short kick so much ass! No frame feels the same, every frame is full of imagination and incredibly varied. This one is again back-story, and the slide-show it presents while the central character has her story does wonders to illustrate her narration. This drew me in far more than the first Origins, and smartly uses the build-up provided by the former.

The Duel – This one also is done entirely in CG, but with a really weird filter put on top of it. It’s… intrusive to say the least. In any case, what sets this one apart is the classic Japanese style of storytelling: here the creators took an evil alien race, and turned it into a Japanese-esque tribe of pride and stubbornness. The characters are pretty static, though, and the scenario was a bit too predictable at times.

If I’d have to rank these eight from least favourite to most, it’d be the following:
8. The Package
7. Odd One Out
6. Origins – I
5. The Duel
4. Prototype
3. Origins – II
2. Homecoming
1. The Babysitter

The top four were a bit of a weird experiment. For those who were looking forward to Mamoru Oshii’s involvement: don’t. He only worked on The Duel, and while it was an interesting attempt to show that animation is more than just 2D and 3D CG and Japanese or American, it was 1) too Japanese for that to really work, and 2) you could clearly see that it was just 3D CG with a random filter. Anyone with a video editing tool could do that.

The bottom four however, were definitely worth it, and Bones, Bee-Train and Studio 4C did an amazing job bringing these short stories to life. I especially loved Homecoming and the Babysitter: even though the characters looked a bit weird in the beginning, they made up with it with some amazing eye candy and a ton of personality. It’s very difficult to get sympathetic characters out of just 15 minutes, but these two more than did it.

The best in terms of graphics came from Studio 4C; while just about every episode aside from the Duel looked great, Origins and The Babysitter push good looking even further by not focusing on extreme detail, but instead on creativity. Their shorts are a visual feast, mostly because they throw in so many different artworks that are varied, bold and all kick ass. The music… hell, do I need to even say it? While the music was excellent for every short, Homecoming had by far the best soundtrack.

All I can say is: Studio 4C, Production IG, Bones, Bee Train, and just about every other anime studio who’s ever participated in these kinds of projects: please keep doing them! The beauty of these projects is that with so much diversity, there are so many interesting and different stories to tell. Sure, there will be some disappointing episodes, but even then the nice ones are bound to make up for them.

Storytelling:	9/10 – Prototype, Origins II, Homecoming and The Babysitter make excellent use of their short time-frame and put forth a truly engaging story.
Characters:	8/10 – A bit held back by the cardboard characters of Odd One Out and The Package.
Production-Values:	9/10 – Gorgeous and varied graphics, though at times the animation itself could be better.
Setting:	8/10 – I’ve never seen Halo, and I’m impressed at how they portrayed such a seemingly cliched back-story.

With this third season, I’m completely sold on the Maria-Sama ga Miteru franchise. The first season took a while to get going, while the second dragged on a bit too much in its second half, but this series of OVAs is perfectly paced, making for five excellent double-length episodes.

This season is all about character-development. It’s always been a big part of the Maria-Sama ga Miteru series, and it’s something that just gets better and better here in this season. It advances the characters, and also does wonders in fleshing out how exactly the characters have changed from the beginning of the first season.

While at first sight yet another high school drama, Maria-Sama ga Miteru sets itself apart in so many different ways. The unique drama that results from the fact that it’s a very neat school, so much that even the tiniest misunderstanding can create genuine and powerful drama. The way in which each student chooses her own younger sister gives a unique twist to these characters, and really allows them to get the best character-development possible in such a setting. It’s a series that’s elegant and innocent, and this shines through the third season more than ever. Even though some of the most interesting characters of the first two seasons have left now, the remaining characters picked up the pace perfectly and created their own story. Yumi, while I once criticised her for sticking her nose into everything, has developed into a wonderful character at this point.

The OVA-format also means that there was no budget wasted on broadcasting costs, so the graphics also look better and more consistent than ever. This third season is well paced, with just the right balance between drama, slice of life and character-development. Overall, I’m very impressed.

Storytelling:	9/10 – Excellent balance and pacing that gets the best out of the characters.
Characters:	9/10 – At this point the characters all have some sort of interesting development behind them.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Very solid, as expected of the OVA-format.
Setting:	8/10 – Is set in a high school, yet feels unique.

At first sight, baseball series must all look the same. I too had that same prejudice about the genre before I started watching them. However, what I like about them is that they all have their own things that they’re good at: Touch has its character-development, One Outs has its mind games, Cross Game has its slice of life and Princess Nine has its bombastic and bold execution. Ookiku Furikabutte is the proverbial page-turner: I found myself marathoning through this series, just to see what would happen next.

I’ve often criticized baseball matches for dragging on for too long, but here it’s different: the first season of Ookiku Furikabutte only has two matches, one of which takes up a whopping eleven episodes. Miraculously though, the creators somehow managed to keep it engaging from beginning to end. Out of all the baseball series I’ve seen, this is the one that put the most emphasis on teamwork. It does not have a god-moded pitcher or batter who can single-handedly save games: every single pitch, every single throw or swing is important and could have a major impact on the match.

Because the pitcher inthis series isn’t able to take care of the entire defense by himself, we for once get to see every member of the team in the spotlight, and with his own chances to shine, even the team of the opponent is fleshed out in this way. The baseball matches here are full of tactics that often need to be re-adjusted for every different player, and the creators have really shown that they have a deep knowledge about their subject.

Despite this, I still have a few problems withthe main pitcher, though. It seems to me that the creators tried a bit too hard to make him step away from your average lead character-pitcher that they completely dived into the opposite side of the spectrum. Mihashi is such a loser and socially inept kid that he’s more like some sort of a plot device, rather than an actual character, and I feel that the creators overplayed his strange quirks a bit too much, and that’s a shame because he does get the most ttention in this series. This takes precious time away from the side-characters, that could have been used to develop them.

Overall, A-1 Pictures animated this series also very skillfully: all of the character-designs are distinct and not just carbon copies with just different hair slapped on top of them. Their animation knows when to be smooth and when to cut corners in order to give a good feel of the ongoing baseball match, with the only notable annoyance being the constant facial distortions of Mihashi that get old after a while.

Overall, while I’ve seen more interesting characters in baseball series, I have not seen baseball matches as detailed as outlined here. This is really a series for the baseball fans out there, because this series perfectly captures the essence of how gruelingly long and intense such a match can be. That second season is looking very promising now.

Storytelling:	9/10 – Very well written baseball: every pitch, hit, throw and catch counts.
Characters:	8/10 – Good characterization, but simple characters and an overly quirky lead character.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Solid.
Setting:	9/10 – Very knowledgeable about all sorts of baseball techniques and concepts.

Well, so Inspired by Cobra The Animation, I decided to check out the original Cobra series for some good old-fashioned entertainment. Within that, I found myself slightly disappointed, though. In the end, I like Osamu Dezaku best when he takes himself seriously.

But Cobra himself is still interesting to watch, if only for how over the top this series takes his superpowers. This franchise remains one of shallowness: Cobra never really develops and really only remains interesting because of his personality and how he continues to kick ass even with every odd stacked against him. The people he meets are all pretty shallow, and mostly stay forgettable. But at light entertainment, it’ll keep you interested with its action.

Seriously, this is 1982. For a TV-series, the graphics are very well drawn and animated. There is hardly any distorted frame, and the animation cuts no corners whatsoever. I believe that this series, the founding of Ghibli and Macross (which aired around the same time) started the revolution in anime that lead to significantly improved graphics throughout the eighties.

To illustrate my problems with this series however, I think it’s best to compare it to Cobra the Animation. While similar, there are some essential differences that made me actually enjoy the remake more than the original Cobra series, and it has to do with the focus of these series. They’re both both adventure series: the kind that you watch for their simplicity and unpretentiousness. However, the focus of 1982 Cobra lies on killing bad guys. The focus on Cobra 2010 lies on on exploring: meeting interesting places and people. Sure, Cobra 1982 has some creative settings, and Cobra 2010 also kills a bunch of bad guys, but these take a bit of a backseat to the real focus.

The thing is: 31 episodes of Cobra killing waves and waves of bad guys, often ending in him facing some sort of boss, gets old. With the exception of Crystal Boy, all of the bad guys just look like each other, especially the minor ones. The series does try to bring in some variation here and there, but it’s nowhere near enough to really catch my attention.

The thing with series that feature a godly main character who can never be beaten is that you really need to keep it entertaining to make up for their lack of flaws. The key is often creativity: take One Outs for example: a lot of fun to watch despite its complete lack of depth. And then there also is the Cobra of 2010, which despite its low production values isn’t afraid to insert the craziest ideas that prevent it from being boring. The 1982 Cobra however plays it too safe: there just wasn’t enough creativity in it for my tastes and for every nice idea it had three repeated and recycled ones.

Storytelling:	7/10 – Solid direction, but too safe and repetitive.
Characters:	6/10 – Shallow, to say the least. Especially women and bad guys are just paper bags but Cobra has his charms.
Production-Values:	9/10 – Very detailed animation, decent but unimpressive soundtrack.
Setting:	8/10 – Granted, the backstory of the universe that this show is set in does have its set of surprises.

Remember Night on the Galactic Railroad? It was probably one of the quietest movies you can get. In any case, it was based on a story from Kenji Miyazawa, and back in 2007, it was animated for a second time by a digital artist named Kagaya. I was expecting something with cat people again (something that returns in nearly all of Kenji Miyazawa’s adaptations), but instead I got something much more unique than I thought.

If you looked at the screenshots you might wonder why there aren’t any people on it. That wasn’t because I was in some strange mood when I took them. There really are NO PEOPLE, or any other sort of characters in this OVA. We just have a narrator who reads the story of Kenji Miyazawa, combined with visuals and music. She also does the voices of the lead characters, but they never appear on the screen. All this show is is one huge chunk of atmosphere as we travel through all sorts of locations and constellations.

Don’t worry though. This is really an excellent recommendation if you like visual poetry. What this movie does excellently is combining the narrative, dialogue, visuals and music into one. It’s the perfect movie for if you want to relax for about an hour and dream away, and because of the limited storytelling and how we never get to see the characters, the narrative speaks to your imagination to fill in the omitted parts. It’s such a relaxing, yet thought provoking and imaginative OVA.

Which is really helped by an absolutely beautiful soundtrack. Every second of that soundtrack fits perfectly with the rest of the story and visuals, and it’s been very skillfully composed. The visuals themselves are also utterly gorgeous. Nearly everything is in 3D, and not everything is perfectly and realistically rendered, but nevertheless it’s full of eye candy. This is what I meant with the art of cutting corners in 3D animation, back in my Urban Legend Hikiko Review. Everything that matters is rendered beautifully, and the rest, like realistic water or textures. Ah well, who cares. They don’t prevent the visuals in this movie from being awesome.

Fantasy Railroad of the Star really is an engaging adventure and a beautifully imaginative journey across the Galactic Railroad. It’s obviously not for everyone, and you have to be into this kind of stuff otherwise you’re going to be bored out of your skull, but it’s OVAs like this that start off with a great experimental idea, and actually make it work. It’s a shame that it’s taken three whole years for this thing to get released in the west.

Storytelling:	9/10 – A wonderful combination of dreamy narrative, visuals and audio.
Characters:	8/10 – Um, yeah. We never get to see them, but even though words they were a wonderful lead cast.
Production-Values:	9/10 – Beautiful soundtrack, very imaginative rendered visuals.
Setting:	8/10 – You can see that the creators had an extensive amount of astronomical knowledge.

Okay, so for those who missed it: I am not going to review Fumoffu because I don’t want to sit through a comedy I don’t enjoy. I do want to say a bit about why I didn’t like it, because the comedic moments of The Second Raid also turned me off for the same reason. For me, the creators took Sagara’s antics way over the top. In the first season he was a bright kid, who just had trouble adjusting in normal society. In the subsequent series, the creators try to make use of every light-hearted moment in order for him to do something outrageously stupid, only for Chidori to smack him in an over the top fashion. My biggest problem was that it wasn’t just not funny, but it also turned Sagara into an idiot and this plagues him throughout nearly the entire Second Raid.

As for the rest of this series… I’m really troubled judging it. During the middle part, I was really ready to label this series as superior to the first season. Even though Gonzo’s version of Sousuke was superior, Kyoani added a lot of extra things. The animation was far superior and the visual direction, and the small details within the storytelling were great to watch.

However, as the series drew near its finale, and Sousuke and especially his angst got more and more screentime… something just didn’t work for me. There was so much potential for this storyline and yet the creators waste so much time on Sousuke angsting over and over. It goes up to the point where his angst gets in the way of just about everything, preventing the minor characters from really shining.

And then came the ending. Seriously, what is it with Kyoani and Deus ex Machina endings? I’m trying not to spoil it, but the final episode was poorly built up, tried to do way too much character-development in way too little time, tried to wrap up its patiently built-up storyline way too fast. It felt way too convenient. A huge shame, considering how much potential there was in this series. It would even have been better if the creators just left a few more plotholes open, perhaps for a potential fourth season to address.

So yes. I may be the only one in this, but I actually enjoyed the Gonzo version more. With all the hype that surrounds it, I really expected something more from Kyoani’s version. It was undoubtedly more refined and superior in technical terms, but I just never liked Kyoani’s sense of humour, and this series misses the charms that made me enjoy the first season so much. This mostly is due to Sagara’s “derailment”, but also the villains themselves were surprisingly disappointing: none of them really matched the Gauron of the first season. They were all just too busy with their own quirks to really make an impact on me.

Storytelling:	8/10 – Excellent in technical terms; very creative, but the overall plot fails to make use of this potential.
Characters:	7/10 – Disappointing lead character and villains, though some of the side-characters have their moments of greatness.
Production-Values:	9/10 – Very highly detailed, very smooth animated. No complaints whatsoever.
Setting:	8/10 – Detailed military background forms a pretty solid base for this series to work with.

Yeah, this is it. Macross Plus has without a doubt turned into my favourite installment of the Macross Franchise. Directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, it turned into an amazing character-study of its three lead characters. It’s much less chaotic and whimsical than your average Macross series, and instead it is a very focused story about fully grown adults and the relationship between them.

These three lead characters are the ones who make this series, but what also supports them is a rock-solid sense of storytelling, who knows exactly how to use its airtime to the fullest, giving a great balance between action, drama and build-up. Especially the final episode, in which everything comes together, is an amazing episode that allows the best of these characters to rise.

If I had to mention a flaw, then it’s that some of the side characters just seem… shallow. And I mean that in the way that they only seem to exist or do stuff, for the sake of advancing the plot. Sharon’s executive, for example. His actions had great result, but the guy himself was just a stereotypical evil villain who was evil for the sake of being evil. And while the ending itself is amazing, I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of an actual epilogue to wrap everything up.

For a Macross Series, the animation is perhaps not the most impressive out there, but still very good and fluid, especially considering the year in which this was produced. The animation is very smooth and the artistic direction is also very powerful. The soundtrack is an awesome one as well.

So yeah, now I finally understand why the Macross Franchise is held with such a high regard. The other Macross series I’ve seen had their charms here and there, but for me they mostly stood out through their eye-candy, not their substance. I’d probably rank them in the following way, from least favourite to most:
5). Do You Remember Love? (Lacks the charms of the series it recapped)
4). Macross Zero (Great visual direction but a chaotic story)
3). Macross Frontier (Great middle part but disappointing beginning and finale)
2). Original Macross (Great insight on the Zentradi)
1). Macross Plus (Great character-study and storytelling all around)

Storytelling:	9/10 – Focused and powerful.
Characters:	9/10 – Very well detailed and fleshed out lead characters with an excellent chemistry.
Production-Values:	9/10 – Very smooth animation, great soundtrack.
Setting:	8/10 – Some things exist just to forward the plot, but otherwise a good addition to the Macross Universe.

The Macross Franchise has always been one of eye candy, and Macross Zero does not disappoint in the slightest. As the first Macross of the new Millennium, the graphics are utterly gorgeous. The CG is a bit unrefined at times, but the way it’s animated and contrasts with the background; the huge explosions and vivid and detailed animation. If anything, you should be watching this OVA for its amazing visuals. The audio? Again, beautiful. The best of the Macross franchise that I’ve seen (meaning the Original Macross and Macross Frontier).

But what about the rest of the OVA? Um… yeah.

I think it’s best described as “chaos”. Macross Zero is typical of Shouji Kawamori; both the good parts and the bad parts. The story has some interesting parts; there are a number of interesting characters, but at the same time it just feels so incomplete. I found it very confusing to try and figure out what everyone’s motives and ideals were throughout these five episodes. The creators like to introduce things without any build-up whatsoever and overall the storytelling feels very unbalanced.

As for the characters: I loved native side-characters. It’s just too bad that they hardly got any airtime. The lead characters didn’t impress me too much. The male lead is yet another bland teenager who somehow is authorized to fly a jet fighter. The female lead character is just way too naive. Their whining often gets in the way of the story and especially that female lead just keeps going on and on about her ideals and how you shouldn’t mess with nature and stuff.

I admit that at times she has interesting points about war versus nature, but at others we just see Kawamori taking another chance to shove his enviromentalistic ideals down your throat. On the other side, the main villains are also pretty shallow. There was just nothing that made me interested in them.

So no; as substance, this OVA rather failed. However, as entertainment it more than succeeded, it only because of the beautiful visuals and its amazing visual direction. Especially in the final episode this stands out like no other: the story becomes just ludicrous at that point, but oh, did it look pretty.

Storytelling:	8/10 – The story is poorly balanced, but the visual and technical direction rocks.
Characters:	7/10 – Unappealing teen-aged lead characters whose whining often gets annoying.
Production-Values:	9/10 – CG looks a bit out of place, but other than beautiful.
Setting:	7/10 – Way too little back-story and too preachy at times.