Fall 2021 Summary – Week 5

Wooper: Just me again this week. Our State of the Season post will replace this column next Tuesday, and it’s looking like a heated one – lots of conflicting opinions on the fall’s anime so far. I’ll be back on the 23rd with impressions of one or two new things, hopefully with a friend or two in tow.

PokeToon – 6-7

PokeToon is an anthology project consisting of short pieces set within different regions in the Pokemon universe. There’s tremendous variety between each episode’s art and animation styles, which is the sort of thing I love – all the more so when the perennially underrated Studio Colorido is involved. Their work on last year’s Twilight Wings established them as the go-to group for vignettes in this world, and they’ve only improved their batting average here, handling four of PokeToon’s seven episodes thus far. That includes episode 6, an adorably spooky tale about a girl who turns into a Gengar while exploring her school after dark. I found the story’s climax to be genuinely suspenseful, and then surprisingly emotional once the tension had been resolved, thanks to the age-old ‘character steps from darkness into light’ trick (bolstered by Colorido’s standout lighting, which is second only to KyoAni’s). Here’s a link to [I Became a Gengar?!] as part of a playlist with the earlier episodes. Be advised that it doesn’t contain the most recent one, a less impactful but still attractive story about a trio of boys who rescue an abandoned Snorunt. Its shorter runtime and limited animation make it one of the series’ minor offerings, but its art design, which borrows from felt and paper cutout animation, is worth seeking out if you like those styles.

Komi-san wa, Komyushou desu – 3

I’ve waited for the [NovaWorks] release of this episode for two weeks now, but sometimes the need for blogging material eclipses my patience for fansubs. Watching the official version and seeing all the untranslated textboxes did dampen the show’s comedic timing, but I’m still pretty happy with what we got here. Komi-san moved away from its two-part structure in this episode and adapted a bunch of chapters in isolation, which is probably the right move given the manga’s shorter format. As a result, we weren’t locked in with the off-putting new character (who looks like a genderbent Deku with glasses) for too long, jumping from story to story at the episode director’s whim. One thing that stayed consistent across each chapter, and the whole series thus far, is people’s comical adulation of Komi: fainting, weeping, basking in her glory. Meanwhile she’s freaking out about accidentally calling a friend on her first-ever cell phone with an intensity that would surely baffle her admirers. I like the inherent contradiction of the school’s least socially capable student being its madonna – Komi-san is different than 2019’s Hitoribocchi no Seikatsu in that way, but both shows tackle social anxiety in humorous fashion, which probably serves as a lifeline for a lot of isolated Japanese teens. I can’t say it fulfills the same function for me, but it’s a fun weekly distraction (or monthly, depending on when the good subs drop).

Star Wars: Visions – 4

“The Village Bride” plays out much the same way that Visions’ premiere did – a wandering lightsaber user drifts into a remote village, saves its population from peril, and drifts out. (This time it’s a Jedi rather than a Sith, although her black and blue outfit creates some nice ambiguity regarding her background.) What makes this episode different from “The Duel” is almost everything else, including the score by composer Kevin Penkin, whose five year relationship with Kinema Citrus is still going strong. Man’s relationship to nature was a big theme here, as the story took place on a sentient planet, so the mysticism of Penkin’s arrangements was a big plus. Though the climax of the episode involved some measure of combat, the focus was on mastery of the Force (enabled by the protagonist’s connection to the natural world) rather than fight choreography – it was reminiscent of the original trilogy in that sense. My only criticism of “The Village Bride” lies with the simplicity of its character designs, or more specifically, that the animation didn’t push the envelope given their simplicity. Scenes of characters climbing rock formations or gesturing during heated dialogue fell short of my expectations – but hey, that didn’t stop this from being my favorite Visions episode yet.