Winter 2021 First Impressions: Back Arrow, Kumo desu ga, Nani ka?, Tenchi Souzou Design-bu

Back Arrow

Short Synopsis: A ripped nudist emerges from an extraterrestrial capsule and transforms into a gooey robot to defend an old west town.

Wooper: It takes a special kind of trust in your show to base its name on a pun (Back Arrow is a mishearing of the Japanese word for idiot, “bakayarou”). It’s a fitting title, since the whole thing is pretty stupid. It’s the special kind of stupid that anime does rather well, though, where an unwieldy blend of styles and story elements is carried by confident presentation and in-your-face characters. Back Arrow is a dead ringer for the less operatic Gundam series in that way – Turn A especially, given its use of both terrestrial and cosmic motifs. The gaggle of troublemaking children (who double as cheerleaders for the main character) are highly reminiscent of Gundam, as well, only they’re animated with considerably more skill than most entries in that franchise ever managed. As a matter of fact, this whole premiere looked pretty nice. Back Arrow’s “world within a wall” setting doesn’t intrigue me, exactly, but it does feature a lot of pretty geography, with treacherous cliffs and cascading waterfalls giving it a real sense of place. The featureless CG mechs sucked, but pretty much everything else had me entertained – I’ll give this one at least two more episodes.

Potential: 65%

Lenlo: What the fuck did I just watch. Like, I get it, it’s the same guy who made Promare and BNA, wrote Kill la Kill and the Gurren Lagann movie, but what is this? Is he just recycling ideas? Going crazy? I’m really not sure. Because we have a male Ryuko, TTGL’s giant robots, cowboys, techno samurai and… a wall. I honestly have no idea how to even rate this show because after BNA this could easily be a trash fire, but after Promare it could maybe be good. I think the only answer is to uh… watch another and see what happens?

Potential: ???

Kumo desu ga, Nani ka?

Short Synopsis: Most of a class gets reincarnated as rich people. One unlucky girl is reincarnated as a spider.

Amun: First things first – I’m not a fan of 3DCG. I get that it’s necessary – hand animating this show would be insane. Particularly the frog venom fight was fully rendered and stood out – in a bad way. Other than that, Spider-isekai exceeded all expectations. My goodness, the spider character (currently unnamed) is dynamic, well animated, and weirdly cute. It’s strangely impressive that this show can use a spider as such an expressive canvas. I’m also not one to normally comment on VAs, but unnamed spider-chan’s is on point. Nice work Aoi Yuuki! There’s some other plot around reincarnated class members (and the obligatory guy in a girl’s body – that felt a bit forced, to be honest), but the star of this show is clearly our darling spider.

Potential: 90%

Wooper: Ordinary anime series tend to put a lot of effort into their first episodes in an attempt to ensnare potential viewers. KumoDesu is not an ordinary anime, though – it’s an amateurishly directed botch job from none other than Shin Itagaki, the man behind Berserk 2016. That fact will be sufficient cause for most of you to stay away, but for you lucky few whose eyes were never scorched by that show’s repulsiveness, I’ll elaborate on this new spider show’s failings. For one thing, the main character is rendered in unconvincing CG ninety percent of the time, and hardly seems to make contact with the ground whenever she’s shown crawling. The Arifureta-esque starting cave is totally computer generated, as well, so Itagaki can wreck his own show with the pointless camera revolutions and extreme closeups for which he is now infamous. The self-aware dialogue about light novels made me wish that the poison-spewing frog from the show was real so that it could shoot acid into my eardrums. The only thing I didn’t hate was Aoi Yuuki wailing, “Oh, Jesus!” after witnessing her new arachnid siblings cannibalizing another spider. In short, it’s shit.

Potential: 5% (solely for the absurd ED)

Tenchi Souzou Design-bu

Short Synopsis: A new member joins the design team that handles God’s outsourced animal designs.

Lenlo: This is weird. I really expected to dislike this series to find it boring and yet… I was engaged. By Edutainment. I really enjoyed the comedic, yet informative nature of this show. How they worked through possible evolutions/designs of animals, explored different ideas such as with the birds, and ultimately saw how they played out. Or how they explained why Pegasus won’t work, or eventually landed on Giraffes. It was really interesting and the real life animal segments worked surprisingly well. Each of the main team members seem to have actual personalities and tastes/preferences with their work/animals as well. I don’t think this is going to be an Anime of the Season contender and I have no idea if it will actually be able to keep this up long. But as far as first episodes go, I actually really enjoyed it. It’s weird yo.

Potential: 75%

Amun: Heaven’s Design Team’s first episode landed at the top end of my expectations. We’ve seen this format a couple times now – this is basically the professional version of Seton Academy (complete with the explanation cuts on actual animals). Where Heaven’s Design Team gains better marks is the lack of perversion or furry bait – plus better focus on story and characters. The animation is pretty dull, but we expected that going in – this isn’t the highest budget show from the season. I’m curious if we keep the episodic nature or if an overarching story will occur – if I had to guess, the final project will be humans. The interactions between team members, the various revisions, and failed prototypes resonate true for anyone who has ever been involved in product design. I’m sure the cast will expand to include other professional supporting roles. All in all, there’s definitely space in this story to be good. Probably not great, but definitely good.

Potential: 75%