Category: Other:

I’ve been thinking about this series, and how to exactly review it, since Clannad’s after story contained some of the biggest highlights but also some of the biggest lowlights of the season. In the end, though, I decided to be positive about this series. Sure, the ending was terrible, I’m not going to sugarcoat that, but the episodes prior to that were utterly incredible.

Clannad already was a very good series, and its after story pretty much starts out similar, with a number of different arcs that are meant to flesh out the different members of the Clannad cast. Since Clannad already did the main characters, the first half of the After Story focuses more on the side-characters. while nothing amazing, the stories are consistently charming and interesting.

The goodness only really starts with the arrival of the second half, though. It’s here where most of the characters graduate high school and all go their own way, and this is where this series evolves into something completely unique. It’s a bit hard to describe this without any major spoilers, but the result is absolutely heart-wrenching, and yet incredibly realistic. Nearly every side character disappears from the screen in order to follow his or her dream, and we’re just left with the main couple of the series. It’s going to be very hard to find someone who wasn’t extremely positive about the turns that the series took at that point.

But yeah, it unfortunately ends in one of the biggest and most blatant Deus ex Machina endings out there, on the same level as Mai Hime. Whie the game this series is based on contains the explanation of what went on, anyone unfamiliar with the games will feel completely cheated. The series had been quite faithful to the original Visual Novel, but it did try to add in enough extra vits in order to spice up the story and make it more realistic and believable, but those two really did clash in that final episodes. And in the end the biggest flaws of this series is that it’s a bit too keen on pleasing the fans of original visual Novel. The ending just feels out of place, and Tomoyo’s After Story and Kyou’s story (which both got only one special episode) just feel like a big waste of potential. If the creators wanted to include those stories, they should have gone with a Higurashi-styled series: have different arcs focusing on all the important characters, which reset to the beginning at the end, and having each of these arcs deal with various of the side stories seen so far.

So no, I really wasn’t happy with that ending. Still in the end, Clannad has been a fantastic series, just like its predecessor Air. Both have taken the biggest heap of clichés imaginable, and went with such a harem setting to something completely daring and original with excellent and bittersweet results. Unlike Kanon, these two really helped the harem genre evolve, and with a genre that originally lived on seeing who could make the most generic heap of stereotypes, it really needed that.

Well, I finally made myself watch the final episode of this thing. Hoshi no Umi no Amuri, or Amuri in the Star Ocean, is a three episode OVA, fully rendered in 3D CG. What I expected when I started watching was another one of those bad and uninspired fanservice OVAs, without any redeeming value whatsoever. What I got was… well, I’m still not sure what I got exactly, but it was really weird.

Seriously, this entire OVA feels like a really bad acid trip in space. Try to imagine yourself drunk, stoned, in an airless environment and having just lost a significant amount of blood. The hallucinations you can get there are a pretty accurate portrayal of all the bizarre stuff that flies, bounces, blasts and jumps across the screen in this OVA. It really is surreal beyond belief.

But the thing is, that it’s got a cast of really charming characters somehow. The characters in this series have lots of really weird powers, but they all have to do with escapism: the lead characters bounces off everywhere, but this is because she keeps resisting against making contact and friends with other people. Another character constantly flies uncontrollably across the screen like an annoying fly, but that’s because she’s constantly running away from trouble.

Overall, I refuse to give this series a rating, because my rating system just isn’t fit for all the strange stuff that happens in this series. I liked the show, though. It definitely isn’t for everyone, especially those who hate extremely sugary and energetic series will hate this show with passion, but if you’re looking for something utterly bizarre yet charming, then this series is a must-watch.

Mamoru Oshii has become famous for his typical style of very convoluted dialogue. For the Sky Crawlers though, he went into a completely different direction from all of his other works. There are no endless dialogues here, the storyline isn’t really that complex, the action scenes don’t last forever: they’re short and to the point, the character-designs are very simple and down to earth and the pacing throughout the entire movie is very quiet. And yet it works like hell.

Basically, the Sky Crawlers tells the story of a bunch of people who are stationed at a small airbase somewhere in Europe in the middle of some war. The movie’s biggest focus is on its storytelling, because my god, the realism! Amidst the dogfights, there is a huge amount of attention to detail spent on how the characters interact with each other. The characters here really feel much more like regular people than in most other anime. Most of the drama in the movie is kept very subtle and meaningful. And that really is the biggest strength of this movie: it’s two hours long, with a story that could also be done in 20 minutes, but because of the incredibly slow pacing it really was able to show off its characters, their strengths and weaknesses in a very quiet and subtle way.

So yeah, obviously you don’t want to watch The Sky Crawlers if you’re looking for an energetic action-flick, although the action scenes that take place whenever the characters fly their planes definitely look beautiful. The CG is really well done, and integrates really well with the 2D art so that it hardly ever feels out of place.

If I had to mention down-sides of the movie, then there are two things that spring to my mind: first of all, there hardly is any background on the characters. Only the lead characters have some (very good, by the way), but the rest of the characters are all just a bunch of random pilots who happen to be in the same airbase. This of course can also be seen as a good thing: you get to know exactly as much about them if you were to meet them in real life. Of course they have their secrets, but they sure as hell aren’t going to blurt them out to any Tom, Dick or Harry.

The other flaw is most of a personal disappointment of me: there really isn’t that much innovation in this movie. It’s probably something really new for Mamoru himself, but I’ve seen the subtle storytelling done before and better. It’s of course really good for this movie to chose this approach, but I felt I saw nearly every aspect in this movie in another anime already before. Kenji Kawai’s soundtrack also pretty much sounded like all of his other soundtracks, and it didn’t really stand out as anything fresh or new from him.

Still, that definitely doesn’t take away that this is a very solid movie. It’s not Mamoru’s best work, but nevertheless consistently good and enjoyable if you like your drama to be subtle.

I originally dropped Kyoani’s version of Kanon after about ten episodes because the characters got on my nerves way too much. Still, after having been completely surprised at how good Air and Clannad’s After Story turned out, so I just had to finish Kanon at one point. This review is going to contain a few spoilers here and there, but in any case, the thing that immediately struck my mind when I picked it back up: those eyes! It feels like they watch right through you!

In all seriousness, though. The reason that Air and Clannad made such a big impression on me was that they started with the biggest heap of cliches imaginable, played a bit with them, and then went into a totally unique and original direction which blew me away in the end. For Kanon I was anticipating something similar. And it indeed started out with a huge amount of cliches: sick girl, tomboy, silent samurai girl, nice girl, energetic male, cute mother, et cetera. However, at the end of the series, I was still waiting for it to turn into something special.

I think that in the end, this series was trying too hard and ended up forced for me. It tries very hard to be cute: there is Ayu with her Uguu~, Makoto with her Au~, Nayuki with her Unyuu~, Mai with her delayed reactions, but all of this feels forced, and even though there’s more comedy in it than any other key adaptation, none of the jokes really live up to the few scenes that Air devoted to it (all the Uguu~s in the world couldn’t even come close to the awesomeness of the Stegosaurus t-shirt). The same goes with the drama: this series aims to be a huge tear-jerker, though I never cried once. It felt like the series kept clinging too much to its harem roots, which resulted in a few very strange plot twists. Twice, we have Yuuichi come very close to a girl, only to dump her in a hospital and move on to the next one.

Parents have always played a very big role in Key adaptations, but the extremely forceful way that Nayuki’s mother inserts herself into the drama didn’t sit well with me either. It felt like the creators were going “we need more drama! Let’s insert a random car crash!”. And there are a few more of these contrived plot twists that only serve to keep the story on the right track, rather than to get the best out of the characters (for example, it was quite convenient for Mai to suddenly lose her powers, otherwise she would have instantly solved nearly all of the problems in this series). The final episodes also included some deus ex machina that didn’t also sit too right with me.

However, do note that this is all compared to Air and Clannad (a very high standard). For me it feels like if you’ve seen both of those, then Kanon doesn’t have anything new or additional to add. However, when you look at the series as a standalone production, then it definitely has some good points. The air of mystery is very good throughout the series, the slice of life moments are also pretty well done, and Yuuichi is actually a pretty good lead for a harem series like this. Not because he’s a continuous sarcastic wise-cracker (that actually was annoying most of the time), but because he’s a seriously flawed character who already made a lot of mistakes in his life. One of the nice things about this series is seeing him realize what an incredible idiot he has been, and learning from his mistakes.

And yeah, this is a Kyoto Animation series, so the animation is very detailed if you can ignore the often very weird eyes. The character-designs definitely aren’t the most appealing ones out there, but the way they are animated makes up for it. There’s one particular aspect of the designs that I did appreciate, though: the architecture of the school that the characters go to. You can see that either the creators spent some time on designing it, or the creators thoroughly searched for some of the best school architecture out there and made an anime version of it.

Overall, Kanon isn’t bad by far. I liked watching it, but it’s just not that good. There’s nothing outstanding, ground-breaking or awesome about it, but it is definitely a good dark mystery romance series. If you like these sorts of very sad romances, then you’ll like this one, but it’s not going to make you see the light if you hate the genre.

I remember when Zegapain first started, I was really turned off by its first episode, so I dropped it without giving it much of a second chance. In the end, though, this series turned out to be pretty capable. While it starts out like any other series does, with a typical teenager who just lives a normal life and gets to meet a cute girl and pilot a big mecha (like an expert as well), it gradually evolves into a fascinating post-apocalyptic series, successfully degrading human beings in a bunch of computer bits.

This definitely is one of those series that doesn’t play all of its trumps right in the first turn. The whole mecha-fighting indeed does feel like a mere game to the lead character in the beginning, but gradually more and more about the setting of this series gets revealed. It’s basically the Matrix meets anime, though with differences I’m not going to spoil here.

The cast is likable, no character really feels wasted in the end, and overall it’s a pretty solid series, although it doesn’t hit any heights. My only gripe with the series is that the final bad guy hardly has any attention or development at all, and feels a bit shallow because of it. The action-scenes are also very prevalent throughout the series, but they hardly ever form any highlight. This is going to be a short review, because there’s not a lot that you can say about this series. Basically, there are some very nice ideas put into this series, and that’s the biggest reason why you should watch this.

One of the things I like about Gonzo: they take risks. That’s really where the best ideas come from. Sure, they definitely have their screw-ups; but then again: who doesn’t? In any case, another product of Good Gonzo is Saishuu Heiki Kanojo, or Saikano or She: The Ultimate Weapon as it’s known as as well. However, this isn’t just going to be the case where I simply list everything that it does right and just get things over with: like a lot of Gonzo’s series, it has a lot to like, but also a lot to hate about it.

Ultimately, whether or not you’re going to be able to enjoy this series is how much you can stomach teenaged angst, because BOY, do these characters WHINE in this series. On top of that, it loves to pull those plot twists that add extra drama: death, destruction, extravagant love triangles, for this series it can’t get sad enough for the lead couple, and the result is that the characters hardly every stop crying an whining.

I really was expecting a huge tear-jerker when I started watching this series, and I believe that the creators also intended this series to squeeze as many tears out of the viewer as possible, and yet I didn’t cry once, nor felt the inclination to. As a tear-jerker this show lacks subtlety. There’s just too much angst and sadness. This series just keeps bouncing back and forth between love triangles here and war is bad there, and I guess that this format failed to impress me.

Instead, I was sold on this series through completely different things. The characters just feel incredibly genuine. No matter what kind of overly sad plot twists the creators pull, the characters act believable and charming. The dialogue is consistently of a very high quality, and especially the voice acting made a lot of impact on me.

In fact, this series would have worked for me even if the lead female character, who is an ultimate destructive weapon that can wipe out entire cities at once, had been completely removed. What this series excels at is portraying how a huge war affects ordinary people, and how their lives are majorly impacted by it. The quiet moments in this series are so much more memorable than the obvious sad tear-jerker moments when the umpth character kicks the bucket.

In the end though, I can’t call anything about this series truly bad or flawed. Sure, the romance had its annoying moments, but for each annoying point it also had more than enough charming ones. Sure, the setting is overly sad, but I’m not going to deny that it made impact. In the end, the creators managed to create a provocative and hard-hitting series, that may not be perfect, nor hits any heights, but has enough that makes it worth watching.