Hourou Musuko – 09

by psgels, posted in Hourou Musuko



The drama in this episode was just utterly brilliant. It’s where everything comes together, the build-up is really paying off and the characters start to change even more. Doi turned out to be a wonderful addition to the cast here.

This was a terrific example of the heights that subtle drama can reach. The entire episode was quiet, but so much was going on. The red thread was Nitori doing the impossible and coming to school in his girl outfit, being nudged by Doi in order to do this. It brilliantly made use of his insecurities as a girl in a guy’s body. It all culminated wonderfully until the climax of this episode.

Now, there still is the matter of that ending. This is a manga adaptation after all and I still haven’t forgotten the cheap way in which Kuragehime ended its run, but if that ending is good then this really is an excellent experiment of Noitamina to try and focus on series with a different group of lead characters (unlike Fractale for example). Noitamina is a very double-edged sword, but those who understand its limits (like the creators of this series seem to do) can use it to air some of the most wonderful series.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Fractale – 09

by psgels, posted in Fractale



It’s about bloody time, but Clain was finally bearable to watch in this episode. Yay for character-development!

Seriously though, this was a build-up episode for the finale of this series (there are only two episodes left, after all), but for once he doesn’t spend his time whining but he actually pushes the plot forward. A large part of this episode was about building up the tensions between the Lost Millennium and the Fractale system, which eventually came down to Clain, Phryne and Nessa being left behind. It was a moment in which the massacres of the early episodes came to bite the Lost Milennium in their behind and they finally decided to uninvolve themselves with the innocent Clain and his companions. It was a bit of a melancholic episode.

Naturally Phryne immediately goes back to the Fractale system in order to do whatever with her father, but even there Clain actually stood up and did something immediately. Overall this was a quiet but intense episode and I’m really glad to see that the creators managed to pick themselves back up here.

So yeah, Fractale does not belong in Noitamina. It’s just too rushed and unbalanced, and even two extra episodes would have been excellent to give a bit more depth to the story, but ideally this should have had 22 episodes. Right now this show tries to do a lot of things, but they don’t mesh well. I like how they ended up using the Fractale system in a completely different way than you’d first expect, but in the end it just got too little airtime. The concept of taking away touch from humans: that is actually a pretty original backstory, but when the analysis of this doesn’t really go beyond pervert jokes, you just have to feel that something is missing.

Of course, the good point about this is that this allows the viewers to form their own conclusion. This show basically is your standard adventure story that has the cast walking around this original and thought-provoking plot device. Whether that’s going to be enough, though…. that’s going to depend on that finale.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Aim for the Top: Gunbuster Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Okay, so I ended up liking Gunbuster for a whole different reason than I thought I would. From one of Hideaki Anno’s earliest works, I expected this fun homage OVA to the giant robot genre with excellent action scenes, but that’s probably not going to be what I’ll end up remembering about this thing.

Now, Gunbuster is definitely a homage, but it doesn’t really do much for the giant robot genre. It’s got a very typical set-up with a lot of cliches and fanservice, but ends up playing a lot of them a bit too straight at times. The result is yet another teenager who ends up saving the world multiple times on a giant robot that she somehow ends up piloting. There also is quite a bit of romance, but that also doesn’t really get anywhere beyond your average cheese shop.

Instead, this IOVA is all about the science fiction. Instead of coming with your usual explanations and backstories, Gunbuster interestingly weaves pseudo quantum science with fantasy into a time travelling epic. It’s also one of those stories that changes significantly with every airing episode, making good use of its unpredictability to spiral out of control, despite the large amount of cliches that are in the story and characters.

If you’re wondering where the science fiction is when you start to watch it: the best episode of this OVA does remain the sixth and final one. It’s here where the creators say “screw it” and abandon the cliches in favor of its neat ideas, setting and background, and yet another proof of how Hideaki Anno is in his element when he goes over-budget.

Speaking of the guy, of course Gunbuster is very well animated. I can’t fault this show for looking pretty, and especially for its time it has detailed animation and a pretty nice direction. I can imagine how this movie was a big trendsetter, but it’s just a shame that half of the trends it set ended up horribly abused during the past decade. Overall I don’t think that Gunbuster is anything amazing, but it definitely has its good points and I still enjoyed watching it despite its cliches.

Storytelling: 8/10 – Makes up for its cliches pretty nicely with its good direction and constantly changing story.
Characters: 7/10 – A bit too many cliches and cheese, though it does have interesting character development.
Production-Values: 8/10 – Pretty impressive, though nothing amazing.
Setting: 9/10 – Great background stories and ideas.

Suggestions:
– Noein
– Macross Frontier
– Soukou no Strain

Legend Of Galactic Heroes – My Conquest is the Sea of Stars Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Legend of Galactic Heroes is a franchise that, more than any other one, baffles me as to how it got made. I mean, if it was just a television series or a few movies about realistic space battles between huge armies, then okay: it would have been an interesting experiment to do. Instead though, the creators here just dedicated more than an entire decade to something that seems such a commercial gamble. The creators just came out of nowhere and delivered first an OVA of 110 episodes, only to create two more OVAs of 28 and 24 episodes long respectively. How was this financed? How did the creators keep such a consistent production here on something that seems light-years away from the mainstream?

Anyway, this movie is the one that started it all, being released about half a year before the first episode of the OVA was released. It mainly is just a background movie, meant to tell the past and set things up for the OVA, but I already could tell that, yes: this would be something special.

The cast of characters in particular is what sets this series apart from all other space and science fiction series of its time. There just isn’t any cheese, no overacting, it’s not trying to be childish and neither is it trying to dumb itself down. The creators make sure to give character to not just the main characters, but also the side ones, and even some seemingly unimportant bystanders. The dialogue is well written, intelligent and detailed and does an excellent job of fleshing out both the characters and the plot. Something tells me that the creators of the Seikai trilogy were heavily inspired by this series.

One criticism I have for this movie right now is that one of its purposes is to make the two main characters look smart, and it does so by portraying their superiors as stubborn idiots (yeah, blame Gosick for me, being too focused on that). Even that though is far from as black and white as it seems at first sight, and both of the idiots serve are subtly different from all of the other moron commanders you see in anime. Again, the excellent dialogue is to thank for that.

As for the space battles: the thing with anime is that it’s near impossible to accurately portray battles on a huge scale. This movie was one of the few attempts I’ve seen that realizes this, and tries to give it its best attempt to stay as believable as possible,instead of just randomly copy-pasting the same drawing over and over. Huge fleets are drawn with depth and at the same time budget is saved cleverly with dynamic camera work and an actually readable strategic map for the main commanders. The latter may not look like much, but just try to think of how many other anime just show a bunch of nonsensical technobabble on these screens that are impossible to follow?

Storytelling: 8/10 – Mostly building up, but it does that well. The space battles are also unique.
Characters: 9/10 – Excellent dialogue and a realistic portrayal of its characters.
Production-Values: 8/10 – Nice and detailed animation. Classical music for the background works, but is a bit cheap though.
Setting: 8/10 – Potential to become really interesting in the OVA.

Suggestions:
– Armored Trooper Votoms
– Seikai no Monshou, Senki and Senki II
– Mobile Police Patlabor’s First Movie
(Note: I’ve decided not to put Tytania on this list of recommendations. Not because it’s so much worse, but because it has one vital difference with LoGH that really forces you to watch it with a different mindset: Tytania is very theatrical, while this movie had far more restrained actors.)

You Are Delicious Review – 87,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



You might be wondering why I’m giving such a high rating to kiddie movie about a bunch of cartoonishly drawn dinosaurs. Believe me, I’m just as surprised as you are. For those of you who don’t know: Omae wa Umasou da (or You are Delicious!) is a project consisting out of a TV-series and a Movie, based on a picture book about a Tyrannosaurus who takes care of a baby Ankylosaurus. The TV-series was just… bad. Incredibly childish and ludicrously poorly animated. It really was aimed at children of two or three years old. Because of this, I also was just planning to only check out a few minutes of this movie before giving it a pass.

Now, the reason why I liked this movie so much is riddled with spoilers, so I’ll try as much as possible to avoid them. There is one thing however that I do want to warn about, considering the circumstances currently in Japan, and that is the huge amount of dead bodies that are shown in this movie. The creators really don’t shy away from the fact that dinosaurs eat each other and even innocent children aren’t except to this rule (au contraire, in fact). On top of that, a volcano also erupts during the airtime. Be aware of this when watching this movie, because the disasters that happen in this movie are in no way meant to be compared to what happened in Japan with the Tsunami. Regardless of whatever stories anime tried to tell, what happened in Japan is truly horrifying, and let’s hope for a steady recovery for everyone involved.

You are Delicious isn’t really a kids’ movie. It’s more like something for the whole family: it’s got cute dinosaurs for the younger viewers, but it also really doesn’t shy away from serious themes as prejudice, killing for a living, and parenting. It really can get quite mature when it wants to and unlike most other movies of its kind, it doesn’t dumb itself down. It has its silly moments, but by far the biggest purpose of this movie is telling a serious story, and taking itself and its audience seriously in the process.

Now, let me try to explain this in the least spoilerific way: the amount of character development in this movie is huge for movie standards. The premise of this movie is about a Tyrannosaurus Rex taking care of a baby Ankylosaurus, but there is much more to the story than just that. It even puts in effort to make its downright impossible scenario actually plausible. I’m not going to spoil the way in which it does that, you’ll have to watch the movie, though. Let me just say that the cast of characters ends up with a ton of depth and wonderfully fleshed out with especially the lead character being a joy to watch.

Obviously it doesn’t aim to be the most realistic movie: heck, it has giant dinosaurs doing somersaults and other kinds of battle moves. At the same time though it has a ton of these nice details that make it surprisingly down to earth, like those long neck dinosaurs getting dizzy when they they lift their heads too high. Plus, the fancy attack moves make for some really sweet choreography in the action scenes.

There have been more of those “Wolf and Sheep” stories before, but these all had their share of flaws. The amazing thing about You are Delicious is that I have almost nothing I can criticize it for. I mean, by comparison, Chirin no Suzu was very melodramatic; this movie instead manages to keep its balance between hard-hitting drama and subtle characterizations. Arashi no Yoru ni had a simple message that it was a little too keen on portraying. This movie has multiple strong messages that are all more than they seem and that it doesn’t try to shove down the viewer’s throat.

This movie really took me by complete surprise. I’t quite possibly the biggest surprise I’ve seen in years. Being based on a picture book of all things, I can only imagine how much extra the creators put into the story of this movie.

Storytelling: 9/10 – The proof that you can make anything awesome with the right direction. Well balanced and knows exactly when to be silly and when to take itself seriously.
Characters: 9/10 – Wonderful character development on adorable characters.
Production-Values: 8/10 – Nice animation, unique art style and great action scenes..
Setting: 9/10 – Paints its own original and imaginative picture of the time of the dinosaurs with just the right parts taken under the loop.

Suggestions:
– Chirin no Suzu
– Heartcatch Precure – Hana no Miyako de Fashion Show… desu ka?
– Kappa to Coo to Natsuyasumi

Level E – 10

by psgels, posted in Level E



So, this episode was something else. It had no Ouji whatsoever. In fact, none of the recurring characters aside from the color rangers even made an appearance. There also was hardly any comedy and it actually was really focused at telling a serious story here. It’s an excellent change of pace for just one episode, especially considering how next episode the hilarity is surely promising to return with the reappearance of Baseball Guy.

Now, something obviously was missing in this episode, but even so the story it told was quite good. It was a bit simple, but it fitted quite nicely within just twenty minutes, and it made good use of the Color Rangers in a setting completely different from an RPG parody (plus it actually fitted in some development for the spiked hair guy). It had very typical bad guys, but even they were just more than evil for the sake of being evil, and were quite successful at creating some tension.

Also, I’m surprised to see some actual karate used in the action scenes. You could actually see that that the two kids practice the basics a lot, and they really got the basics down. At the same time though, you could see that they didn’t have much experience in actual fighting against a partner: their movements were a tad too neat and slow; in a real fight while using karate, you’ll always see people sacrificing clean techniques in favour of being able to move fast enough to actually be able to hit your opponent. This time the kids were lucky that they were helped by their powered suits.

In any case, this episode was the weakest of Level E so far, and yet I still really liked it. This show has always had the problem that it was nearly impossible to live up to the absolutely fantastic first arc, but even considering how the subsequent arcs were a step back it still had plenty of stuff to like.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

OVA Impressions: Nichijou

by psgels, posted in OVA Impressions



Nichijou has one major advantage over Lucky Star and K-On: it’s creative. This isn’t just slice of life, the creators try to make something creative out of everyday situations, like bringing fishing metaphors in when characters are talking about their grades, to some strange woman who refuses to explain why she’s got this giant wind-up on her back. This is the kind of slice of life that could potentially make these characters interesting and is more than just random talking.

At the same time though, it also has something that has been annoying me about Kyoani series since ages: characters trying way too hard to be cute. Half the cast here was like “ooh, find me cute! Look I’m cute. I do cute things to prove that!”

That, combined with the way in which half of the jokes of this episode fell flat, made this episode rather boring after about seven minutes. It’s a shame, because the first two minutes started off this episode really well with interesting animation and a fast delivery, but after that the characters just lost their steam. The animation still is pretty good: nether amazing but I also spotted no flaws.

At this point I’m still hoping to run into the next GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class, which is what I consider to be the best amongst the “random slice of life around a group of girls”-genre. I was hoping that Nichijou would at least come close to it with its creativity, but alas. The TV-series will have to put in a lot more effort to remain interesting.
OVA Episode Rating: 7,5/10

Gosick – 10

by psgels, posted in Gosick



With this episode, I’m sure of it: Gosick should just have been 13 episodes long. It’s very ironic that out of all the series this season, the only one that goes beyond 13 episodes is the one who doesn’t need that many episodes, leaving series as Yumekui Merry as way too short. Seriously though, if the creators cut off all of the bad arcs and just compiled all of the good stuff into one season, it would have been a very good series.

The current arc really has no business in this series. It completely failed its purpose to give Hair Guy some depth. All we now know is that he feels pressured, but that could easily have been done within a minute inside a different arc. It really made no difference for the story of this arc whether his past was revealed or not.

The story again suffered from the stupid virus once more. I mean, when your house gets searched by the police, and you’ve just collected the most priceless artifact imaginable, not to mention that you’re selling off young children. Even if you’re completely confident that they won’t find anything, why the heck did the bad guys in this episode not try to move everything to a different location? I mean, with the huge crowd he invited, there is just one thing that needs to go wrong and everything is ruined.

Also, did Kujou just really try to drop a priceless jewel on the floor, to test whether or not it was made out of glass? I mean, it didn’t break, but what if that drop scratched it?

Also, it’s a shame to see that this is very possibly the worst animated Bones series in years. I mean, what was up with that action scene at the end? Three frames with speedlines and suddenly everyone was captured. That’s just lazy, but the rest of this episode also just looked too mundane. You can see that at least some budget went into it, but none of the drawings really felt inspired or particularly well animated.

The only merit of this arc was Victorique. Especially that nightmare at the end of the episode was excellent. I’ve said this before: this series sucks in terms of the small picture, but it has some pretty good stuff in the big picture. Just cut away these random mysteries. This show just isn’t good at them.
Rating: – (Disappointing)

OVA Impressions: xxxHolic Rou – Adayume

by psgels, posted in OVA Impressions, xxxHolic, xxxHolic Rou



For the fans of Gundam Unicorn who are complaining about slow release dates: the intervals between new xxxHolic episodes is a whole whopping year!

But dear god, was it worth the wait. Unlike what I previously expected, this episode doesn’t really aim to answer any question whatsoever. In fact, it doesn’t even address the cliff-hanger that the previous episode left us with, and no new news about Yuuko appears anywhere. The length of this OVA was about half an hour, and its purpose was completely different from the first xxxHolic Rou.

What this movie did do was incredibly heart-warming, though. It’s an entire episode full of subtle character-building on Watanuki and Doumeki. I mean, the changes that the first xxxHolic Rou episode brought forth were immense. This episode fleshes this out brilliantly by somehow doing the impossible and giving the characters even more depth than they already had. Yeah.

I mean seriously, xxxHolic already was by far my favourite Clamp series, and this episode only made it better. This episode was full of quiet discussions between Watanuki and other side-characters like Mokona, Doumeki and his grandfather. Doumeki’s grandfather is just about the only one who didn’t change significantly, and even he had a wonderful portrayal in this episode, worried about his grandson.

This episode also showed a few flashbacks to Watanuki’s past. And seriously, if there was any series in which such a small recap like that would would, it’s this one. For one thing, it was great to see Watanuki sigh at what a moron he used to be, but it also really reminded how it’s already been five years since I first started watching this series, and it reminded what kind of huge changes the characters went through. If you add all of the pieces of development together here, you really get an amazing cast of characters. And I really don’t hope that this was the last of the xxxHolic OVAs.
OVA Episode Rating: 8.75/10

Letter Bee – 48

by psgels, posted in Letter Bee



Ah, this episode explained a lot. It didn’t just contain a lot of backstory, but it also really showed what the creators of the anime are trying to do here: they’re trying to close off the Letter Bee story while resolving all of the major questions and subplots. On one hand, it’s a shame that the sponsors didn’t give them the full chance to completely tell the story of the manga. On the other hand, it’s commendable to see the creators of the anime go through these lengths in order to avoid what is by far the single biggest and most frequent mistake of manga and light novel adaptations: completely cutting off the story and leaving you hungry for a sequel that will never arrive.

The small dip in quality really was their way to carefully wrap up the storyline without rushing it, and because the manga put so much meaning into it, they really had to take their time to let the story play out. Now that that’s happened, the past weeks have finally gotten back to focus on what made this show so great: the characters.

Because, yes! The creators didn’t cop out. I really was afraid when Noir turned back good that the creators would find some excuse to turn him back into Gauche, completely nullifying his development. They didn’t! This episode clearly states that Noir is still Noir. He now just happens to have similar goals as Lag. The scene in that cave between the two of them did an excellent job of using the build-up of both the early episodes and the anime original ones.

Also, finally! Lag’s mother makes her appearance. She’s the centre of all of the mystery here, and even though it was already pretty much established that she was that sun, it’s good to finally actually see her. Again, well worth the build up.
Rating: ** (Excellent)