Genius Party – 05 – Limit Cycle Review – 72,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Genius Party gathers many different people with many different talents to create shorts. With Limit Cycle, this is monologues. It’s basically 20 minutes of monologue about religious and philosophical topics. Its director is Hideki Futamura, who isn’t really a big name. He worked on a bunch of the Animatrix shorts, did key animation for movies as Junkers Come Here, Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust and Perfect Blue, and he directed Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. He’s definitely someone with talent, and here he finally gets to prove again what he can do.

In these twenty minutes of nothing but talking however, he makes the classic mistake that you can do with these kinds of shorts: he forgets to put anything into context. What we have right now is some random guy who rambles on about life, death, immortality, religion, et cetera. I just had one question on my mind, though: “what’s the point?” Why is this guy delving into philosophy? What does he want to achieve?

You see, the thing is that right now you have a string of dialogue of a level that even I could have come up with. Just give me enough time to quote a bunch of famous philosophers who talked about life, immortality and religion, and voila! This isn’t intelligent, this is just plain random. I think that what the director should have done is that he should have looked more at good examples, in which endless strings of dialogues and monologues do work. Most notably, if he watched Mamoru Oshii’s short on Twillight Q, or Mouryou no Hako, he would have gotten a good idea of what he needed to do to put some meaning behind these words. And give them impact.

Still, a complete waste of time this isn’t, because thankfully the visuals are utterly gorgeous. Along with Dimension Bomb, Limit Cycle definitely has the best aesthetics of all the shorts of Genius Party, and that has to say something. The compositions, character-designs, use of colours, and filters, all come together wonderfully along with great character-designs. If anything, the images were much more thought-provoking than the dialogue!

Anyway, to wrap up Genius Party: it really was a great opportunity to see so many different talents and styles, together in one package. These compilation movies of different short stories have been there before, but never in this scale, with so many different movies and I can only hope that Studio 4C (or any other studio for that matter) is going to continue making more of these, because I really enjoyed sitting through even the lesser ones.

As for my favourite ones, my top three consists of Dimension Bomb, Toujin Kit and Baby Blue. These three are definite works of art and really succeeded in what they set out to do. The other shorts also all have their own merits in their own single way.

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 6/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 7/10

Ashita no Nadja Review – 90/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews



“Nadja Applefield grows up in an orphanage, but on her thirteenth birthday she finds out that her mother is still alive, and possibly even a noble. Thus she joins a band of travelling performers and travels all across Europe to find her.” That doesn’t exactly sound like a top-tier shoujo series, now does it? Ashita no Nadja indeed takes the format of a classic shoujo adventure, and makes it downright awesome. I am really surprised with how actually GOOD this series turned out to be.

I originally decided to check out this series on recommendations of Wyrdwad, but I put it on hold around episode 23, discouraged by how the final 13 episodes haven’t been subbed yet. My impression of this series at that point was a fun adventure series across Europe. It’s a fun watch, in which Nadja meets all sorts of interesting people who get the chance to tell their story. Most episodes are light in nature and a lot of fun to watch. It wasn’t anything special at that point, it was episodic, but the individual stories all have their individual charms.

Anyway, eventually I got too impatient and just finished the rest of the series raw (so yeah, don’t bother asking for subs of the final 13 episodes: they’re unfortunately not there yet, but they SO deserve to be!), and with that I was blown away completely by the strength, GUTS and charms of the main storyline of this series. I was so expecting your average cheesy shoujo storyline with stereotypically incompetent villains and a lot of time spent on the lead characters being incredibly indecisive. None of that returns here: instead we get a story where always something interesting is going on and where characters manage to show their utter best in terms of character-development.

And the villains! This series really has some of the best villains out there, who are nothing like your average bunch of incompetent idiots who can never get anything right. The main villains for this series all are a bunch of excellent actors: they’ve created a scenario in their head and stick to it, and time and time again they manage to foil the lead characters’ plans and happiness (which usually is the other way around!). Eventually, this series evolves into a battle of wits and emotions between Nadja and the main villains, which involves an intricate plan that looks simple (and isn’t of the ridiculously complicated variant like you see in shows as Death Note), yet incredibly hard to find any holes in it.

This series seriously has a bunch of incredible script-writers, who have the talent to make a solid and engaging story of just about everything. As an episodic series, I often found myself doubting whether an episode was going to turn out all-right based on its premise, especially around the middle parts of the series. However, nearly every single episode delivered with solid build-up, excellent characterization and a conclusion that felt intelligent, believable and yet pushed the characters further in terms of character-development. Even the small side-characters who only appear in one episode have multiple sides to them and feel fresh.

With all these praises I’m singing for this series, I unfortunately also have to admit that it has a flaw, and a really big one at that. Wherever Nadja travels in Europe, wherever she goes, she always meets up with the right people. Even though European cities are incredibly big, she always meets up with recurring characters if they happen to be in the neighbourhood, she also conveniently runs into a bunch of nobles that she immediately befriends, (including one of them that becomes her love interest).

This really happens a lot, throughout the entire series. Still, I guess that the creators had good intentions when they used them: they don’t use these plot-holes just for cheap laughs, but instead to allow characters to tell their story, to allow for more and better character-development so that we as an audience get to know more about the cast. There only was one plot twist in the series that really felt cheap and rushed. Apart from that they can all be forgiven. Still, they can become a major reason for some people to get turned off by the rest of the storyline. It all depends on your suspense of disbelief. For me, I indeed acknowledge that these sorts of coincidences are a bit lazy and convenient, but the rest of the series is just so damn good that I really stopped caring about them at one point.

Overall, this series was in a way just like Glass Mask 2005 and Kaleido Star for me: all three are 50 episoded Shoujo Series of Awesomeness. They all stand out in their amazing characterization and rivalry that goes waaaay beyond what you normally expect from anime. All of them are very well paced and truly excellent in the thing they do, with a storyline that just keeps evolving and time and time again they come with unexpected situations. They all involve performing (Maya acts, Sora does acrobatics, Nadja dances) and all three of them try to reach the hearts of their audience by performing, all in their own way. All three series are highly underrated (with two of them not even fully subbed, for God’s sake), but perhaps the most important thing: all three of them have the power to reach an audience beyond the usual shoujo fans, and are a true example of the great things that the genre is capable of. Of the three, Ashita no Nadja is the most light-hearted one, but make no mistake that the story cannot get really dark at times, and the light and dark parts combine wonderfully.

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

Genius Party – 03 – Deathtic 4 Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Most of Genius Party’s animation is hand drawn or animated with cells. Deathtic 4 instead is nearly entirely CG, and feels the most like a platform to try out new CGI techniques. On top of that, the characters are all zombies and talk in some strange kind of Scandinavian-ish language that nobody can understand. The director is Shinji Kimura, a guy who mostly is involved with background art for big hitting movies as Akira, Angel’s Egg, My Neighbor Totoro, Steam Boy, Tekkkon Kinkreet and Prime Rose, and he also took care of the art of the first short of the Gotham Knight movie.

So as expected, the background art is very good. I didn’t notice it at first, but the he designed a very original city that at the same time doesn’t distract from the real art in the foreground. You can see that a lot of time went in designing every single building. On the opposite side though, the story and characters feel among the dullest of what Genius Party has to offer. It’s straightforward, there’s no real symbolism or depth to the story. It just feels flat.

But this is really the power of Genius Party: because it has directors with so many different backgrounds, there’s lots of stuff that you can see. Baby Blue had a director who is excellent at characterization, and so that short had the best characters. Instead shorts like this one, Toujin Kit and Wanwa the Doggy that are directed by animators and background artists have a very distinctive visual style instead. This is why I’m a fan of these compilation movies, and I can only hope that in the future, more of them are going to be released.

On a side-note, anyone know what happened to Le Manchot melomane?

Storytelling: 7/10
Characters: 7/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 8/10

Guin Saga – 15

by psgels, posted in Guin Saga



Haha! To think that some of the best romance of the season (only surpassed by Phantom) comes from not a slice-of-life series, not a full fledged romance show, nor a drama, but instead a series that advertises itself as an epic fantasy series. I did not see that coming, but what makes the romance in this episode stand out is the fact that it’s completely void of any wimpy characters and for once kissing becomes something normal, rather than something sacred that should only happen once or twice.

My biggest surprise here is that Istvan and Linda have become a couple now. I especially loved the look on Remus while they were making out: for once it’s not the look of some siscon (which seems to be really common in just about every anime that has siblings of different sexes and similar ages!), but rather it’s the look of someone who dislikes inefficiency, and would wish that the two of them started to think about things that mattered.

And of course, Guin turns out to be fine, but what interests me is that even he didn’t remember what the heck it was that happened to him: he just… woke up at that island, nothing more. It probably has to do with where he came from, but apart from that I have no clue of what went on.

There was also plenty of eye candy in this episode. The island had some wonderful designs, and the newly introduced characters (are they? or did I forget about their introduction) all look great, with even the unimportant side characters having distinctive designs. The fight scene this episode also rocked, and for once it didn’t look rushed, which also was a plus. I’m really excited about this series right now.

So, how about a second season?
Rating: ** (Excellent)
Lots of romance, plot development and eye candy. Exactly what this show is good at!

Cross Game – 15

by psgels, posted in Cross Game



Okay, so this as an episode that set up the next baseball match, but boy was it an exciting one. The nature of the upcoming match is going to be much more than the first one: the fate of both teams are at stake, one of the coaches is going to get fired afterwards, if the Farm Team loses it’s going to be disbanded, Aoba has offered to become the Farm Team’s Right Center and at the same time Azuma isn’t going to be playing. With this, it can really be anyone’s game.

It’s a shame that the character pages of Myanimelist are evil and full of spoilers (seriously, a bit of spoiler warnings would have been preferable!), I already received enough hints to know how that match is going to end when I tried to look up the names of a few of the characters a couple of weeks ago, and besides I also don’t think that it’s going to be that hard to predict how the match is going to end anyway. As long as the creator keep the length of that match a bit under control (and not like last time stretch a simple match for more than three full episodes…), it’s going to be very interesting to see how it’s going to play out.

And in any case, this was an excellent episode for the character. It really allowed us to see some different sides of theirs. I loved those little touches of the old guy, noticing that it’s the task of the manager to do a team’s laundry. That guy turn out to be the Farm manager’s grandfather, by the way. At this point, I have no idea what the point of this guy in the story is going to be, especially since there have been plenty of hints that this guy is obsessively hiding something.

KouxAoba also continued in this episode. It’s always small things that show them how much Wakaba is still affecting them. This time, it’s the remark that Kou made at a certain point, quoting how she would say that she’d rather die than give up, which has him worried. The chemistry between the two of them really revolves a lot around Kou taking light sayings like that seriously. Since Wakaba died in such a simple accident, it’s indeed no wonder that they’re like that.

I also like Miki a lot. I at first thought that he was just going to be another one of those stereotypical evil teammates that needs to be overcome, but the past few episodes have shown that he definitely has his heart in the right place. Despite his rather serious look, he’s one who wants to play baseball for the fun and teamwork.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
The introduction of the next baseball match and lots of potential character-development

Konnichiwa Anne – 15

by psgels, posted in Konnichiwa Anne


With this episode, I understand a bit more what’s wrong with this series: Marysville. Every single character introduced in the Marysville arc is dull, cliche and boring, and that’s why the previous episode was especially bad, because it was entirely centred around one of these characters. The Thomas family however, is a different story. They are the ones who make this series. With this, Anne has also shown that she doesn’t have the strength to carry this series on its own, and she really needs the Thomas family for this to make the series complete.

So, this episode starts during a lunch-break, in which Mildred is showing off her huge box of lunch. Anne’s lunch is small, so Randolf offers her a bit of his, but she declines. Mildred then mentions that for the upcoming pick nick she’s going to have an even bigger lunch. Anne obviously wants to join the picnic, but for that she needed to have donated to the church like everyone else has.

So, the question becomes how to get money in order to go to the picnic. Randolf comes with the idea of trying to search in a crow’s nest, but Anne thinks that it’s a better idea to ask Johanna. Johanna however, has just had a bad day because the well is giving trouble. She obviously declines giving money, since she believes that God isn’t there for the penniless.

Horace and Edward meanwhile are fascinated by a local tortoise salesman. When Bert gets back, he smells like tobacco again and Johanna scolds him again. He then comes with the news that he’s managed to get a promotion (or something similar that’s going to give them a bit of extra money), and his salary is going to triple in the process. Anne and Johanna are obviously elated when they learn of the news. They spend the dinner trying to figure out what they’re going to do with the money. When Bert asks Anne what she wants to do, she obviously answers that she wants to go to the picnic. This results into a fight between him and Johanna, who believes it to be a waste of money. Dinner ends with all four kids sitting outside because they kept yelling. At that point, Anne mentions how perhaps they can get stuff from crows nests.

A bit later, Johanna comes outside with the news that Bert has promised to stop smoking so that she can go to the picnic. Anne obviously is elated when she finds out. That evening Anne and Johanna spend a bit of time talking on how Johanna has never been on a picnic, and how she’s forgotten by now whether or not she ever wanted to go. Bert meanwhile gets the “brilliant” idea to wager the money he got in horse races.

The next day, Anne prepares to go to the picnic while Bert tells her that he’s going to bring her to the church, as he himself was planning to go to the horse races. Johanna however overhears him, and the two of them start fighting as usual. They get interrupted by Horace and Edward, who are stuck in one of the trees. Apparently they thought that crows really kept expensive things in their nests, but when they started climbing they got too scared and fell off. Bert manages to save them, but he hurts his shoulder in the process. He is okay in the end, but he can’t lift heavy things for a week. Yeah, that’s going to help with his work.

Everyone is down, aside from Anne, who still starts fantasizing about going to the picnic, but she quickly stops when Horace and Edward start crying about their tortoise. Bert then just shrugs everything off, and promises Johanna that he’s going to work hard to make up for the work he missed, and even for Johanna’s part. The family then spends the rest of the day picnicking at their own location, since Bert doesn’t need to go to work anyway. Anne then gets to see the sea for the first time and the episode ends.

The Marysville arc has been quite boring, though. It’s much lighter, but in most WMT series the slice of life parts are just as interesting to watch, but thanks to those brats at school it’s getting a bit tedious to watch. Still, in this episode we finally got a bit more foreshadowing of what’s going to happen in the future, and I just hope that once Anne moves to her second family, the annoying brats are going away too. I’d really wish to believe that, but the fact that they’re in the ED while Elisa wasn’t does worry me a bit.
Rating: * (Good)
Finally the focus is back at the Thomas family.

Genius Party – 10 – Wanwa the Doggy Review – 77,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



Well… what can I say…?

Wanwa the Doggy is… different. It’s… I’m still not sure what it is; all I know that it was really, really weird. The one who brought us this abomination was Shinwa Ohira, an animator. He worked on the animation of various big-hitting movies, but also on stuff like FLCL, Gosenzosama Banbanzai, Gundam and a few television series here and there. But none of it really matches up in terms of weirdness to… whatever the hell it was that I just watched.

The best way to describe these thirteen minutes are as a very bad acid trip. Shinwa Ohira just continues to throw weird stuff at the screen throughout the entire 13 minutes of this short, one scene more nonsensical than the other. I guess that it was about a kid’s worries as his mother is having a baby, but even children don’t have that kind of imagination.

The animation was as good as usual : there was a lot of movement, and you can see that the creators used lots of imagination for nearly all of the visuals here. Just don’t ask where the hell this inspiration came from…

Storytelling: 8/10
Characters: 7/10
Production-Values: 9/10
Setting: 7/10

Full Metal Alchemist – Brotherhood – 15

by psgels, posted in Full Metal Alchemist - Brotherhood



And so, we’ve finally moved on to the second part and the point at which the two FMA-series have turned completely different. At this point in the original series, the creators were busy to turn Lust and Scar into nice characters. Brotherhood instead makes the setting a whole lot bigger by introducing a Chinese-inspired country that lies next to Amestris, which is apparently what the country that Ed and Al live in is called. It also shocked me how small their country actually is, especially because there are several other huge countries that surround it, including a huge country called Drachma (as in… the Greek currency?).

Anyway, this episode introduces a bunch of new characters from ChinaXing: Scar ends up with a young girl who can heal people and her miniature panda, while Ed runs into one of the country’s many princes along with two of his bodyguards, who are searching for the Philosopher’s Stone as well. This episode was mostly filled with their introduction, and a fight scene between those bodyguards and Ed and Al (which happen to be an old guy and a teenaged girl by the way… not exactly the most logical choice for bodyguards for a prince, are they?). It was a pretty fun episode, but nothing special.

This episode also had a new OP and ED, though both of them aren’t really my tastes. I’m not really a fan of J-pop and J-rock, and these two songs didn’t make it any different. For me, they didn’t really set themselves apart from all of the other OPs and EDs out there.

Rating: (Enjoyable)
Introduction episode for the characters from Xing. Finally this show is 100% different from the original series!

Canaan – 02

by psgels, posted in Canaan



Okay, so this season I’m going to be blogging Canaan. It’s supposed to be a short series, and I’m not going to be expecting the most amazing things from it, but instead what I want from this series is the things it did well in its first episode: fun and well directed action scenes. For that, it’s going to have to correctly develop and characterize the cast, have a storyline that provides interesting and creative situations and a setting that’s dynamic enough to prevent from all those scenes from looking the same.

Canaan doesn’t seem to be a true adaptation, but rather a sequel. This is a plus, since the creators now aren’t bound by the length of the original source material, and instead can go in their own way and plan the story over 13 episodes accordingly. With this, they should be able to wrap up everything properly.

I haven’t read the original source material, and I don’t really think that I’m going to do so in the future. I’m not sure for how many others this goes, but I do hope that the creators take account of the ones who are unfamiliar with 428, rather than assuming that everyone already knows everyone’s back-story. And at the same time they’re obviously going to have to include this back-story, without boring the ones who did bother to read through 428.

I’m interested in the director, because this guy did Sword of the Stranger, which was a great movie in terms of action. If he can apply the same thing here for Canaan, it’s going to be a pretty enjoyable series while it lasts. The guy behind the seres composition wrote scripts for Simoun, has written the progress of series as True Tears, Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club, but unfortunately also a bunch of mediocre series, most notably Vampire Knight… I hope that with Canaan, we get to see his good side. And hey, the music is done by the composer of Noein and Phantom. That’s a plus too.

In this episode, we learn that for some reason, Maria and Minoru are now targeted, because they photographed something they shouldn’t have. Probably those strange infected people back then. The nature of the disease still is a bit of a mystery, because this episode shows an old guy with that strange mark on his face who can safely move in the open air.

My biggest fear right now with this series is that the creators are overplaying the chemistry between Maria and Minoru a bit. I can see them getting annoying quite fast if something doesn’t happen.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
Nice enough action sequence, but nothing special yet.

Genius Party – 11 – Toujin Kit Review – 82,5/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews, Genius Party



While there are other quiet shorts in Genius Party, Toujin Kit definitely feels to be the most down-to-earth no-nonsense movie of the bunch. At the end of the thirteen minutes, there is no doubt what the story is about: there’s hardly any deep symbolism, there is no over top action, and instead Toujin Kit is what it is, and because of this it definitely has its merits.

The director for this one is Tatsuyuki Tanaka, who is one of the lesser known names to participate in Genius Party. He’s one of Studio 4C’s key animators, and also worked on a few random other series. In Toujin Kit however, he definitely demonstrates that he belongs among the big guys. I remember Anonymous’s comments on the animation of Eden of the East versus Dimension Bomb, and after Toujin Kit I’m really starting to understand what he meant. Because of the attention to detail in today’s animation, animators are forced to cut a lot of corners in animation.

Toujin Kit has none of this: here characters are animated: they move realistically, and hardly ever stand completely still. The frame-rate is incredibly smooth, and the rest of this short is on purpose kept very simple and down to earth, in order to not have any cheap distractions from the animation. In fact, there isn’t even a soundtrack: just some background noises.

The characters and story however aren’t dull in any way either. Because they’re so well animated, they’re easy to connect to and well likable, despite the fact that none of them are really nice people. Some of their motivations are well explained, the others are easy to guess or imagine and together they form a very complete little story.

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