Mirai Shounen Conan Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews




Hayao Miyazaki scares me. Back in the late seventies, when anime wasn’t even twenty years old, it was really starting to evolve and mature, resulting in quite a few early masterpieces. There was one thing however that all of them had notable difficulties with, though: the inbetween and cleanup animation. And here Hayao comes and animates Conan with such a consistent crispness that was completely unheard of at the time. It would take the rest of anime five to seven year to come that kind of refinement. How the heck did this guy accomplish all of that?

I mean, this guy knows like no other how to make something mainstream with his innocent yet exciting storylines. Mirai Shounen Conan is pretty much the base of what every children’s adventure should be: a lead couple, exciting, yet varied action scenes, villains who actually know what they’re doing and aren’t complete pushovers (plus, they use actual gunpowder guns, not those phony laser-guns), a solid story without any plot-holes or cheesy deus ex machina, a balance between action scenes and build-up that can both be playfully childish and able to take itself seriously, never taking itself too far to become unbelievable, yet putting constant tension on the characters. This series is so incredibly solid, it must have made a HUGE impact on 1978, and the way that its formula is still being used today, it must have had an immense influence as it played a major part in Miyazaki’s role in revolutionizing anime.

And yet, I do feel a bit disappointed: I expected more from this. Part of this has to do with the premise being used so often now that it hardly held any surprises. Heck, even Miyazaki himself revisited the general premise here with Castle in the Sky. Out of all of the works I’ve seen from him, this probably is the one that aged the least well.

But even beyond that, I kept feeling like this series was missing something. This show has an incredibly solid base, but beyond that I feel like it did very little to spice itself up. There is surprisingly little character-development, and Conan and Lana as a main couple don’t seem to develop at all, and weren’t really interesting enough to really keep my attention. Conan also has this huge amount of strength in him. I can understand why this was done for the action and to keep the plot going, but it also rather makes this series a bit too predictable for its own good when his only weakness is not being able to be at two places at the same time. When the once smart villains also get completely stupid and arrogant near the end of this series, I do feel like this series could have been much more in terms of its plot and characters.

I am a big fan of both Miyazaki and children’s adventures, but I have to be honest and say that I didn’t enjoy it as some other anime of those genre. If I watched it as a child I have no doubt that I would have loved it, but when you look at the same year in which this series was made: 1978, I just have to admit that I liked Captain Hardlock and Perrine Monogatari’s stories and characters a lot better. Technically speaking, it’s one of the most solid tv-series of its decade though, make no mistake about that.

Storytelling: 8/10 – This series both contains exciting adventures and down to earth drama and they blend quite well. Solid in just about everything it does, but could have taken more risks.
Characters: 7/10 – Could have been better: the lead couple isn’t interesting enough to carry this show, the side characters have their charms but they don’t stand out, and the main villain gets too stereotypical near the end.
Production-Values: 8/10 – For the standards of more than thirty years ago, the animation was fantastic. Today, it still looks good. The soundtrack in contrast is used surprisingly sparingly, if used at all. That could definitely have been used better for a better atmosphere.
Setting: 8/10 – A solid post-apocalyptic back-story, with Miyazaki’s usual pet peeves of airplanes and environmentalism.

Suggestions:
– The Mysterious Cities of Gold
– Laputa: Castle in the Sky
– Romeo’s Blue Skies

Letter Bee – 31

by psgels, posted in Letter Bee




This episode was so full of win that it’s hard to know where to start. It seemed like a random filler at the start, but it was full of those tiny neat ideas and those awesome little quirks of the different characters with as closure a really heartwarming story about a doll. Not to mention that the villain in this episode was called Autobahn. Now, if that isn’t awesome then I don’t know anymore.

But seriously though, I didn’t know that Sylvette was such a successful doll maker here. This episode gave a whole new meaning to that doll of hers, as she started making them from Gauche, and later turned it into her profession. The Wheelchair Leopardess really got her time to shine in this episode.

I’m amazed at how many neat ideas the creators stuffed in this episode. I absolutely loved the villain, but also: a carriage carried by a rhino, an old guy who dresses up young and yet tries to hit on older women, and not to mention the shoddy outfit that Lag spent this episode in as the Dingo of Sylvette. Nichi in her few episodes was also fantastic again. I really love how the setting of this series feels like no other and I love how the creators don’t shy away from mentioning these seemingly useless but still original and very neat details about the world they live in.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Bakuman – 06

by psgels, posted in Bakuman



Finally we get to the first meeting of one of the editors of Shounen Jump (or Shounen Jack, as it’s called here), and it was quite interesting, as we also get to see the full concept of the pilot that Moritaka and Akito created. It’s also here where you can see that the two still have a long way to go: the sketches looked rushed, and the dialogue of the trailer itself had some good concepts, but sounded rather cheesy without the proper build-up.

I don’t read any manga myself, but I’m still interested at how the editor said that there was too much dialogue and that his story would suit a light novel better. It’s true that that pilot sounded more like a trailer than an actual story, but that can also be a particular style, right? I’m interested in how many people like Moritaka and Akito he gets each month: do a lot of people try to contact him like that, only to give up later? The way he talked with his colleague seemed to suggest that they’re not exactly a rare case.

In the meantime, we also get to see some of Akito’s background. His mother was a bit much in the way she started crying in front of her son about something cheesy like that revenge, but overall it could have been much worse, and it’s a solid background for him either way. Oh, and finally the romance a) moved somewhere and b) stayed in the background with just a few scenes dedicated to it that were concise and to the point. When it’s like that then I don’t have any problems with it.
Rating: * (Good)

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt – 06

by psgels, posted in Autumn 2010 Kaleidoscope




Ah, who cares? I’m just going to talk about two shows this week. Don’t expect it to turn into a habit, but this episode was just too awesome. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 probably turned off a lot of people, but the past two episodes really made up for it.

Episode five was mostly awesome because of Osamu Kobayashi (yeah, the guy from Gurren Lagann’s fourth episode), but this episode was really everything that this series should be: crazy and over the top fast paced action. The first few episodes made the mistake of focusing too much on the shock factor, which is neat for one episode but becomes boring quite fast.

The bitch-fight between the two angels and devils was completely awesome though. The focus was much more on the addictive chemistry between these four than the shock factor and dirty references, and the toilet humour instead got used effectively in the action scenes at the second half of the episode. This was really the first episode of this series where the chemistry between these characters really worked. On top of that, this episode was well paced and didn’t drag on like some of the previous episode as well.

It’s really these kinds of episodes that I expected when I first learned about this series. The second half of this episode just continued building up the action without getting boring: that’s how varied it was, moving from battles with angry cars to toilets, shootouts and random chases: there was a ton of creativity in this episode that went much beyond the usual gimmicks of this series. It’s also here where the music really helped making things even more exciting.

The big question now is whether this show will be able to keep this up. It is the perfect set-up for an action series without any bounds whatsoever, but the creators really need to make use of it and let their creativity run wild like the previous two episodes. If the remaining episodes will be like that though, then this will end up as an awesome series.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Uninhabited Planet Survive Review – 85/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews




Uninhabited Planet Survive. Now, if that isn’t a descriptive title, then I don’t know anymore. I do want to warn those who are planning to check it out, though: it is not a series that aims to be the most realistic. Some of the things that the kids here end up building and pulling off just stretch the suspense of disbelief. Not to mention that during the months (perhaps even year) that they spend on that deserted planet, their hair never goes off-model, and their clothes magically repair themselves. I know a lot of other anime do that and all, but with such a premise it really sticks out.

Having said that though, I am very impressed with this series, and the incredible amounts of challenges it puts in front of its characters to overcome. They may be kids, but damn: they really work hard in order to be able to survive; hardly anything is handed to them on a silver platter. Every day they need to find food and take care of themselves, they have to build everything, from tools to shelters from scratch. A lot of this series really is just these eight characters, trying to keep living on this strange and unknown planet. This show has 52 episodes, and this length really makes it into one heck of an engaging series.

So yeah, they’re kids, all of around fourteen years old. They start out pretty annoying and one-sided; especially Howard was specifically designed to get on your nerves. They really do grow on you, though. Throughout the series they are well explored and developed, and especially the bond that forms between them ends up as very memorable. The series spends plenty of time developing themes as leadership, sacrifices and family to really make this a well rounded cast (it really makes use of these 52 episodes to let everything change very naturally). The part that impressed me the most was the surprisingly mature looks on blame and forgiveness.

The main problems with this series lie in the way that it’s a children’s adventure. I personally like this genre a lot, but it has A TON of pitfalls that are very easy to hit, and this series unfortunately didn’t manage to avoid all of them. It’s not the fact that this series is childish: really, for a show of its kind it has plenty of mature moments. The thing is however that near the end it tries to be too epic, resulting into a ton of pointless and cheesy Deus ex Machina that could have been totally avoided by a much more mellow ending. The first episode also is probably the worst episode of the entire series, in which the creators for no reason put the characters’ lives in danger, before anything had even happened yet.

These cheesy episodes are a relatively small part of the total airtime of this series, but they’re a bit inconveniently placed, right at the beginning and end of the series. Apart from that though, whenever this series just focuses on the cast trying to survive, learn about each other and the planet they’re on, I really enjoyed it, and this just gets better and better as the show goes on.

You can really see that this is from the same creators as the Secret of the Cerulean Sand: both do end up stretching your suspense of disbelief, and try to be a bit too epic, yet they’re very engaging adventures. Secret of the Cerulean Sand has a much faster pacing, while Uninhabited Planet Survive has a much better cast of characters and feels much more natural in its pacing.

Storytelling: 8/10 – Wonderfully paced and played out, really giving the cast ample time on the deserted planet. The finale is riddled with Deus ex Machina, though.
Characters: 9/10 – Start annoying, develop wonderfully. Great themes between them.
Production-Values: 8/10 – Simple, but do their job. The soundtrack has some great tracks.
Setting: 9/10 – Tries to be a bit too epic for its story near the end, but it still is a very imaginative world that the characters ended up in. Lots of neat science fiction as well.

Suggestions:
– The Mysterious Cities of Gold
– The Secret of Cerulean Sand
– Mahou Shoujotai

Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu – 18

by psgels, posted in Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu




This may very well have been the first episode of a ZEXCS series whose visuals genuinely impressed me. I know that the first episode had a big budget and that this episode had a lot of off models and all, but that’s not the point. ZEXCS-series always have this look of genericness, with perhaps the only exception to this point being Umi Monogatari. This episode completely blew my mind, though. The animation completely threw this genericness aside and went all out, and it looked awesome. I know that they just probably got one particularly awesome animation director on this episode, but I’d really love more episodes like this.

And seriously, this pretty much was the best Denyuuden episode since episode three. Perhaps even better. It’s episodes like this that I’ve been waiting for, and I’m really glad that this series is finally picking up, and at least the creators realize it. Now if only the producers who are responsible for the number of episodes would realize this too!

I admit: this Tiia-guy is good. The previous episode introduced him a bit generically, but this episode used that introduction really well when it suddenly turns out that he was genuinely trying to make Ryner into one of his comrades. I really love the bits of character-development here between Ryner and Ferris, and how they’ve actually been separated here.

I think the scene that impressed me the most here was the part in which we saw Shion’s army fire all of those arrows at Tiia. Animating huge armies is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and this show obviously didn’t have the budget to properly animate such an army: most of the time they were just still frames. And yet the way they were drawn, and their arrows flew, it really managed to bring life to them, and make them feel like a real army, rather than just the same guy copied and pasted over and over again like some bizarre house of mirrors.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru – 05

by psgels, posted in Autumn 2010 Kaleidoscope



This week I’d like to talk about this surprisingly charming slice of life series. And I guess gather my thoughts about Shinbo at the moment. I mean, I consider him to be an excellent director. The thing I hate however is how he is working on way too many projects. Just get him to work on one single project every year or two years: that will make them extra special, especially with the wait time in between. Why can’t he just leave Shaft’s other projects to the other directors at Shaft? Why does he need to hold their hands for every single series?

My big annoyance with Shinbo is that I’ve just seen too much of his series and I really do not want to sit through another one of his uninspired series. At this point, those series are easy to spot because he ends up doing one of two things:
1. Repeat himself. The best example of this is Natsu no Arashi 2, in which the first four episodes talked about the exact. same. freaking. subject. But also Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei. My guess is that that’s also why I can’t enjoy Arakawa Under the Bridge: there are just way too many similarities between the two.
2. Take his style way over the top to the point where it loses all its charms and ends up only getting in the way of telling the story. Examples of this (in my experience at least) were ef – a tale of melodies and Bakemonogatari.

Soredemo Machi is neither: it neither tries too hard, and while maids have been milked to death in anime, the delivery is fresh here. It doesn’t try to force down as many random jokes as possible, but instead focuses on just portraying the characters without trying to pretend to be anything more, and on top of that the different stories are varied and not repetitive. Finally.

Arashiyama is quite likable. In this episode she was mostly just a side-character, but even there she was pretty enjoyable as she tried to encourage Toshiko and her brother’s romances. It neither dragged on, and yet you could see that she loved to tease them. These kinds of romances are now also cliched as hell (‘I want to propose to you but I’m too scared so I just say something that sounds like “love”), but the creative characterization still made them enjoyable. If the characterization of Togainu no Chi was as good as this episode, I really would not have minded it being a dating sim.

On top of that, I’m glad that we finally have a Shaft series with a proper budget here. Especially the first two episodes had very good inbetween animation, but this episode too was very dynamically animated. I also like how all of the characters have their distinct character-designs, rather than just feeling like stock puppets with different eyes and hair pasted on top of them. On top of that, it’s also an interesting technique to use CG in frames that aren’t moving: it certainly took me a while before I noticed it.

It’s not perfect, especially in the way that those title cards get more annoying every episode, and there are times when it tries too hard (like with the chair in the previous episode), but I like its charms and how down to earth it is. It’s also got some good jokes as well (like the Czar and Luther).
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Shiki – 14

by psgels, posted in Shiki



Holy crap! This episode was unbelievable. It was quite possibly the best episode that Shiki has shown us so far, but dear God was it morbid and depressing.

For the most part, this episode continued the trend that the previous episodes had set up: the vampires are having their way, and get more and more powerful as they go along. We learn what happened to Masao: in the end he was just too chicken to kill a human, but strangely enough he was kept alive. We also learn another reason why the vampires chose a small village as their base: its cemetery, in order to ensure that as little people as possible get cremated. Oh, and unfortunately it seems like finally the Awesome Beard Guy’s family is going to be on the list of next victims, along with one of the nurses of the infirmary: Yuki.

But Toshio… the things he does in this episode… at first I thought that his eyes meant that just like Natsuno, he gave up, and collapsed under the stress. But to keep the corpse of his wife hidden, only to brutally experiment on her and kill her afterwards in order to find out the secret of the Shiki, it was just creepy beyond belief. Especially in the way that she actually kept screaming and pleading. Heck, we know that she may have been in a state of confusion when she woke up, but to wake up, only to find your husband trying to destroy your brains…. It’s just completely disturbing, but I loved how well this episode built everything up.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Kuragehime – 03

by psgels, posted in Kuragehime




Whoa, the characters here are all in their thirties. The females anyway. That makes this show even more interesting; I mean, when was the last time we had a series where the average age of the characters was this high? Ristorante Paradiso? It’s impressive, even for Noitamina’s standards. It’s great that they still dare to make series like this.

I like Kuranosuke’s relationship with his mother: his parents have been divorced for god knows how long for now, and his mother definitely had a lot of influence on him (probably partly inspired his cross-dressing), and yet the series doesn’t try to create cheap drama around her, yet keeps things down to earth.

And yet the series is also so over the top, in the way that Kuranosuke keeps penetrating the ridiculous and in-denial lifestyle of the sisterhood, while at the same time we have Tsukimi making her own impact with Kuranosuke’s brother. The whole way in which he just forces himself onto Tsukimi is what I like best about this series: it’s just so dynamic and lively.

The characterization for the entire cast is excellent, though. On paper especially the members of the sisterhood would have been awfully annoying, but the way that this show portrays them, by giving them some depth here really works. They’re all completely in denial, and have shut themselves off from the outside world completely. They just pretend that there’s nothing wrong with their lifestyles.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Nurarihyon no Mago – 18

by psgels, posted in Nurarihyon no Mago



A really charming episode. At this point, Rikuo’s classmates have really completely stopped being annoying, and they’re as interesting to watch as the rest oft he cast right now. Natsumi getting attacked was a very neat way to show her own experiences to kami and youkai. The drama around her could have been cheesy if she was the same nondescript character of the first few episodes, but here, it really worked.

On top of that, this episode also made use of the “forgotten gods”, like series as Natsume Yuujinchou did as well. It’s a great little theme, that works especially well in this context, because it’s a lot of those nearly forgotten gods, that maybe have one or two people praying to them, who lend the Nura-clan their power.

I wonder why that Sodemogi (on a side-note: I hate having to rely on MyAnimeList to check on the names of these characters: they’re riddled with spoilers. The page of this guy for example just tells how he dies without any sort of marking, making me glad that I didn’t see it last week…) went without an escort this time, though. Would that make him harder to spot or something?
Rating: ** (Excellent)