Fall 2021 Summary – Week 4

Wooper: It’s a solo recap post for your boy this week, which I’m fearing may happen more than once this season (despite my practice of pestering my co-writers). I’m trying to give my impressions on at least one unique anime each week, so titles like PokeToon, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, Super Crooks, and Aggretsuko S4 will likely appear in this column as the fall season stretches on. Even if there’s something new to talk about every Tuesday, though, it helps to have some-one new to talk with me. Know what I’m saying, fellow authors?

Deji Meets Girl – 1-5

There are dozens of full-length anime series, particularly comedies, whose airy senses of humor would work better in short form. On the other hand, most shorts wouldn’t benefit from longer runtimes, as their premises are bite-sized to begin with. Deji Meets Girl is a notable exception to that second rule, because it’s trying to build a legitimate relationship between its main characters – an Okinawan part-time worker and a teen idol on vacation – but it keeps running up against the restrictions of its format. It’s unfortunate that this clash keeps occurring, because I like a lot of things about this show. The thick linework grounds the characters in reality even as they experience supernatural happenings (plus it reminds me of Gal & Dino, which I love to the moon and back). The animation is strong (especially in the premiere), the color palette shifts to match the new phenomena introduced in each episode, and all the teasing in the script is executed in good fun. At just 90 seconds per episode, though, it’s too chopped up to build anything substantial between its two leads. That’s too bad, because if Deji had gotten five minutes to work with each week, it could have fought for a spot on my year-end list.

Star Wars: Visions – 3

It’s a good thing Lucasfilm gave Trigger two cracks at the whole Star Wars thing, because this first attempt was all lightsabers and no brains. All the dialogue was either expository or moralistic, and the visuals leaned so heavily on franchise iconography that there was no room for original thought anywhere in these 16 minutes. Star Destroyers, Vader-esque helmets, towering generator columns, X-Wings, Tatooine’s double sunset, the list goes on and on. Even the twin theme was already covered by the original trilogy, so really all “The Twins” had going for it was the combat, which was thankfully quite flashy. It’s cool that Imaishi paired up with Shigeto Koyama again to create Promare 2.0; I’m guessing the upcoming Cyberpunk anime will run on the same engine, since it must have taken ages to develop. Here it was used to give power to R-DUO’s X-Wing, manipulate Am’s whip-like lightsabers, and sweep around her and Karre during their duel. Cool stuff, but the finish earned an eyeroll from me – cutting through a Star Destroyer by slicing it with a lightsaber while warping through space? It’s the kind of conclusion created to mask a lack of original ideas, and while some might argue that wasn’t the goal of this anthology, I’d say fiction calls for innovation in nearly every situation, this one included.

Kyuuketsuki Sugu Shinu – 2-3

Kyuuketsuki already has five episodes out, but I only watched the second and third this week, mostly to see whether my initial assessment of the show was on the money. The show does subsist on repetitive gags, so that part was accurate enough – a threatening editor here, a tsundere policewoman there, and a flamboyant vampire hunter for good measure. (Side note: the trend of manga artists writing their editors into their work as menacing fantasy versions of themselves is fundamentally lazy, but my unfamiliarity with the manga industry makes it more amusing than it should be.) Loud and one-note though the series may be, though, I do like a lot of the visual choices. The simple, bright colors make the frequent lighting changes all the more striking, whether it be a representation of someone’s panicked mindset or the result of an actual lightning flash. I also dig the synergy between the character and background designs, the latter of which use the simplest of shading techniques to enliven offices and bars that would otherwise feel artificial. I wouldn’t say the show does a lot with a little, but it certainly does enough to hold my attention from chapter to chapter, even if one of them is a bust. I kind of doubt I’ll watch the whole series, but it’s not the dead fish I’d predicted it would be after three episodes.