Cencoroll Review – 82,5/100

Anime Innovation Tokyo is a project meant to sponsor young and talented creators in creating something new and innovative. These people often have great ideas, but lack the budget and experience to really put these into practice, and that’s where this project helps them out with. I really like this idea, and therefore I’ll gladly promote their efforts. Cencoroll is the first project of theirs to be completed.

Cencoroll mostly stands out with its animation and storytelling. Regarding the former, you can see that the creators have gotten themselves a nice budget, but a limited one nonehteless. They make up for it with really good keyframes though: they’re very expressive, and well drawn, and a lot of time went into each frame.

I also like how down to earth the characters remain: despite that this is an action-series, none of the emotions of the characters are ever cheesy or overdone. In fact, the lead character is as nonchalant as you can realistically get. The storytelling also has a little bit of wit inside of it, when some plot twists aren’t explained and the writers assume that the viewers themselves are able to figure out that A + B equals C, which is something I appreciate.

The question however is: is this movie truly innovative? To that question, my answer is no. I wouldn´t exactly label this series as unique. However, it does have a “screw conventions we´re going to do it our way!”-mindset, and that’s the thing that counts: you can really see that the creators wanted to be innovative, and this is actually a great start for Anime Innovation Tokyo, as they come up with a concept that will generally be very well liked, andnot just be popular amongst the arthouse fans, while at the same time they put in a few neat ideas. I’m hoping that the future projects are going to be a bit more daring in trying out really new things, but it’s a great start nonetheless.