Mobile Suit Gundam 00 – 47

by psgels, posted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00



Short Synopsis: A-Laws gathers up all of its forces for an all-out attack on the CBs.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
I keep expecting this series to become a trainwreck… and it doesn’t. Seriously, there was so much potential for these final episodes to delve into a scream-fest, but aside from some slight annoyances (Louise mostly) the finale of this series hasn’t become a total disaster at all. This episode too was again a very good one, strangely enough.

Finally the character-development comes together a bit, and instead of the scream-fest in the veins of Zeta Gundam that I was expecting, the finale seems to be heading much more in the style of Gundam Wing. While there is no huge battleship to crash into the earth (unless Veda decides to plummet into the earth somehow), it basically was a string of very solid all-out battles together with character-development that instead of spiralling out of control made the cast come more together. Exactly what was happening in this episode.

The ending of this episode was also really interesting, with Regetta killing Ribbons, but then again: this remains Sunrise. Ribbons really sounds like a guy who wouldn’t die even if you killed him, and although the idea of Regetta being the new main villain, I first want to see Ribbons really dead in the next episode.

In any case, this series still can go anywhere. It can still be the series to restore the faith in the Gundam Franchise after the likes of Gundam Seed Destiny, or it can just become one total disaster. And I really hope that it’s going to be the former.

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 22

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Natoru’s powers get out of control.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
A building-up episode, but oh my god, what an ominous one! Finally things make sense, but at the same time we can expect a really dark finale for this series. Ah, I should have known that Kazuki Akane would attempt to screw time at one point. This episode is where it happens.

I think that the OVA (Yay! There’s going to be an OVA) is going to shed light on exactly how this happened, and going to tell exactly what happened with Natoru on the day that Birdy lost her caretaker (Oh my god, this is what I realize as I’m typing this: her mystery savior was indeed Natoru’s grown up version! Of course!), and it’s going to show how exactly he and his father were screwed over. This drove him to seek power, and this power is now biting him in the behind.

In this episode he manages to save himself by pulling a time-warp, but the big problem with it is that it happens completely beyond his control. He really seems to have signed a contract with the devil somehow. In the meantime, the creators are also making sure of every opportunity to show a bit of history of he characters. When he went to earth, he seems to have joined a regular high school, while two of the beastmen that he’s supposed to kill have known each other for a long time, it seems.

Seriously, this is one of these episodes that may not make much of an impact when I watched it compared to the others of this series, but now that I’m thinking back to everything that happens, it only becomes better and better. It’s been a very long time since I ran into an episode that had this effect on me. And oh my god… this series remains just amazing.

Genji Monogatari Sennenki – 08

by psgels, posted in Genji Monogatari Sennenki



Short Synopsis: After a six-month period of mourning, Genji returns to the palace for a visit.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Okay, so while lots of stuff happened, this mostly was a building up episode. First we get Aoi’s funeral, in which Genji, his father and step-brother say goodbye to her. He gets visited by her in her dreams, and in the meantime we see that Lady Rokujou has found out that she’s been unconsciously killing the women Genji slept with, though it seems that she’s not willing to accept the fact that she created the murderous ghost. Six months after Aoi’s death, Genji returns to the main palace in order to spend some time with the emperor and that’s where he sees Murasaki back, who seems to have grown up from when we last saw her. It really makes it difficult to keep track of all of the different characters when they change faces like that! When I watched this episode for the first time I thought that the little girl that appeared later in this episode was still Murasaki.

But instead it seems that that little girl is a new character that Genji is asked to take care of. If I understood correctly, she seems to be of noble blood, though her mother has died, and Lady Fujitsubo’s brother seems to be her father. Later we see Genji and Murasaki talk for a bit, where it’s interesting to note that Murasaki and the narrator seem to be sharing the same voice actress. Since the original novel was also written by a Murasaki, this seems to be the way of the creators of the anime to give a small tribute to her. The episode ends with Genji making love with Lady Rokujo. I didn’t quite catch the reason why and its implications, but the next episode should shed more light into that.

And since I’ve praised the graphics of this show often enough, I’m going for something different now: the music! It turns out that they also did the soundtrack for xxxHolic, and it’s indeed the same subtle combination between folky songs and modern synthesizers, though the soundtrack of Genji Monogatari is much more dreamy than the one from xxxHolic. Still, it’s a really varied soundtrack: there are so many different songs in here, and yet none of them feels out of place.

Tytania – 20

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: The plan to bust Fan out of prison begins.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Ah, so no Uranibolg this time, but instead this episode focuses on the Fan vs Zalish storyline. The plan wasn’t the most flawless one, but it definitely had enough interesting points. I personally didn’t like how the long-haired guy whose name I forgot at the moment suddenly turned out to have huge 1337-hax0rs skill that were even capable to hack into a prison, but at the same time this again shows how incredibly bad the security of Tytania is: it’s been so long that they ran into someone with the capabilities to challenge them, so when someone skilled does try to hack their facilities they hardly have any countermeasures installed. The prisons as well: they work because everyone’s scared of Tytania, but in the meantime we see Tom and Dick who have been able to fool the system by making it believe that they are too weak for the gravity system.

In the meantime, the upper governments are also screwed up. Because Estrad was so far removed from the centre of Tytania, they never had much problems with them: it was a small planet in which hardly anything happened, so they usually had nothing to fear from Tytania and just lived their ordinary lives without much conflict. That’s why the president was cocky enough to simply deny Fan Hulic to Zalish, resulting in his entire capital blasted to the ground at the end of the episode.

What’s also good is that this episode showed that Fan’s allies can also accomplish their tasks without the help of Fan: it shows that they’re all a bunch of reliable people, rather than a bunch of people who follow Fan’s orders and hardly do anything for themselves. With six episodes left, the finale is about to begin now. I’m curious to see whether the creators can pull this one off.

Tytania – 19

by psgels, posted in Tytania



Short Synopsis: As it turns out: Idris also has a very annoying brother.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Wha, this episode took me by surprise. This definitely was one of the hardest to understand episodes of this series yet, so I hope that I understood everything correctly. Zalish and Fan were completely absent in this episode, and it only focused on the tension between Idris on one side and Jouslain, Lydia and Baruami on the other side.

So because the rulers of Estrade failed at their coup, Idris takes over their duties and pretty much increases his own influence. Someone needs to take over his old duties and that someone becomes his younger brother: Radomorz. Like Zalish did with Alsas, Idris originally attempted to keep his brother as far away as possible because the guy is a total idiot, and indeed the minute he arrives he starts hitting on Lydia and picks a fight with Baruami. What follows is a very nice (and painful) kick from Lydia, Radomorz insulting Baruami’s father and Baruami hitting Radomorz in the face.

This creates a scandal because Radomorz’ rank is much higher. The original punishment for him was to send him to some far away post in the middle of nowhere, but because of Lydia’s testimony (ZOMG, she actually did something useful!) he simply is removed from his post and sent away to the main planet of Uraniborg.

But damn, Ajman scares me. The guy really is obsessed with Lydia for some strange reason: this is the first time where he spoke his mind so clearly, and he defended her letter with a surprising amount of enthusiasm, especially when he usually just sits in his chair and lets the dukes do the thinking. I know that with these noblepeople age doesn’t matter, but it remains wrong for a guy to start chasing a girl who’s more than forty years younger than him…

Still, I have to admit: that kick of Lydia definitely made up for all those episodes in which she didn’t do anything.

Shikabane Hime – 22

by psgels, posted in Shikabane Hime



Short Synopsis: Finally! The cat!
Episode Rating: 9/10 (fantastic)
Amazing! The second season just continues to get better and better! I know I have ranted a lot about the second season so far, but the past few episodes have been utterly incredible! This could very well turn into my favourite Gainax production at this pace. This is EXACTLY what a good shounen series needs to be!

And seriously, if this episode wasn’t horror, then I don’t know anymore. We have a slaughtered group of children, a frog shikabane who brutally eats the corpses of these children, yet another group of children who are nearly crushed by a bunch of exploding cars, Hokuto who brutally kills everyone within her sight by squeezing them to death. Oh my god… you can really see that the creators were in their element when they made this episode.

So in the end, it turns out that Hokuto was simply someone bred to be sacrificed to the gods. That’s why she turned into a shikabane without any grudges, making her a simple killing machine. Makina’s ancestors were the one who killed her, and that’s why she was turned into a Shikabane: to give her a grudge. In the meantime, the cat turns out to be the shikabane of every kid who was slaughtered by Ouri’s mother. It was interesting how they saw him as a companion, rather than someone killed them in the case of Hizuchi.

Those revelations also came surprisingly early: three episodes left and most of the mysteries are gone now. The only thing that I still want to know is the background behind the final two members of the Seven Stars. In the meantime, the end of this episode definitely made all hell break loose. Usually I’d raise an eyebrow again, since this means that the show is going to turn into an even bigger fight-fest than it already was, but this series has surprised me enough times already. The creators really seem to plan to go all out with the show’s finale, and I can’t wait to find out what they have in store!

Michiko e Hatchin – 20

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: Satoshi vs Shinsuke.
Episode Rating: 8,5/10 (Awesome)
Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! This series already was one of my favourites of the currently airing shows, and in the past two episodes it really surpassed itself! While for Casshern Sins I wasn’t sure whether everything would come together in the end, I can be sure for Michiko e Hatchin: it’s going to have an awesome finale! There are so many trumps that it hasn’t played yet, and yet it feels like they can perfectly fit within the final two episodes of this show. At this point, I can say that Michiko e Hatchin has been Manglobe’s best work: Ergo Proxy had pacing issues and Samurai Champloo was a bit meager on its overall storyline, but this time it feels like they’ve done a job without any major flaws. Not to mention that it’s been incredibly fun so far.

This episode really surprised me when it Satoshi took care of Shinsuke and his gang. Especially the way he used his head to completely screw over all of his attackers was awesome, and now he ended up killing someone he grew up with. He originally was portrayed as a heartless bastard, but I really liked it how he did show emotion when he was about to kill Shinsuke. And again we see Michiko and Hatchin split up for more than one episode. Michiko’s parts were also pretty intense.

This series really has something I’ve been looking for a long time now. I think the last series I watched that had it was Shion no Ou: call it the X-factor. Characters that can be awesome no matter what they do. It’s really one of the reasons why I’m still so much into anime. The nicely written series are a nice way to spend time, but the really special series like this one are especially the ones that make it worth it. This is of course something incredibly subjective, but for me this series has been an awesome ride.

Michiko e Hatchin – 19

by psgels, posted in Michiko e Hatchin



Short Synopsis: A trainwreck. Literally!
Episode Rating: 9/10 (fantastic)
Haha! So what if the animation style was completely different from the rest of the series?! This most likely was one of the best episodes of Michiko e Hatchin yet! It’s really awesome that everything is now coming together more than ever. I really have to say that Manglobe did a fantastic job on this episode, and I can only hope that the rest of the series’ finale is going to be as awesome as this!

And MAN! Satoshi seriously is the best villain I’ve seen in a long, long while, and that considering how relatively little airtime he has gotten in the series! Every time he appears, you just know that he’s going to do something evil, and yet he stands so far above 99% of all those “Muaha I’m going to destroy the world because I’m evil!!1!”-villains. This episode makes it even better when it unites the two best characters of this series: Hatchin and Satoshi, with awesome results.

And in the meantime Atsuko pays a visit to Michiko. Ah, so what if it’s forced and directed, it was damn awesome as well: we finally get some real insight into Atsuko’s character. Even when Michiko served in jail, she just kept running after her like a shadow, but in the end she values her as a friend and really intends to help her escape, although this would mean that she’d have to abandon Hiroshi and Hatchin for it. And yet again, Michiko ignores her requests. It turns out that what she wants more than anything else isn’t revenge on Michiko, but instead acknowledgement. She wants Michiko to see her as an equal, and she just keeps failing at it.

And yeah, the animation was screwed up, but nevertheless it looked GREAT. There was lots of movement and interesting camera-angles, perhaps at the expense of a Hatchin that looked less cute than usual. At times like these, I’m grateful for this series’ really weird broadcasting policy: I can hardly wait for that next episode!

Casshern Sins – 22

by psgels, posted in Casshern Sins



Short Synopsis: Casshern is still alive but heavily damaged and Leda attempts to receive eternal beauty from Luna.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Whoa… the voice actors were really having the time of their lives in this episode. Seriously, there was a lot of screaming and moaning in this episode, but those scenes hit me really hard. In any case, it seems that my worries in the previous episode were just completely out of place: although I would love to run into a series some day in which the main protagonist dies before the final episode of the series, Casshern indeed still needs to do some things in this series. The huge beating up he received in the previous episode was meant for his character-development: he’s no longer a senseless killer, and also for some reason, his body’s regenerative abilities have declined a lot, although they’re still there.

And I’m really glad to see how Leda and Dio turned out. I remember noting about eight episodes ago how the two of them were my least favourite characters of this series, but now that they too have received their development, they too have really become part of the amazing cast of this series. This episode really was about the two of them, and worked really well. As Casshern demonstrated: Luna’s blood isn’t perfect. It’s not like you drink it and become immortal with the push of a button. In this episode, Leda only drinks a bit of her blood, though that doesn’t turn out to be enough for 100% regenerative abilities. Remember how Casshern needed to impale her chest in order to drink enough blood and the past two episodes showed that that still wasn’t enough to be purely immortal. I also think that the “immortal”-part of Casshern was just a rumour: Luna’s blood regenerates, but it doesn’t toy with life.

And it also turns out that not every robot is able to take the huge amounts of blood from Luna either. This episode shows that Leda just couldn’t take even a fraction of the blood that Casshern must have drunk from Luna. She doesn’t look dead, but that does explain why Casshern lost his memory: he too received the repercussions of drinking too much of her blood. It’s a bit hard to imagine how this would chain-react into the ruins, though. And I also think that Luna never gave her blood to Dune because he probably already had drunk too much of it, and giving him even more would only ruin him. Luna indeed isn’t a villain, but just someone who is incredibly tormented by her own powers.

But what does that mean for all of the robots who have been saved by Luna before? Did they simply drink a little bit of her blood, that would allow them to heal their wounds, but didn’t do much else? In that case, then it must mean that the robots who were hurting themselves like crazy were just ecstatic: they were too happy that their wounds recovered that they didn’t notice that new ones popped up.

Unfortunately, it really does turn out that this show has only 24 episodes, that means two episodes left. I’m really curious to see whether this series can pull off a great finale. It really has the potential for that, but series as Ghost Hound have shown that lots of build-up doesn’t necessarily mean a perfectly planned ending. At the very least, I want to see a satisfying explanation of where the ruin came from, and why it appeared when Casshern killed Luna. That coloured rock has probably something to do with it. Speaking of which, where the heck has Ouji hidden it?

The Sky Crawlers Review – 85/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


Mamoru Oshii has become famous for his typical style of very convoluted dialogue. For the Sky Crawlers though, he went into a completely different direction from all of his other works. There are no endless dialogues here, the storyline isn’t really that complex, the action scenes don’t last forever: they’re short and to the point, the character-designs are very simple and down to earth and the pacing throughout the entire movie is very quiet. And yet it works like hell.

Basically, the Sky Crawlers tells the story of a bunch of people who are stationed at a small airbase somewhere in Europe in the middle of some war. The movie’s biggest focus is on its storytelling, because my god, the realism! Amidst the dogfights, there is a huge amount of attention to detail spent on how the characters interact with each other. The characters here really feel much more like regular people than in most other anime. Most of the drama in the movie is kept very subtle and meaningful. And that really is the biggest strength of this movie: it’s two hours long, with a story that could also be done in 20 minutes, but because of the incredibly slow pacing it really was able to show off its characters, their strengths and weaknesses in a very quiet and subtle way.

So yeah, obviously you don’t want to watch The Sky Crawlers if you’re looking for an energetic action-flick, although the action scenes that take place whenever the characters fly their planes definitely look beautiful. The CG is really well done, and integrates really well with the 2D art so that it hardly ever feels out of place.

If I had to mention down-sides of the movie, then there are two things that spring to my mind: first of all, there hardly is any background on the characters. Only the lead characters have some (very good, by the way), but the rest of the characters are all just a bunch of random pilots who happen to be in the same airbase. This of course can also be seen as a good thing: you get to know exactly as much about them if you were to meet them in real life. Of course they have their secrets, but they sure as hell aren’t going to blurt them out to any Tom, Dick or Harry.

The other flaw is most of a personal disappointment of me: there really isn’t that much innovation in this movie. It’s probably something really new for Mamoru himself, but I’ve seen the subtle storytelling done before and better. It’s of course really good for this movie to chose this approach, but I felt I saw nearly every aspect in this movie in another anime already before. Kenji Kawai’s soundtrack also pretty much sounded like all of his other soundtracks, and it didn’t really stand out as anything fresh or new from him.

Still, that definitely doesn’t take away that this is a very solid movie. It’s not Mamoru’s best work, but nevertheless consistently good and enjoyable if you like your drama to be subtle.

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