Xebec is a strange animation company after all. You never see them among the big guys and most of their works are seemingly mediocre, and yet as I watch more of their works I have to admit that they somehow hit the mark a surprising amount of times. If I had to mention something at which most of their great works stand out at, it’s the way in which they put in a lot of slice of life and quiet scenes in seemingly action-packed premises; only Pandora Hearts doesn’t have this and I have to admit that it’s not really the best thing to advertise your series with. Still, it does work; Stellvia again shows how when it takes a premise doomed for failure and yet turns it into a very enjoyable series.
Stellvia of the Universe starts out with a really flawed premise: in a certain science fiction setting, a seemingly average girl boards a space pilot school, suddenly turns out to be a l33t hax0r and somehow ends up piloting the mecha that holds the fate of humanity in its hands. I watched the entire series and still find it hard to believe how far she came in only one year. On top of that, this series also has some utterly horrid character-designs to work with, along with CG that really doesn’t try to integrate with the rest of the show.
And yet the characters made this premise work somehow. The above mentioned slow pacing really allows for the creators to show the daily lives of the protagonists, which allows the characters to get fleshed out really well; this doesn’t just go for the main characters, but also the side ones, and because of this they become able to carry the faulty premise of this series. Obviously you don’t want to watch this just for the drama, but eventually the drama that does come out is poignant and genuine.
Near the ending however, the series does get a bit annoying, though. It keeps focusing on the angsty romance between the two lead characters a bit more than what’s healthy for this series, especially because the romance tends to get in the way of just about everything else that also needs attention. Because of that, the finale lacks a bit of the impact it could have had.
Nevertheless, this series definitely has its good points and even the graphics don’t get much in the way as soon as you get used to the horrible designs. Science fiction is obviously a very popular genre in anime, but Stellvia does stand on its own amongst some of the behemoths of this genre, rather than being a mish-mash of other series. It’s neither the best from Xebec or science fiction obviously, but a very nice watch nonetheless.
| Storytelling: | 8/10 |
| Characters: | 9/10 |
| Production-Values: | 7/10 |
| Setting: | 8/10 |
This series is seriously tearing me up as I watch it. I remember wondering at the end of Birdy the Mighty Decode 2 whether or not the rest of 2009 would premiere a series that would match its brilliance. I’ve finally managed to find a contender. It’s amazing considering how much this series has already done in only FIVE EPISODES so far. This episode lacked any action and didn’t have a rebellious Mirai, but it left me as an emotional wreck afterwards.
This episode first showed Mirai’s old elementary school (she seemed to have had to travel quite a distance to reach it), which leads to an anecdote in which Mirai tells about how her mother embarrassed her at her graduation ceremony. The rest of the episode shows the three lead characters as they spend the evening and the night in the shelter camp that has been set up at the school.
I loved how this episode didn’t just tell the story of Mirai, Yuki and Mari, but also that of the school, the people who lost their loved ones, the old couple who lost their grandsons, the girl who had a mental breakdown due to the aftershocks, the guy who seems to have suffered from a sunstroke, Megu, one of Mirai’s classmates and heck: even that couple sitting next to each other and staring at the wall that only appear in one frame. Seriously, you don’t see many series in which the creators just pull out a random classmate, give her less than a minute of airtime and yet manage to make you sympathize with her with a believable back-story.
But yeah, this was the episode in which the chaos settles down a bit and the emotions pop up even more. It’s in a way similar of getting an injury during sports or something else: in the beginning the adrenaline is still rushing through your body and you’re still too bewildered to really get what’s going on. Then a few minutes later, the seemingly endless pain really starts. In this episode, it really starts to sink in that people have died here.
Really, while watching this episode, I kept wondering whether this really was only the fifth episode of this series. It feels like much more episodes have passed for this series, and yet there seems to be no end to how amazing this series can be. It’s really going to rank among my favourites of 2009 if the creators can keep this pacing up throughout the final six episodes.
Rating: *** (Awesome)]]> 
This episode was really there to add more depth to Oz: Eliot’s rather rash words have hit him hard in this episode, and even though it probably wasn’t that special for Eliot, it really gave Oz the opportunity to reflect on himself. But yeah, there are only six episodes left for him to show how much he learned. Second Season Where?!
Through Lotti, we also came to learn a lot more about Jack Bezarius and his past. It turns out that he wasn’t anyone special when he was still alive: he just happened to be best friends with Glen Baskerville, the instigator of the Tragedy of Sabrie. Glen turned out to be far from the evil overlord that I imagined him to be, and something must have really screwed him up to have ordered that tragedy. Not to mention that it’s still unknown what Vincent and Gilbert were doing there.
On a side-note: the 
Agh! What is up with those bloody recaps today?! I’d be more patient if Basquash didn’t just pull the exact same thing. Blegh.
Oh, and on the few minutes of new material: ZOMG CAL!!
Rating Recap: — (Blegh)
Rating Non-Recap: *** (Awesome)]]> 
Blegh. The second half of this episode was mostly recap. A really weird place for this show to start recapping, but at least you can see that it’s building up. My main annoyance right now is that there is no way of knowing whether this build-up will come together in the end. With Shoji Kawamori, you’ll never know.
And wtf… Coco has been on the moon all this time?! That’s definitely something I didn’t see coming. I guess that that’s why she’s been out of the picture lately. I first thought that it was James Loan’s younger and wilder version that hung out with her and Dan when they were little, but it turns out to have been Slash. It turns out that Coco used to be much more spirited and talented than Dan when she still had her legs, and Slash turns out to have recognized this talent and promised to take Coco to the moon as soon as she found her groove. After losing her legs, she took a while of calming down, but instead ended up promoting the Basquash through the internet, hence why she ended up at the moon. The question is whether or not she’s going to have surgery to restore her legs. I hope not, but yeah… this is anime.
The first half of this episode consisted out of a bit of development for Sera. But I must say that the basketball matches are starting to get rather boring right now. There was character-development in it (Dan finally stopped trying to do everything himself), but the action scenes didn’t really interest me. That brings me back the start of this series again: the action-scenes of the first eight episodes simply were much better and well done. After that, it really dulled in aside from episode 11 and that part was a filler.
Rating: (Enjoyable)]]> 
There’s always this… something about plays that are performed in anime. I’m not sure what it is, but they always tend to bring out something fresh out of the characters. Aoi Hana as usual does this very subtly and full of emotions. In this episode, we see the play Wuthering Heights being performed by Yasuko and the others. I really have been watching too many cheesy soap operas lately, because this episode really surprised me at how well everything went, and yet there were so many emotions at the end.
Basically, nearly everything in the play goes smoothly, aside from a few pieces of clothing and books that aren’t at the place they should be, and when everything is over the teacher that Yasuko had her crush on congratulates her, which makes show a rather embarrassing side of her, which is something that Fumi happens to oversee. In your average anime, you’d usually expect Fumi to run away and refuse to talk to anyone, but interestingly enough the two of them were able to talk just fine after that: Fumi is clearly hurt when she found out that Yasuko still has feelings on her past crush, but both of them understand that it’s just something from the past.
There’s also this scene in which Yasuko claims that she dislikes the character of Catherine in Wuthering Heights. Well, I don’t know the full details of the Wuthering Heights novel, but Catherine seemed to be a passionate, wild and mischievous girl, who lead both her and Heathcliff to their doom. It’s interesting how in the same way, Kyouko actually looks up to her due to her strong will. They both have totally different ways in which they relate to her character, and it also signified the distance between the two of them, since Kyouko doesn’t know what happened in Yasuko’s past with her teacher.
And on a side-note, this series has something with hair. In every episode, you can see someone playing around with someone else’s hair. I like this though: it shows that hair is more than just brightly coloured stuff on top of people’s heads that waves elegantly in the wind to give off the air of good animation. I especially liked the animation of Catherine as she played the part. It’s much better to have a bit of a messy animation and movement, rather than clean art and a bunch of still frames.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]> 
Watching a series like Nadia is interesting, if only because of the place it takes up in the history of the adventure genre. It’s based on the novel 20000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, who was one of the pioneers of the science fiction genre and wrote about aeroplanes and submarines before they were even invented. The visuals are clearly inspired by Laputa Castle in the Sky, one of Ghibli’s earliest classics, and you can also see traces of the awesome Mysterious Cities of Gold. In its turn, you can see its influence amongst great future adventure series as Bonen no Xamdou, Blue Submarine No06 and of course Ashita no Nadja. Amongst these excellent works, Nadia obviously doesn’t stand out as the greatest adventure ever, but nevertheless it’s an excellent series and a proof of Gainax’ ambition.
Nadia starts out as an historical series in the year 1889 and shows the two lead characters (two kids named Jean and Nadia) as they are chased by what at first sight seems to be the prototype for Team Rocket. Gradually though, this series gains more and more depth, and the setting develops into something truly epic, and a great look at how science fiction would have been more than a century ago. We gradually get to see more and more of the back-story of the world that this series plays in, which really becomes increasingly more interesting as the series goes on.
Throughout the series, we get to see a wide variety of situations, as we see Jean and Nadja travel on aeroplanes, hot air balloons, robots, the Nautilus Submarine of which the novel 20000 Leagues Under the Sea has become famous for, and much more. There’s also an entire arc that takes a step back from being epic, and instead has the lead characters stranded on a desert island for about eight episodes, with the focus being much more on “slice of life” and trying to survive on that desert island. While it will probably be boring for those who are watching this series for its action, but these episode did a great job of fleshing out and developing the characters.
But what great action this series has! Consider that this series aired in 1990, it looks like no other TV-series that aired before. Hideki Anno did a great job in creating a TV-version of the Ghibli-esque graphics, in the days that Hayao Miyazaki was really at his most prolific. The series has a excellent selection of rich and colourful character-designs and other graphics, and while you can see that the drawings in this series were still done by hand, the animation is surprisingly smooth and detailed.
There unfortunately are a bunch of flaws that hold this series back from calling itself among the greatest adventure series out there. Especially the villains of this series just are hardly fleshed out. The major villain is your typical evil mastermind who wants to take over the world, and every single one of his subordinates has the personality of a paper bag. It’s very hard to take these guys seriously and consider them a serious threat, even though they’re usually competent at their jobs. I think that it’s also because of this that the ending contains a bunch of weird Deus ex Machina that just seemed to have been inserted to wrap up the story. Also, Nadia may have been a bit too often a damsel in distress, especially in the first half of the series.
At times the show is a bit hard to watch, because the barrier between men and women forms a major theme for especially the lead couple, but most of the important characters end up nicely developed by the end. Nothing memorable, but this development does makes sure for a bunch of really charming scenes in which this development comes together. And a honorable mention has to go to King, the animal side-kick who proved that subtlety and GAR do go together.
Well, talk about a different atmosphere in this episode. For once, nobody died and instead we’ve now come to fleshing out the characters, with Shannon, Jessica and Kanon being the first. What the hell is going on is still pretty much a mystery, but we did get quite a few new answers to what went on. Not the most spectacular episode, but I liked it a lot.
So right now we’ve either moved to the past, or a third universe. We either have ourselves a non-linear storyline like Baccano or Touka Gettan, or this series really is like Higurashi which resets itself every time Beatrice kills everyone (or lets everyone kill everyone), just in the way that Higurashi went. My suspicion is the latter, though. Beatrice is known as the “eternal witch” who likes to put people through eternal suffering. But then again that does raise the question of why she’s resetting in the first place when her goal simply seems to be regaining her powers and ruling over the island.
In this episode, it’s also revealed that Kanon and Shannon are siblings, or at least, Kanon referred to Shannon as his older sister. I could be mistaken in this because kids have a tendency to refer to anyone as older sisters or aunts. We also learn that they are the only two who can see Beatrice, which seems to suggest that either in the past or in this universe Beatrice has yet to say hello to Maria.
This episode was mostly about explaining Kanon’s deep-seated grudge at his position as a servant. He and Shannon both started out as furniture who fell in love with a member of the Ushinomiya family (for Kanon, this was Jessica). Shannon accepted Beatrice’s help and therefore got to date George without any problems. Kanon however, was different and refused Beatrice because she he believed that she kept toying around with the lives of others. So saying that people can’t date furniture in the first few episodes turned out to have been a bit of a rejection to Beatrice.
Jessica in the meantime very much reminds me of Mion: she’s supposed to be the heir of an important family, and yet when she is with her friends she puts up a completely different character. Perhaps she also has a twin in the same fashion.
This is also something seemingly unimportant that caught my eye, but with this series in which everything seems to be relevant, perhaps it’ll turn into an important clue later on: why do all of the direct heirs of the Ushinomiya family have just one child? Is this also something that was dictated by grandfather? And why is Maria the only one who doesn’t match the ages of the others? Did something happen with her parents in the past that caused them to go against Kinzou?
Rating: * (Good)]]> 
Yeah yeah, I know. I’m blogging another moe series. But seriously, the second episode took like what… FOUR WEEKS to get subbed? Talk about the dark horse of the season: that’s the kind of release schedule you’d expect from your average World Masterpiece Theatre or Osamu Dezaki series, not a show about lots of moe schoolgirls…
But yeah, that’s pretty much why I decided to blog this series: because of the lack of subs I’ve been following this series raw and I like it a lot, but the dialogue turned out to be surprisingly difficult for a series that’s about a bunch of 15-year-old schoolgirls and has no plot whatsoever. By writing about it, I hope to be able to catch more of the countless jokes and details that the creators threw in it. My Japanese is far from perfect, so do note that I could make mistakes here and there.
The first half of this episode starts with the GA members handing in some assignments, in which they had to design items that people use every day. Nozaki first came with a vaccuum cleaner, Tomokane took way too much creative freedom in creating a UFO, while Yamaguchi created a cup (which she ironically used to fake a cup she previously knocked over). Yamaguchi and Nozaki obviously get the advice to be a bit more creative. In the next round, Yamaguchi comes with a bunny-shaped cellphone, while Tomokane comes in with a desk. In the next round, Nozaki delivers a copying machine, with Tomokane comes with a bunch of cheap ideas, like pasting her previous desk below a bunch of bookcases. And a desk whose drawers have eyes. Noda in the meantime rips off some of Tomokane’s ideas throughout the sketch. A running theme throughout that sketch was Yamaguchi knocking over the teacher’s cups over and over, so in the end she delivers a cup warmer.
The next part of the episode was about the Nozaki’s birthday. Since she didn’t announce it, nobody could prepare anything for her. Tomokane comes with a hastily drawn gift token (I hope that that’s the right word for it in English). Yamaguchi gave her a picture book. Oomichi and Noda meanwhile organize a small birthday party after classes, in one of the art club’s empty classrooms, it seems, in which they all have a drink. The subject then turns over to these drinks and some word puns that only the Japanese can pull off (like wondering who it was who hit Fruits Punch).
The rest of this episode was about the strange other art club that took up most of the third episode. It’s very strange, because whenever they pop up, the rest of the series also completely changes and becomes much more that of a traditional slice of life series about these people. I still find it strange that this series advertises itself as the “GA Art Design Club”, and yet we’ve already spent more than an entire episode to these guys…
Anyway, the second half of the episode starts with them simply cleaning up their clubroom and getting rid of the stuff that they don’t use anymore (including a strange doghouse that the club-president was sleeping in). The president (I believe her name was Awara Chikako) is pretty much the oddball of that club, and obviously tries to get away from having to clean. When she does end up helping out (as in, ordering everyone around), she finds a book back that she thought she had long lost. In the same process, Homera finds a bunch of soda cans that turn out to be more than ten years old.
The next part of this episode starts when “Same-sensei” (who apparently got her nickname when she first introduced herself in front of a class and got too scared to speak straight) comes in the room, searching for her colleague. The next teacher to visit the room is Kotoma, who seems to be looking for some past work that is stored in the clubroom. For some reason, some of the older members are shocked by this and start fearing for their lives. It turns out that these works are stored in a particularly dirty room that doesn’t seem to have been cleaned for many years.
It seems that it once belonged to a yet another art club, which seems to be long gone now. Awara then comes with a story of how once someone was chased by a ghost when he tried to enter it, and that ghost somehow turned into a strange mannequin that’s in the clubroom.
We then see a bit of back-story on how the doghouse came to be, as it turned out to have been an attempt to make Awara stop whining. It’s broken now anyway, as Awara brings the remains to the local garbage collection place. The episode then ends with the GA club, as they try to go home as it’s raining outside. The ED this time seems to have been sung by Horie Yui, who voices Nozaki. This is one of these series in which all of the main voice actress get to have a go at singing the ED, which makes me wonder what the creators are going to do with the next episode: are they just going to start with Miyuki Sawashiro, who voiced the first one, or are they going to try something different?
In any case, I know that this is not a summary blog. There was a time in which I would write an incredibly detailed summary for every single series that I was blogging, but after a while it just became way too tiring to continue doing that and so I instead changed the focus of this blog on storytelling. Nevertheless, having one show to summarize each week shouldn’t be that much of a problem, and I had a lot of fun writing this entry and figuring out what’s going on. This episode wasn’t the best we’ve seen from this show right now, and the characters have a long way to go before they become as good and enjoyable as Hyakko, which I didn’t end up blogging, but I like the focus on art. I like how the characters in this series already know how to draw, and are instead now looking at expressing their creativity and putting them to practical use. It’s very close to my personal interests, and I don’t think that any similar series is going to pop up any time soon. And besides, it has the director from Les Miserables. Is there any way you can go wrong with that? ^^;
Rating: * (Good)]]> 
Oh god. It’s been a while since I sat through such a mind-numbingly boring series as this one. Usually I obviously try to avoid these kinds of shows, but for the Melody of Oblivion I was lured in because I like a good mind-screw once in a while. What I got instead was a good sleep. You know, with series as Kurokami you can at least watch them for the good action, but Melody of Oblivion simply has nothing that makes it even worth watching, aside from a few weird ideas that never really get anywhere.
This series plays in a world in which humanity has lost a big war against the so-called “monsters”, which is something that the narrator is very keen on reminding us of in case we forget. The problems start right with the main character: even for your typical male lead, this guy has the personality of a potato. It’s more fun watching paint dry than to watch this guy on screen. On top of that, he probably has one of the flimsiest back-story I have ever seen. The first episode of this series simply starts off with him as a regular high-school boy, through the course of the first arc he gets his obligatory super powers (shounen series), and then he simply leaves on a journey. Why? We never know. In fact, he spends the entire freaking series fighting for no possible reason.
This might be excused if you know, he didn’t have anything better to do and just was fighting monsters to kill the time (which seems to be the case for nearly all of the side-characters in this series by the way), but no: he has a female love interest. Romance can be a beautiful thing: it can enrich characters and make you care for them. However, when the characters in question are a bunch of cardboard boxes, the romance simply becomes way too obnoxious. The lead female really isn’t much better than her male counterpart: she has no power of herself, so she continuously plays either the damsel in distress, or the love interest that watches from the side-lines while doing nothing but worrying. Their relationship becomes even more painful to watch when they’re together, simply because the male lead is such an incredible pussy that he refuses any advances that the lead female makes on him and instead he goes out fighting monsters (which obviously leads to lots of useless and pointless angst).
Well then, the series consists out of a number of arcs (eight in total), which feature the two lead characters arriving into a town under the influence of a so-called “monster agent”. These arcs however, all look like each other and do way too little to stand out, or even be interesting. They drag on for way too long. The monster-agents themselves are also incredibly dull and stereotypical bad guys who all fit in the same mold. The only one I even remotely liked was the Bobcat guy, but that may also be because he got the least amount of airtime out of all of them.
If I had to mention a highlight, then I’d have to say episode 25, but that’s more in the sense of “so bad it’s good” than that it actually redeemed some of the boredom. It’s a hilariously bad episode, with more recycled material than actual new footage (heck, I even suspect that there were just two minutes of new footage in total in that episode); it’s a completely nonsensical episode in which the creators pull all sorts of idiotic plot twists out of their asses, but it was the only episode of the entire series that was really what it was meant to be: entertaining.
As for the mind-screws that this series seems to be known for: it really isn’t that special. All this series has is one of the worst soundtracks out there, along with a bunch of weird images that make no sense and are just inserted for the heck of it. The series is completely nonsensical, hardly anything has a satisfactory background (the explanations that are there don’t make any sense more often than not) and the series closes off with an incredible amount of plot-holes still left open. You can see that the creators wanted to do something different with this series, and in a way I appreciate that, but at the same time they forgot one important thing: make this series interesting.