Category: Anime Reviews

Argento Soma Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Argento Soma is one of the post-Evangelion series. Like series as Betterman, Reideen and Dai Guard, and even awesome series as Figure 17 and Bokura no, it features a series of smart and very hard to destroy monsters that need to be destroyed, and the lead characters have some sort of huge mecha that can do the job. There’s a lot of potential for this kind of formula and granted, Argento Soma isn’t the best of the bunch, but it’s a fine attempt nonetheless.

Argento Soma chooses for a slow-paced approach with some subtle angst, and I must say that it works quite nicely. For once we don’t have any teenagers piloting the giant mechas, but instead we have a team of people well in their twenties. In fact, there is only one child in the story, and with her it’s made clear over and over that she actually doesn’t belong in the military. Central to the story, and the definite highlight, is the relationship between the two lead characters: the young girl and one of the main pilots that is to fight the evil “aliens”, as they’re called in this series. They’re both heavily traumatized and scarred by things that happened in the past and through the series they help each other growing over their troubles.

A major theme in this series is also symbolism. There are two particular characters who have a habit of comparing the situation they’re in to either random anecdotes or figures of speeches. This show also has a nice little pattern with its episode titles, which are all emphasized at the end of each episodes. In some cases the symbolism is a bit silly, but most of the times it works pretty nicely.

You don’t want to watch this series for the battles, which more often than not take just a back-seat to other things. Central to this series is its cast of characters, which develops nicely throughout the series. There are a lot of episodes that don’t have anything to do with fighting, but instead focus on other things, like one episode is fully dedicated to politics (a very well done episode, by the way), and there are quite a few episodes dedicated to character-development. The battles themselves quickly turn repetitive though. There are also a few random plot-holes that pop up near the ending, and I also think that Soma’s voice actor isn’t fully able to make his character believable once he starts angsting. The villains in this series are also very stereotypical and really lack any sort of impact.

This series does stand out in its soundtrack and character-designs: both give this show a unique feeling. Overall though, this series could have done with a bit more ambition. It never really reaches any heights: the story is very simple if you start to see the bigger picture, and the characters themselves do feel like they could have been fleshed out a bit more, but that too has its charms: it’s not trying to become the best thing since sliced bread, but instead just puts down an enjoyable little series with a bit of depth, yet doesn’t hit heights and at that, it succeeds.

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 8/10

Genius Party – 05 – Limit Cycle Review – 72,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Genius Party gathers many different people with many different talents to create shorts. With Limit Cycle, this is monologues. It’s basically 20 minutes of monologue about religious and philosophical topics. Its director is Hideki Futamura, who isn’t really a big name. He worked on a bunch of the Animatrix shorts, did key animation for movies as Junkers Come Here, Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust and Perfect Blue, and he directed Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. He’s definitely someone with talent, and here he finally gets to prove again what he can do.

In these twenty minutes of nothing but talking however, he makes the classic mistake that you can do with these kinds of shorts: he forgets to put anything into context. What we have right now is some random guy who rambles on about life, death, immortality, religion, et cetera. I just had one question on my mind, though: “what’s the point?” Why is this guy delving into philosophy? What does he want to achieve?

You see, the thing is that right now you have a string of dialogue of a level that even I could have come up with. Just give me enough time to quote a bunch of famous philosophers who talked about life, immortality and religion, and voila! This isn’t intelligent, this is just plain random. I think that what the director should have done is that he should have looked more at good examples, in which endless strings of dialogues and monologues do work. Most notably, if he watched Mamoru Oshii’s short on Twillight Q, or Mouryou no Hako, he would have gotten a good idea of what he needed to do to put some meaning behind these words. And give them impact.

Still, a complete waste of time this isn’t, because thankfully the visuals are utterly gorgeous. Along with Dimension Bomb, Limit Cycle definitely has the best aesthetics of all the shorts of Genius Party, and that has to say something. The compositions, character-designs, use of colours, and filters, all come together wonderfully along with great character-designs. If anything, the images were much more thought-provoking than the dialogue!

Anyway, to wrap up Genius Party: it really was a great opportunity to see so many different talents and styles, together in one package. These compilation movies of different short stories have been there before, but never in this scale, with so many different movies and I can only hope that Studio 4C (or any other studio for that matter) is going to continue making more of these, because I really enjoyed sitting through even the lesser ones.

As for my favourite ones, my top three consists of Dimension Bomb, Toujin Kit and Baby Blue. These three are definite works of art and really succeeded in what they set out to do. The other shorts also all have their own merits in their own single way.

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 6/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 7/10

Ashita no Nadja Review – 90/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



“Nadja Applefield grows up in an orphanage, but on her thirteenth birthday she finds out that her mother is still alive, and possibly even a noble. Thus she joins a band of travelling performers and travels all across Europe to find her.” That doesn’t exactly sound like a top-tier shoujo series, now does it? Ashita no Nadja indeed takes the format of a classic shoujo adventure, and makes it downright awesome. I am really surprised with how actually GOOD this series turned out to be.

I originally decided to check out this series on recommendations of Wyrdwad, but I put it on hold around episode 23, discouraged by how the final 13 episodes haven’t been subbed yet. My impression of this series at that point was a fun adventure series across Europe. It’s a fun watch, in which Nadja meets all sorts of interesting people who get the chance to tell their story. Most episodes are light in nature and a lot of fun to watch. It wasn’t anything special at that point, it was episodic, but the individual stories all have their individual charms.

Anyway, eventually I got too impatient and just finished the rest of the series raw (so yeah, don’t bother asking for subs of the final 13 episodes: they’re unfortunately not there yet, but they SO deserve to be!), and with that I was blown away completely by the strength, GUTS and charms of the main storyline of this series. I was so expecting your average cheesy shoujo storyline with stereotypically incompetent villains and a lot of time spent on the lead characters being incredibly indecisive. None of that returns here: instead we get a story where always something interesting is going on and where characters manage to show their utter best in terms of character-development.

And the villains! This series really has some of the best villains out there, who are nothing like your average bunch of incompetent idiots who can never get anything right. The main villains for this series all are a bunch of excellent actors: they’ve created a scenario in their head and stick to it, and time and time again they manage to foil the lead characters’ plans and happiness (which usually is the other way around!). Eventually, this series evolves into a battle of wits and emotions between Nadja and the main villains, which involves an intricate plan that looks simple (and isn’t of the ridiculously complicated variant like you see in shows as Death Note), yet incredibly hard to find any holes in it.

This series seriously has a bunch of incredible script-writers, who have the talent to make a solid and engaging story of just about everything. As an episodic series, I often found myself doubting whether an episode was going to turn out all-right based on its premise, especially around the middle parts of the series. However, nearly every single episode delivered with solid build-up, excellent characterization and a conclusion that felt intelligent, believable and yet pushed the characters further in terms of character-development. Even the small side-characters who only appear in one episode have multiple sides to them and feel fresh.

With all these praises I’m singing for this series, I unfortunately also have to admit that it has a flaw, and a really big one at that. Wherever Nadja travels in Europe, wherever she goes, she always meets up with the right people. Even though European cities are incredibly big, she always meets up with recurring characters if they happen to be in the neighbourhood, she also conveniently runs into a bunch of nobles that she immediately befriends, (including one of them that becomes her love interest).

This really happens a lot, throughout the entire series. Still, I guess that the creators had good intentions when they used them: they don’t use these plot-holes just for cheap laughs, but instead to allow characters to tell their story, to allow for more and better character-development so that we as an audience get to know more about the cast. There only was one plot twist in the series that really felt cheap and rushed. Apart from that they can all be forgiven. Still, they can become a major reason for some people to get turned off by the rest of the storyline. It all depends on your suspense of disbelief. For me, I indeed acknowledge that these sorts of coincidences are a bit lazy and convenient, but the rest of the series is just so damn good that I really stopped caring about them at one point.

Overall, this series was in a way just like Glass Mask 2005 and Kaleido Star for me: all three are 50 episoded Shoujo Series of Awesomeness. They all stand out in their amazing characterization and rivalry that goes waaaay beyond what you normally expect from anime. All of them are very well paced and truly excellent in the thing they do, with a storyline that just keeps evolving and time and time again they come with unexpected situations. They all involve performing (Maya acts, Sora does acrobatics, Nadja dances) and all three of them try to reach the hearts of their audience by performing, all in their own way. All three series are highly underrated (with two of them not even fully subbed, for God’s sake), but perhaps the most important thing: all three of them have the power to reach an audience beyond the usual shoujo fans, and are a true example of the great things that the genre is capable of. Of the three, Ashita no Nadja is the most light-hearted one, but make no mistake that the story cannot get really dark at times, and the light and dark parts combine wonderfully.

Storytelling: 9/10
Characters: 10/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 9/10

Genius Party – 03 – Deathtic 4 Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Most of Genius Party’s animation is hand drawn or animated with cells. Deathtic 4 instead is nearly entirely CG, and feels the most like a platform to try out new CGI techniques. On top of that, the characters are all zombies and talk in some strange kind of Scandinavian-ish language that nobody can understand. The director is Shinji Kimura, a guy who mostly is involved with background art for big hitting movies as Akira, Angel’s Egg, My Neighbor Totoro, Steam Boy, Tekkkon Kinkreet and Prime Rose, and he also took care of the art of the first short of the Gotham Knight movie.

So as expected, the background art is very good. I didn’t notice it at first, but the he designed a very original city that at the same time doesn’t distract from the real art in the foreground. You can see that a lot of time went in designing every single building. On the opposite side though, the story and characters feel among the dullest of what Genius Party has to offer. It’s straightforward, there’s no real symbolism or depth to the story. It just feels flat.

But this is really the power of Genius Party: because it has directors with so many different backgrounds, there’s lots of stuff that you can see. Baby Blue had a director who is excellent at characterization, and so that short had the best characters. Instead shorts like this one, Toujin Kit and Wanwa the Doggy that are directed by animators and background artists have a very distinctive visual style instead. This is why I’m a fan of these compilation movies, and I can only hope that in the future, more of them are going to be released.

On a side-note, anyone know what happened to Le Manchot melomane?

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 7/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 8/10

Genius Party – 10 – Wanwa the Doggy Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Well… what can I say…?

Wanwa the Doggy is… different. It’s… I’m still not sure what it is; all I know that it was really, really weird. The one who brought us this abomination was Shinwa Ohira, an animator. He worked on the animation of various big-hitting movies, but also on stuff like FLCL, Gosenzosama Banbanzai, Gundam and a few television series here and there. But none of it really matches up in terms of weirdness to… whatever the hell it was that I just watched.

The best way to describe these thirteen minutes are as a very bad acid trip. Shinwa Ohira just continues to throw weird stuff at the screen throughout the entire 13 minutes of this short, one scene more nonsensical than the other. I guess that it was about a kid’s worries as his mother is having a baby, but even children don’t have that kind of imagination.

The animation was as good as usual : there was a lot of movement, and you can see that the creators used lots of imagination for nearly all of the visuals here. Just don’t ask where the hell this inspiration came from…

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 7/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 7/10

Genius Party – 11 – Toujin Kit Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



While there are other quiet shorts in Genius Party, Toujin Kit definitely feels to be the most down-to-earth no-nonsense movie of the bunch. At the end of the thirteen minutes, there is no doubt what the story is about: there’s hardly any deep symbolism, there is no over top action, and instead Toujin Kit is what it is, and because of this it definitely has its merits.

The director for this one is Tatsuyuki Tanaka, who is one of the lesser known names to participate in Genius Party. He’s one of Studio 4C’s key animators, and also worked on a few random other series. In Toujin Kit however, he definitely demonstrates that he belongs among the big guys. I remember Anonymous’s comments on the animation of Eden of the East versus Dimension Bomb, and after Toujin Kit I’m really starting to understand what he meant. Because of the attention to detail in today’s animation, animators are forced to cut a lot of corners in animation.

Toujin Kit has none of this: here characters are animated: they move realistically, and hardly ever stand completely still. The frame-rate is incredibly smooth, and the rest of this short is on purpose kept very simple and down to earth, in order to not have any cheap distractions from the animation. In fact, there isn’t even a soundtrack: just some background noises.

The characters and story however aren’t dull in any way either. Because they’re so well animated, they’re easy to connect to and well likable, despite the fact that none of them are really nice people. Some of their motivations are well explained, the others are easy to guess or imagine and together they form a very complete little story.

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 8/10

Genius Party – 09 – Moondrive Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Moondrive is the oddball of Genius Party. It’s a full fledged comedy, much more than Shanghai Dragon was. It is really silly, and I got a great laugh out of it. The director of this one is a genius of aesthetics: Kazuto Nakazawa, who people may remember as the director of Comedy, one of the biggest visual masterpieces of the past decade. He also did the key animation for the OP of Ergo Proxy and the second OP of Blood+, the character-designs for Ashita no Nadja and was the animation director of Samurai Champloo. This is one guy who knows how to make things look good.

And it shows in Moondrive as well. The visuals in these fifteen minutes were absolutely fantastic. Don’t expect anything like what you saw in Comedy, but instead this time he went for a dark and gritty setting set on top of the moon. The character-designs are full of style and incredibly imaginative, and the animation is incredibly quirky: it knows exactly how to capture the comedic tone of this series, it’s quirkish and made to make you laugh at the black humour of this short movie.

So yeah, in terms of story and symbolism this short doesn’t match up to the other parts in Genius Party and a few of the jokes are rather predictable or repetitive, but the rest of the jokes and quirky characters really make up for it. This is another reason why I’m such a big fan of these collection of short stories: you’ll never know what’s going to turn up next, and you’ll never know when a short is going to make you roll on the floor laughing.

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 7/10

Genius Party – 08 – Gala Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Yeah, don’t mind about the order of these posts. I found out a bit too late about the real order of the shorts, so I’ll just label them accordingly and review the individual movies alphabetically… for as far as it’s possible. Gala was done by Mahiro Maida, the guy who founded Gonzo. This guy is basically a jack of all trades in the anime business: he animates, directs, designs, produces, draws mecha, writes screenplay, he’s tried out all sorts of stuff. The series he directed are also have no similarities at all, and range from incredibly bad (Final Fantasy Unlimited) to incredibly good (Gankutsuou, The Second Renaissance).

Yeah, that’s pretty much Studio Gonzo in a nutshell. ^^;

Anyway, Gala again is a great little movie of fifteen minutes long. It’s about a strange village with all kinds of weird and uniquely designed people living in it, where suddenly a giant seed drops from nowhere. First they want to destroy it, but gradually their attempts to destroy it turn into something completely different. For what happens next is something that you’re going to have to find out by watching it, but I’ll just say that there is a lot of symbolism in it, and leads up to a very good conclusion.

Music also plays a very big part in these fifteen minutes, but my one complaint is that the soundtrack nearly totally overshadows the music that’s played by the characters themselves. And don’t get me wrong, it really is a wonderful soundtrack, but this is a pitfall very common for anime, as it simply isn’t able to properly synchronize such complex moves as playing an instrument. Even a movie budget doesn’t turn out to be enough to get it right.

Storytelling: 9/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 8/10

Genius Party – 12 – Dimension Bomb Review – 85/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Sorry for the lateness, but I’m finally ready to review the second batch of Genius Party shorts. Dimension Bomb features an all-star cast: it’s directed by Koji Morimoto, animated by Jamie Vickers and voiced by Yoko Kanno. Now, if this isn’t a recipe for success, then I don’t know anymore. And indeed, Dimension Bomb is by far the best short of Genius Party I’ve seen so far. And also the weirdest one.

Dimension Bomb is a visual masterpiece. Not in the way that there’s an extreme amount of detail in everything like in Eden of the East, but instead it’s like every single shot kicks ass: every single scene speaks to your imagination and is visually stunning and creative. The character-designs are amazing, and just about everything is a gorgeous visual feast. The characters are incredibly expressive and just about everything in the art is made to provoke a reaction from the audience.

Don’t expect the story to make a lot of sense, though. There is a general storyline, but without looking it up you’re going to have no idea what the heck is going on in this short, and instead the stuff that happens is open to all sorts of interpretations, depending on whoever watches it. Dimension bomb makes excellent use of its limited time by not just showing a story from A to B, but instead it tells a vague story with lots of symbolism. In order to like this one, you’re obviously going to have to like experimental animation and storytelling, otherwise you’ll feel incredibly lost.

It’s because of things like this that I keep saying that Studio 4C should make another full-length television series (one that takes itself seriously, not a silly one like DMC). If they do, it’s going to be an incredible amount of kickassness. I’m not sure if that’s a word, but it should be.

Storytelling: 9/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 8/10

Kawa no Hikari Review – 75/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Here’s a new TV-special that aired recently: Kawa no Hikari, or the light of the river. It’s not your average anime, because it tells the story about a bunch of rats who have to leave their old home because it’s destroyed by construction workers. With series as this, a major pitfall is to become all preachy and simply let it boil down to “save these poor rats from evil humans”, but thankfully this anime manages to avoid it. Instead, it’s here to bring awareness and break stereotypes. It’s still a shallow series, but it could have become much worse.

This definitely is a series for kids. If you show this to some young children of around six years old, they’re going to love it; it makes them aware of the environment without becoming all preachy, and also teaches them to think before placing judgement on someone. That part is very nicely done, but in the end it still just provides an overly simplistic view of the matter; the series is simply too short for any real depth and the themes just aren’t fleshed out well enough. The result is that another way this show can be interpreted as the following: all sewer rats are evil. Except for one perhaps who happens to be nice. All cats are evil. Oh, but there happens to be one who doesn’t like to eat mice and therefore treats the characters nicely. Oh, and all field rats are bastards too, but the lead characters happen to be nice ones. Feels kind-of elitist, don’t you think?

Aside from the environmentalist parts, Kawa no Hikari is also an adventure story. This part of the series is flawed, but engaging. The way the creators keep toying with these fragile lives of the three lead characters as they battle sewers, floods, angry sewer rats, cars and a lot more is bound to catch your attention. Despite this TV-special’s flaws, the lead characters are engaging and sympathetic, and they make you want to see the endings. Unfortunately, some of the action scenes are completely unnecessary: they’re just there for the sake of including some excitement. Near the ending the action also gets harder and harder to buy (especially that bus scene) and the ending itself really feels like a total cop-out and in no way satisfying. Overall though, this TV-special is nothing to write home about, but still nice enough if you need something simple and innocent.

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 7/10