Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra – 03

by psgels, posted in Armed Librarians - The Book of Bantorra



The more I watch this series, the more I’m convinced that it’s one of the big powerhouses this season. Even taking Darker than Black and Aoi Bungaku into account, I still keep edging to this series as my current favourite of the Autumn season, and this episode only made this show even more intriguing. It’s going to be awesome if the creators can keep this up.

This episode provided a lot of answers. We learn who the mysterious woman that appeared in the visions is: Shiron Byacornise, a girl who could foresee the future. She predicted the arrival of a major disease, however she was used by some sort of group of evil people. The reason she got hung is that she finally retaliated, and got herself hung as a sign of repent.

And I must say… the plan of the “bad guys” to get rid of Hamyuts Meseta is actually quite ingenious: they’d predict whenever she’d get near her weakness (typhoons), poison her with a deadly disease and then try to attack her. Finally we have these bad guys who don’t come up with these wimpy plans that involve sending a bunch of weak goons!

It’s also interesting: the previous episode had been setting her up as a villain, while this episode did the entire opposite: in a strange act of mercy she let a surprisingly self-conscious Meat live, and turned him back into a human. That Meat of course was Colio. She’s also a completely different character when she discovers that she becomes the hunted instead of the hunter, and starts becoming entirely nonchalant as to what’s going to happen to her.

Then there is that mysterious book guy, who still is pretty much of a mystery at this point. He just keeps handing out fragments of Shiron’s book to random people, but for what point and purpose? My guess would be that foresight comes into play again: we’ve already confirmed two people who have somehow the power to look into the future (Shiron and the mysterious guy who predicted the way the storm would travel), so why wouldn’t there be more? It looks to me like this guy is trying to change the future, and Shiron’s memories somehow are the key to it.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Summer Wars Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Summer Wars is the latest highly anticipated movie from Mamoru Hosoda, the director of Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo. As expected, the movie comes with a lot of ideas, attention to detail and really attempts to innovate. It’s a very nice movie, however I didn’t like it as much as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

The movie basically focuses on two things: slice of life around a really big family who has come together for the birthday of its oldest member who owns a huge mansion. The other focus of the movie is some sort of science-fiction story in which the Internet has evolved into some bizarre world called “OZ”. This eventually gets hacked, and it’s up to our teen-aged lead to save the world from this threat.

And I’m sorry, but as a student computer science I just could not buy this premise. It’s utterly ridiculous and makes no sense whatsoever. While I agree that it achieves new heights in the fantasy-ish portrayal of hacking software, and I know that there’s something as artistic freedom, but this movie went completely beyond my suspense of disbelief as it turned the teen-aged leads in this movie into somehow the only ones who were able to save the world. Especially the finale hung together in a string of Deus ex Machinas.

I know I’m harsh, but this is a big-budgeted movie. Take Real Drive, released last year. It’s vision of the future of the Internet was much more creative, realistic, believable and explained, even though it also used a bit of fantasy in its premise. I appreciate the attempts of the director, you can see that he really tried, but he was too torn between creating a good story and appealing to the mainstream in this part.

Okay, so that was the bad part, now the good stuff: the slice of life. What I absolutely loved about this movie was the way the family was portrayed. Every single character was behaving realistically, even taking the ridiculous setting into account. The cast is incredibly large, especially for a movie, and the creators actually developed all the characters a bit throughout the movie. I especially liked the chaos in which a lot of things happened at the same time and everyone was doing something at the same time.

You’re definitely going to recognize the art style from Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, and Madhouse really made sure to breathe life into every single character with some incredibly good and realistic animation. This slice of life makes this series really fun to watch. But yeah, compared to Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, it just isn’t as powerful. The soundtrack is less impressive, and it really gets hampered by that ridiculous setting and superficial climax.

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 7/10

Darker than Black – Ryuusei no Gemini – 02

by psgels, posted in Darker than Black - Ryuusei no Gemini



As for the shows I’m not going to blog:
– Sasameki Koto has some interesting points, but after two episodes it looks too much like it’s going to turn into an endless “will they won’t they” storyline.

Anyway, the reason why I didn’t blog the first season was simply because it aired in what I consider the best season ever: Spring and Summer 2007; it was simply overshadowed. For some reason, I also didn’t like it when it first started out, but reading back some of my past comments, I have no idea what the heck I was thinking back then.

I watched this episode with AoShen’s subs, but I wouldn’t exactly recommend them. Their translations are way off at times and in one scene they make Hei look like a rapist. They’re really those obnoxious people who think they’re funny, but ultimately aren’t.

In any case, I really like the second season so far. Darker than Black’s premise is so rich that it can create a ton of different and interesting storylines, and that’s exactly what they did here: instead of continuing with the tried and true formula of the first season, you can see that the creators are currently exploring new territory, and yet they don’t forsake the things that made the first season so enjoyable.

The most controversial difference is of course that there are now teen-agers present, but Suou is pretty likable. She is impulsive, but this episode showed that she is in a good way: she’s willing to take action to get herself out of problems, instead of continuously getting saved like a damsel in distress. Especially in a setting in which she’s surrounded by contractors, she’s a very brave kid.

The fights in this episode were again well done, and I still love the concept in this series in which the smartest are the ones who usually win their fights, and the penalties are a very nice touch to balance these powers out, like in this episode, in which that woman needed to kiss men (yes, KISS, not “sexually interact”) in order to use her powers.

The whole mystery behind this series seems pretty interesting at this point. Shion should not have been able to walk if he indeed was a contractor, and yet he walked. My guess would be that his penalty as a contractor was just something else, and he pretended to have lost his legs in order to fool people, but the why and how is still a bit of a mystery.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Yobi – The Five-Tailed Fox Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



Well, so I finally managed to find this Korean animated movie: Yobi – The Five-Tailed Fox, otherwise known as the impossibly named “Chonnyonyeouu Yeouub”. At first sight, it’s yet another children’s adventure: mystical girl (in this case, a fox spirit) meets regular boy, the two fall in love, the two fight some sort of evil, ended with a Deus ex Machina. However, this movie makes up for the bland premise through its execution, and not just because of its nice graphics.

First and foremost, it’s a really enjoyable movie to watch. The cast of characters is full of quirky characters that at the same time don’t exaggerate their quirks, yet deliver them with subtlety. A lot of the movie is spent on diverse characters, just having fun, and the movie-budget animation did wonders in making them come alive. While it’s not the best animation you’re going to see in a movie, it definitely does the job in portraying lots of non-verbal communication between the different characters through their gestures and way of moving, and that was for me without a doubt the most enjoyable part in this movie.

Also the premise is also about the only thing generic about this movie. It’s a shame that all family-movies seem to need to follow these same rules (especially that deus ex machina ending remains annoying), but outside of that you can see a lot of creativity in the storytelling: the situations the characters are put in are very imaginative, the locations have a lot of ideas put into them, and the background art is absolutely gorgeous in their portrayal.

There are problems with the animation at times though: the characters’ expressions sometimes look a bit too much like clay figures at times, and you can see a bunch of lazy frames in which the characters are drawn cell-shaded in CG. And granted, at times some events are introduced a bit too sudden, and we still don’t know why Yobi finds humans silly, yet she walks around in a human form most of the time. Overall, it’s perhaps not the best movie to come out of Korea; they’ve done a story better with Oseam, and better-looking graphics in Wonderful Days, but nevertheless Yobi is a very enjoyable family movie with an excellent characterization.

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 9/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 8/10

Umineko no Naku Koro ni – 16

by psgels, posted in Umineko no Naku Koro ni



A very solid episode this time, and instead of the chaos of the past few episodes, it was surprisingly slow-paced as it showed the aftermath of what happened in the previous episode, as well as develop the current storyline even further.

The past few episodes also completely changed how you should look at this game that Battler and Beatrice have been playing. Looking back, Beatrice’s plan right now is indeed pretty clear: she had the scenario of this mysterious person killing everyone but five (including him/herself) of the Ushinomiya Family + Staff, and she twisted those events around to make them seem like magic with some sort of illusion. Apparently she thought that as long as she did this for long enough, the ingenuity of this mysterious killer would go unnoticed and Battler would be forced to accept that witches are real. It indeed seemed like a nice, though one-sided plan at first, but like the past episodes showed: there’s no way you can get a raging bull to shut up, just by yelling at it.

However, with the new Beatrice, this is completely different: why would the new Beatrice want to bother faking the deaths when she can just as easily kill people herself? Is this world perhaps a copy of the original world where Meta-battler came from, or something similar, and the witches have the power to play with the rules just as long as they match what really happened? We now know that Beatrice did everything in order to be accepted in the outside world as a witch, which indeed seems to signify that she had no powers in the world Meta-battler came from but instead of the worlds she created herself, and of which Eva-Beatrice is now a part of.

However, at the same time I wonder: remember how in the first episode, Battler’s father said that he was probably going to get killed the next day. Back there, he knew that something fishy was going on, and he was going to die, however there’s no sign of that here, even though this arc is supposed to focus on the adults. That means that not just the order of victims is different for each arc, but even before that they differ slightly… In any case, I also liked the extra bit of info on Battler’s parents: this episode really gave a bit more character to them, since they’ve stayed pretty much in the background until now, being immediately killed off and all.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Oh and regarding spoilers, my patience has run out right about now. DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE EVENTS THAT HAPPEN AFTER THIS EPISODE. From now on, if I even suspect an Umineko-related comment to have spoilers of the visual novel I will mercilessly delete it. This of course doesn’t go for most people, but every week there seem to be one or two people who can’t resist to ruin the fun for those who haven’t played the games yet. Even when properly marked, it’s really hard not to look at them, and I unfortunately don’t have the software here for proper spoiler-codes.

If you want to talk about the Visual Novel, doesn’t it make sense to look for a forum or blog that discusses the Visual Novel instead of the anime?

Some Quick First Impressions: Gokyoudai Monogatari, Thriller Restaurant and Himitsu Kessha Taka Tsume Countdown

by psgels, posted in Some Quick First Impressions

Gokyoudai Monogatari

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters live together while their parents are away in America.
Well, I guess that not all kids’ shows can be surprisingly good this season. Gokyoudai Monogatari could indeed have been a cute story about two very young siblings (my guess would be that they’re both six or seven or something), if it wasn’t for the completely nonsensical scenario. Let alone that two kids that age are fully taking care of themselves, but the entire episode was full of the most ridiculous situations that didn’t make any sense at all: in the first half of this episode the lead duo gets chased by some sort of evil camera crew for no possible reason, while in the second half the boy gets chased by some sort of angry dog. Everyone really behaves in a completely implausible fashion that I guess is trying to be funny, but fails completely in the process. It gives off the impression of being rushed, and that the creators didn’t really think through the script. Catchy soundtrack, though.
OP: Nice enough. Surprisingly well and fluidly animated.
ED: This is the type of song that the kids who watch this today are going to hate once they grow up.
Potential: 0%

Thriller Restaurant

Short Synopsis: Our lead character visits a supposedly haunted restaurant building.
I must say, the kiddie shows this season are surprisingly good. This obviously is compared to most other kids’ series out there and I don’t mean in the way of the WMT, but in the same way I’d much rather watch an episode of Thriller Restaurant or Kiruminzoo than Fairy Tail, for example. If I had kids and this somehow got translated I wouldn’t mind showing this to them, because it’s a pretty nice horror-series for kids: it has a surprisingly good soundtrack, it knows how to build-up. It’s got a small touch of Japanese culture, and you can see that some actual creativity went into it. It’s not perfect. At a certain time one of the lead characters got possessed in too much of a Gakkou no Kaidan way. In essence, it’s just another grade school adventure, but if you compare it to some of the other shows that kids have to sit through these days, and it definitely stands among the better ones.
ED: Ghost disco… yeah. My biggest surprise is that it’s actually surprisingly good, especially considering the crap music that gets marketed towards kids these days…
Potential: 30%

Himitsu Kessha Taka Tsume Countdown

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is trying to take over the world.
Well, I guess that we’ve found the worst show of the season with this show. Here they take a series that would have been best as another one of those 3-minute series, and stretch it over 20 minutes of them. The show basically talks about two story-lines: one consisting out of strange shapes with stereotypical personalities who fight crime for no possible reason, and the second is about some sort of evil organization that’s trying to take over the world for no possible reason. The end result is an endless string of pointless and unfunny dialogue combined with the worst possible animation that I have ever seen. It’s trying too hard to be funny, it’s full of randomness just for the sake of randomness, and feels like a really half-assed attempt at creating an anime.
OP: Really dull J-pop, but at least there’s a nice visual direction.
ED: One of the only things about this series that doesn’t suck. At least there’s creativity here.
Potential: -70%

Kimi ni Todoke – 02

by psgels, posted in Kimi ni Todoke



As for the series I’m not going to blog:
– I have no idea what to write about Sunred on a weekly basis. Nevertheless, that Tempura-monster was hilarious.
– I have to give Yumeiro Patissiere credit: against all my expectations, the fairies did not give the lead character any powers whatsoever, and instead stressed the importance of hard work and preparation. Thumbs up. Nevertheless, the classmates are still a bit too stereotypical.
– Natsu no Arashi lost its subtlety in exchange for dull fanservice jokes. It can still get good but I don’t want to blog it while finding out.
– There are so many things wrong with Miracle Train that I don’t know where to start: ugly bishies, abysmal voice-acting, dull jokes, one-line background for each of the ladies, it’s already getting formulaic, every case gets solved with a dull monologue, pointless trivia, dialogue that’s just there to waste time. What the heck was Kenichi Kasai thinking?
– Sora no Otoshimono lost me when the panties started flying around.
– When blogging Basquash, I remember how I noted that something really weird had to happen for me to blog Shoji Kawamori’s next series. That did not happen, though such a cute and fluffy shoujo was probably the last thing I expected as his new series. And it’s pretty enjoyable so far in any case.
– Kobato is too one-dimensional: Kobato is just a moron who happens to be cute, her animal side-kick is just yet another subversion of the cute animal sidekick trope, then there are the stereotypical badass male tsundere, emo kid et cetera.
– Let me get back to 11Eyes when Winter Sonata airs. If that one turns out to suck, I’ll probably go for this one.

As for Kimi ni Todoke, well, you forced me all to blog it here. It’s an interesting choice, because I don’t think that I would have blogged this series on my own. I usually just leave shoujo romances like this for what they are, and this isn’t even one of the best ones. My problem with these types of shoujo series is that I’m still not able to determine whether they’re going to turn dull or not during their second half.

In terms of comedy, I’m hardly able to predict whether such a series will turn into a complete success as with Yamatso Nadeshiko Shichi Henge or Kodocha, or just a bore-fest like what happened to me with Ouran High School Host Club. For the serious series, how do you recognize whether a series is going to be awesome like with Bokura ga Ita, or just a complete disaster like with Vampire Knight from the first two episodes? The one time I actually tried blogging such a shoujo turned into a complete disaster: Shugo Chara descended into a filler-fest and still goes on three years later. While it’s nice on its own, I cringe at the thought of what would have happened if I didn’t decide to drop that series after 13 episodes…

Right now, Kimi ni Todoke isn’t the best, but also not the worst. At the moment it strikes me as a bit of a shallow emo version of Bokura ga Ita. The characters at the moment are a bit too exaggerated aside from the lead character: most of her classmates all are scared of her 100% of the time, her boyfriend is perfect without any flaws so far, so I really hope that the rest of the series is going to add a bit more depth to them. The lead character is off to a pretty nice start, however I do want to say that her constant chibi-version is really getting annoying right now.

I do have to praise the art. Especially the background art is absolutely beautiful, which is unsurprising considering the other shows the art director worked on: Eden of the East, Real Drive and Seirei no Moribito. Some of the backgrounds are probably filtered photographs, but they really work well along with this series’ unique art style. I think that right now, there are just too many series that go with a generic art style, instead of one with its own visual identity, and that really is a shame IMO.

Anyway, about the episode, I never knew that seat choosing was so serious business in Japan. I remember from the time when I was in high school, the only reason we had fixed seats was to give an easy time to the teacher, who had to remember all of our names. At the start of the year we’d usually just pick seats ourselves instead of having this strange lottery-thingy that the characters had in this episode.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Konnichiwa Anne – 28

by psgels, posted in Konnichiwa Anne



So, this was really the episode that would make or break this series: it was going to be the first episode of Anne, as she settled in the Hammond family, and visited her new school for the first time. The result is really a mixed bag, but I think that the creators are going to be able to make something out of it. At least, I don’t think that we’re going to get another repeat of the disaster of the Marysville arc.

First of all, Anne has grown again: she’s now ten years old, and you can see her development for the past three months that skipped: she has had no time to play around and be a kid, and really grown up in the meantime. But yeah, that brings us the the problems of continuity again: 10-year-old Anne is much more mature than 11-year-old Anne of Green Gables.

At a certain point in this episode, Anne also finds books of Shakespeare, and it’s actually very interesting to see her using these books and her own fantasy, in order to distract her from the reality she’s in. Like with the books she read in Marysville, she becomes entranced with them, especially because this time, she really has nobody to talk to. In Marysville, she at least had Johanna to talk to, Bert to relieve her worries to, and Noah, who she saw as her own brother because she had been raising him ever since he was born. But yeah, that brings us to continuity again: remember the beginning of Anne of Green Gables? Anne talked about a lot of girly things, but to my memory, she NEVER mentioned Shakespeare. This just again shows that there were a lot of red-haired Anne Shirleys walking around back in those days.

Now, as for the school. I absolutely loved the part in which the teacher was grading some tests by his students. That was really realistic. We didn’t actually get to see the students, because the schools were closed for summer break, but at least the teacher is much better than Henderson: he has this down-to-earth attitude towards teaching, and yet you can see why he decided to become a teacher in the first place.

Unfortunately on the other hand, the cheese is back. The drama in this episode was of the shallow kind again: Anne meets person, Anne talks to person and in the end the person completely changes into a different character because of the insights that Anne gave him. Especially the way in which the teacher said exactly what he learned and how it’s going to change his life just felt forced. I know that this is a kids’ show and all, but Porfy no Nagai Tabi faced the same problem, and that series again and again came up with great one-episode stories with plenty of well-written drama.

So yeah, overall this episode pretty much solidified as an inferior, though capable WMT-series, somewhat like Ie Naki Ko Remi (the 1997-version)’s sister-series. The two have a lot in common: both are spin-offs of utterly brilliant adaptations of literary works, but have drama that’s too shallow to really call themselves equal to the series they’re based on. And yet standalone, they’re pretty enjoyable. Remi had this with its excellent soundtrack (along with the best OP and ED of any WMT I’ve seen so far), strong lead and dark story about child-labour, while Anne did this with its dark attention to dysfunctional families, and a well-developed lead character Anne, who hardly resembles her original character.

Now that 2010 is getting closer and closer, I can only hope for an announcement of next year’s WMT-series to appear. Oh, I so hope that Nippon Animation is going to continue this franchise, despite its low popularity.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Some Quick First Impressions: Fairy Tail, Aoi Bungaku and Table Cat

by psgels, posted in Aoi Bungaku, Some Quick First Impressions

Fairy Tail

Short Synopsis: Our lead character destroys entire cities and ruin thousands of people’s lives with his powers. And is supposed to be the good guy…
Well, so here we have another one of those shounen fighting series. And to be honest, it feels like a rather half-assed attempt. You can really see that the creators are trying too hard for this one: at every single opportunity they get they try to be funny by an incredibly exaggerated facial expression. Some of those attempts are indeed funny, but in most of the cases they just lack comedic timing, feel lazy or just aren’t funny. The lead character also feels like any other 14-year-old shounen lead out there, without hardly anything that sets him apart. As for the fights, they mostly consist out of people throwing flashy beams and punches at each other until one party goes down. I’ve gotten bored of those ever since Bleach abused them. Right now, I’m a bit done with those shallow shounen series.
OP: Decent J-rock, but nothing special.
ED: Bad j-pop song.
Potential: 20%

Aoi Bungaku

Short Synopsis: Our lead character meets the love of his life as he runs away from the police.
Ah, yes. It’s obvious that this is going to be the least popular series of the season. I suspect that this series mostly going to be ignored, if Mouryou no Hako’s reception last year is any indication. It’s going to surprise me if there are actually subbers going to be interested in this series. Nevertheless, this series has the best character-designs of the new season, it has the best atmosphere of the new season, it has the best graphical direction, the most complex and difficult to understand script, and very much my favourite first episode of the Autumn Season. I love the way how it slowly plays out, with the atmosphere only getting bigger and bigger as it goes on. It’s about adults, rather than a bunch of teenagers, and the fanservice for once feels mature, rather than stupid like most other series this season. I really like the concept of animating six short stories inside one series: it’s going to provide variety, and make sure that the series is never going to drag. If I had to describe this episode, it’d be Kurozuka minus all of the freakish action and plus some actually good characterization. It’s taken a while, but I’m really glad to see another interesting concept from Madhouse!
ED: Nice ballad.
Potential: 90%

Table Cat

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters are a bunch of talking cats and dogs.
Okay… this is the perfect example of “so annoying it becomes funny”. I think that anyone who watched this episode wanted to kill that freaking poodle. Her voice actress just would not shut up. In fact, this entire episode (three minutes, okay) was full of the most hyperactive dialogue since the Excel Saga, combined with some really weird and spastic animation techniques. However, I can’t deny that I laughed. 😛
OP: Very cheesy and pointless for an anime with only three-minute episodes.
ED: Again, just a cheesy song that takes fifteen seconds…
Potential: 20%

Full Metal Alchemist – Brotherhood – 27

by psgels, posted in Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood



Recap.

We basically saw Hohenheim and some strange woman talk while the past twenty-six episodes were recapped. I’m not complaining however, because for a recap it was a very good one: it contained the best bits of animation along with the best soundtracks for an intense 20 minutes. Hohenheim meanwhile looks at people dancing around a campfire and has some sort of evil twin or clone or something show up. It then turns out to be a dream of his.

If this really wasn’t part of the manga, then I think it’s the creators’ way of foreshadowing. My guess is that they were forced to include a recap at this point, so instead of just boringly do an episode in which nothing happens, why not throw in a taste of the future? I must say, with the dancing children I’m beginning to see more why Hohenheim was supposed to be that kind man; he indeed doesn’t seem like the same guy as his white version.
OP: New OP this time, starts off well but then degenerates into generic J-rock.
ED: Another slide-show. The music is decent for a j-pop ballad.
Rating: ** ()