Mission-E – 05

by psgels, posted in Mission-E



Short Synopsis: This time, a woman with a Kansai-ben accent is being chased by the foundation.
Highlights: Fun chase scenes.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Definitely the best episode of Mission-E so far. It really was one of these episodes that was fun to watch, and ended with a powerful cliff-hanger. It was interesting, seeing how Maori at the beginning of the episode got talked to by one of her classmates, and she got invited to spend time together, which she only hastily declined because a sudden mission popped up. That is indeed the perfect way to get yourself separated from the rest of the class.

And god… it really took me a while to figure out that the shades-guy from the foundation was actually Adol Brinberg, simply because his personality probably made the biggest shift out of all the members of the cast of Mission-E. There’s absolutely nothing of his playfulness that was seen in Code-E. This is probably because he lost his sister: because of her, he could goof off, because she’d keep him in line so that they could still finish their missions.

I’m not sure whether the woman in this episode was Mils Brinberg or not, but the signs point towards yes. She wasn’t just a regular woman, being able to outrun the foundation for so long, she had a suspicious mole that I could have sworn Mils had as well, and she could have died her hair. I’m just not sure why she was speaking in Kansai-ben, but I can imagine how she could have received Type E when the resort went haywire, back at the end of the first season. What’s also interesting is that she doesn’t seem to work for the foundation, or at the very least Adol doesn’t know about her, and yet she kidnapped Maori at the end of the episode.

Ultraviolet: Code 044 – 05

by psgels, posted in Ultraviolet: Code 044



Short Synopsis: 044 tries to get rid of 724 and his henchmen.
Highlights: Solid action that knows when to stop.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Here’s one thing I don’t get: why the heck is this series getting so much hate?! I mean, I can understand how people can dislike this series: the art style, dark mood and Osamu Dezaki’s direction style aren’t for everyone. But when I look at sites as AniDB and MyAnimeList, with their abysmally low rating for this series and read some of the comments about this series, I just can’t seem to understand where all this hate is coming from.

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged (and enjoyed) a series that was hated by a large amount of people, but at least there I could understand why people were hating it: the lead characters of Night Head Genesis did whine an awful lot. It’s obvious that they’re going to get on the nerves of many people. El Cazador was all about its characters, so if you don’t like them, then there’s nothing much left of it. Blade of the Immortal has been based on a rumoured excellent manga, so of course people will be disappointed if a studio like Bee-Train gets the rights to animate it. For Ultraviolet, I just can’t imagine any reason why someone would really label this as the worst show of the season.

Granted, the only really bad thing of the first episode of this series was the huge amounts of fanservice, but that doesn’t really explain the low ratings. First of all, series with fanservice are often popular in the online crowd (as demonstrated by series as To Love-Ru, Kanokon, Sekirei and Code Geass), so why should this be any different? Second of all, the fanservice was nowhere near as bad or blatant as in series as the ones mentioned above. And third of all, the fanservice disappears nearly entirely after the second episode anyway.

So someone, enlighten me. Why the heck is this series so bad? Why has this series the most amount of “suckage” when compared to all other series that aired this Spring and Summer?

In any case, this episode was more action-packed, as 044 gets rid of 724, who turns out to have been jealous of her all along, as number two in the organization. At the same time, Mathilda and Garcia (who probably are also in trouble, seeing as how they helped their friend 044 kill off many of Daxus II’s subordinates) seem to be joining her, and reveal a bit more about her past.

There were a lot of fight-scenes in this episode, they were obviously not the best animated (probably due to lack of budget), but they were interesting to watch nonetheless. I’m interested to see where this series is going now: 044 is free now, and Daxus II can’t track her down anymore. 044 will probably go after Luka, but what’s going to happen after that?

Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor Review – 80/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


Franz Kafka was once a German author, famous for his downright depressing stories. I’ve only read one work of his (about a salaryman, turning into a huge beetle and then dying from loneliness), but I can fully understand why he got that reputation. A Country Doctor is the interpretation of director Koji Yamamura, the director of Atama Yama on one of the guy’s short stories.

I think it’s already apparent through the screenshots, but the director went for a surreal approach with this 20-minute long movie. The character-designs are constantly warping into strange shapes, and the entire movie is chock-full of symbolism about the old country doctor that plays the main character in this story. You might need a second viewing in order to fully understand what’s going on.

Overall, I liked a country doctor. It’s a great short horror-ish story, but I do think that the director went a bit too overboard with his visual effects. The warped character-designs only distract from what’s really important in the movie, and the plot doesn’t flow as smoothly as you’d like at times. It’s just like Shoji Kawamura’s Spring and Chaos: you want to give a classic writer too much credit and go overboard with the style so that the style actually works against it a bit.

Nevertheless, the art style does look great and apart from a few humps and bumps along the way, the story is well-told for such a short time of 20 minutes and it gives a good look inside the mind of the titular country doctor. A country Doctor is obviously not for everyone (stay FAR away if you hate depressing stories), but if you’re looking for something surreal and have half an hour to burn, then why not give it a chance?

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

Nijuu Mensou no Musume – 15

by psgels, posted in Nijuu Mensou no Musume



Short Synopsis: Chiko now lives away from her aunt, in a mansion along with Tome. Haruka visits her and forms the “Detective Girls”.
Highlights: A rather silly episode…
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I’ll withhold judgment for the detective girls-arc of this series for now. Seriously, I have no idea what to think of it or what to expect, knowing the rest of this series. I really need to see the next episode to form a valid opinion for this series. The fact remains that this series has had plenty of light moments, which make you fool that this series is just goofing off, while they’re in fact just building up.

In this episode, Haruka and Chiko don’t really go and look for cases, but instead they get visited by a number of burglars. The process of catching these burglars was rather silly, especially since Haruka had act and claim her moment of glory (which involved her and Tome, crashing down some stone stair on a bike), but the few moments where this episode was serious were really good. Akine’s back-story gets completed, and it turns out that he lost his sister back in the war, and Chiko resembles his sister a lot. He also finally leaves Chiko’s aunt (which may have been a bad thing, as she’s probably going to hire someone tougher), and we still don’t know what these burglars were doing inside Chiko’s house. They were not normal burglars, because they still tried to attack Chiko, even after they were found.

Most of the humour in this episode was rather corny, but I do admit that I laughed at Haruka’s fantasies of the glamorous future missions of the Detective Girls (with Chiko as the invincible warrior, Tome as a seductress and herself as the fearless leader). The messy animation during the fight scenes also looked really good, and it surprised me. Bones isn’t really a studio that often experiments with its animation (in fact, I can’t remember having seen any experimental animation from them apart from this series).

Telepathy Shoujo Ran – 07

by psgels, posted in Telepathy Shoujo Ran



Short Synopsis: Ran, Rui, Rin and Midori solve the case of the haunted resort building.
Highlights: Dialogue-heavy like no other.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Whoa! Since this is a NHK children series, you wouldn’t expect the dialogue to be so hard to understand, but Telepathy Shoujo Ran somehow manages to do it with this episode. Heck, the entire episode was one huge non-stop dialogue, with perhaps one or two seconds at which people weren’t talking. I really must say that for a children’s series, this series is pretty smart.

Okay, so if I understood correctly:
– Inside the resort, one of the guests who were staying with his family was killed.
– The one who killed him is an old classmate of his. The two of them killed (at least, that’s what I suspect, in any case they buried the guy’s dead body) one of their friends when they were young, and were too afraid to admit that what they did was wrong.
– They buried him at the place where the inn is right now.
– After the recent ghost sightings, the culprit wants to buy the inn, in order to get rid of the evidence and rumours.
– The culprit then killed the victim by throwing ice-cold water on him, to cause a heart failure.
– I didn’t quite catch why the victim had to be killed, but I suspect that he had enough of keeping their sin secret and he was planning to notify others of it.

This is why I love these NHK children’s shows. The kiddie series are of course to be avoided, but the series that air here can and will be surprisingly mature for their audience. Tsubasa Chronicle was about the only exception, but take a series as Dennou Coil, which very openly discussed the issues of death and forgetting about the deceased ones. Kaze no Shoujo Emily in its turn was very poetic, and also managed to slip in a number of deaths and mature topics, and Telepathy Shoujo Ran looks about to do the same. There’s of course censorship: the death are never referred to directly, and yet this episode was nothing short of a murder mystery story.

Seriously, I wish that Dutch children’s television was as good as this. I’m not saying that American children animation is bad, but nearly all of the stuff that makes it across the Atlantic IS, and everything is horribly dubbed. I mean, how else are these children going to learn any decent English?

Okay, enough ranting, my point is that I really liked this episode. For a murder mystery, this episode was surprisingly interesting, especially due to the lovable cast of characters, and even the ones that only appeared for one or two episodes are enjoyable to watch. I also liked how this episode combined both fake ghost sightings with real ghosts. That grandfather in bermudas was a nice touch. 😉

Macross Frontier – 17

by psgels, posted in Macross Frontier



Short Synopsis: The plot thickens as Ranka’s ability to calm down the Vajra gets more and more important.
Highlights: Ozma gained a lot of depth in this episode.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Satelight, you disappoint me. With the huge budget of this series, you couldn’t even find a good voice-actress for the seven-year-old Ranka? Joking aside, this episode might very well be my favourite of the entire series. It’s really one of these episodes in which nothing much happens, and yet the plot is pushed forward a lot. It’s very much different from the intermezzos we saw in the first half of this series, which mostly goofed off. The selection of insert songs was also pretty nice to listen at, and complemented their scenes well.

Especially Ozma was awesome, with his brotherly worries about Ranka. Macross Frontier isn’t exactly your manly mecha-series, but this guy provides an appreciated exception to this rule. We now also learn (that, or I noticed this a bit late) that he’s been having an affair with Catherine. Strangely enough, it was also interesting to see Alto act more as a side-character. Interesting how some main characters make great side-characters, and side-characters make great main characters.

Speaking of side-characters, I do have one complaint. In this episode, we learn that Kuran has a crush on Saotome, but it felt really abrupt, which got me thinking about how little airtime she’s actually had in this series. I mean, she’s been really overshadowed by the rest of the cast of Macross Frontier, even though she’s got a pretty interesting character, and there are more people like that on this series. I also feel that Catherine needs more time to be fleshed out, and especially people like Bobby, Lam, Mena and Jeffrey Wilder have been horribly ignored so far.

Space Battleship Yamato Review – 70/100

by psgels, posted in Anime Reviews


Coincidence can be a very strange thing… I started watching Space Battleship Yamato, and only five episodes later, this piece of news pops up. I mean, what are the odds of that happening? It doesn’t look like a remake, but more of a new movie, but still, based on the first television series of a franchise that spread three series and countless movies, it’s got its work cut out for it.

Space Battleship Yamato is the classic among classics, and Matsumoto Leiji’s debut into animation. Aired in 1974, after Lupin Sansei and Alps no Shoujo Heidi it was the very first television anime to get any significant popularity and it single-handedly defined the space opera genre for anime for many decades to come. Heck, even Mobile Suit Gundam has borrowed a lot of inspiration from the simple storyline of Space Battleship Yamato (executed much better and more interesting, of course).

After watching this series, I can see why it caught on so much. The story is simple but effective, and the crew of the Yamato is adequately developed in order to prevent the series to get dull after its halfway-point. Topics such as honour, love and manliness often pass the screen when pepole aren’t fighting, and the manliness seems enforced by the downright epic soundtrack. It’s of the kind that keeps sticking to your head like glue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being the best soundtrack of the seventies and early eighties.

But of course, this series was developed when anime was in such a young stage, and still needed to mature a lot. For starters, the storyline is incredibly simple: Earth is in danger and Yamato sets out to save it. It’s well told (and the main characters actually don’t get involved with the storyline by accident, and are instead trained officers), but I can’t help but think that it could have used something to spice everything up more. It’s like eating a salad without any dressing whatsoever. Sure, the lettuce is nice and all, but does taste rather plain. The ending does try to spice things up at least a bit with a number of plot-twists, but the problem is that this actually works against them and creates a Disney Ending (seriously, haven’t these people ever heard of checking a person’s heart pulse?!).

Then there’s the ton of technical errors that can be spotted in this series. The director and animators weren’t the most careful, and it’s clear that the production of Yamato was hurried a lot. Sometimes, there are odd leaps in logic (for example, one frame the Yamato is heavily damaged, full of holes, the next it’s magically fixed), the animation can be inconsistent (the bad guys suddenly go Vegeta and change skin-colour in the middle of the series), the animators have clearly trouble to synchronize the characters’ mouths to the voices properly, but the most grating is the huge amount of scientific inaccuracies that would make Gurren Lagann jealous.

Overall, Space Battleship Yamato is an average anime: it doesn’t stand up against most of the better series that we have today, but it’s certainly not bad. The art style has matured in quite an interesting way and you can see the typical manliness of the action scenes from the early days of anime, and today’s anime would definitely be something different if it wasn’t for this series.

Storytelling: 6/10
Characters: 8/10
Production-Values: 6/10
Setting: 8/10

Birdy the Mighty Decode – 05

by psgels, posted in Birdy the Mighty Decode



Short Synopsis: Birdy goes after the terrorists that were behind the explosion of the previous episode.
Highlights: Pretty much pointless story, but very nice art.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
Well, this episode seems to conclude the outer space-arc of Birdy. The villains in this episode weren’t much special, and seemed a bit hastily thrown together. They hardly had any background and just weren’t interesting at all, but for now I’ll just see this arc as a means of giving Birdy her background, and showing a bit of the world where she came from. If that were the case, then the rest of the series had better be significantly better than what was shown here.

One thing that did impress me in this episode was the excellent art. The budget is still nowhere the high levels of the first episode, but I like the amount of imagination that was put into the character-designs and especially the background art. The creators made great use of the fact that the episode was set in an unknown alien environment to make a number of pretty unique art setting.

I think the only really interesting thing about the story in this episode was that it showed how the police-system on Birdy’s planet is pretty much one big mess, where multiple divisions are working on the same case without cooperating with each other. In this episode, Birdy ended up tailing someone who was already been tailed by another guy.

But please, can we finally move to villains who don’t look like some sort of street-punks? The villains in this episode who looked at least a bit attractive turned out to be either spies or betraying their boss. I mean, it’s getting pretty predictable if you can just recognize the real villain, just by the way they’re drawn…

Porfy no Nagai Tabi – 30

by psgels, posted in Porfy no Nagai Tabi



Short Synopsis: In Rome, Porfy and Apollo continue to search for Mina, as he meets a poor woman with a similar fate.
Highlights: So! Much! Foreshadowing!
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
Now THIS is exactly what I’m talking about! Forget the Sicily-arc or the Maximilian-arc. THIS is exactly what makes me such a fan of Porfy no Nagai Tabi and the World Masterpiece Theatre in general. This episode was so much alike the episode in Les Miserables, where everyone kept missing each other, and you SO want these people to meet each other. It’s the same here. Porfy was INCREDIBLY close to meeting Mina, and yet he missed her in this episode.

The episode starts inside the hotel that Porfy’s staying in, in which he meets a woman in rather old clothes. The inn-keeper is friendly, and offers him some extra food. Porfy then heads into Rome, in search for any trace of Mina; he asks an ice cream salesman, though the guy obviously doesn’t know. He points Porfy towards some sort of square (Uradori, or however you spell it), where often a lot of people come. Meanwhile, the woman we saw introduced earlier steals the bag of an innocent tourist.

She didn’t have much money on her, but there was a valuable-looking pendant among her stuff. A bit later, we see her sell various amounts of things she stole on the street. Porfy meanwhile sees an impressive-looking car, though he realizes that this isn’t the right time to get all giddy over things as cars. Apollo, meanwhile is also looking all around for Mina.

At the Uradori, Porfy eats a bit and then looks around a bit. He then ends up at the stand of a familiar-looking gypsy(!!!) who tells fortunes. She offers him a free fortune, since business that day has been bad. Porfy doesn’t believe it, but he stops to listen to her anyway. The first card she opens is the death-card, signifying death in his past. This intrigues Porfy enough to continue listening to her. Some next cards are the wheel of fortune and the world. The next few cards aren’t shown to neither Porfy nor the audience, strangely enough. Before Porfy can ask why, the woman from earlier meets him, thinking that Porfy’s about to head into some sort of scam, and pulls him away from the fortune stand. Before he leaves, the next card does get revealed: the moon, symbolizing betrayal. Away from Porfy’s sight, the final card that gets opened is the sun, important for later this episode.

A bit later, the woman scolds him a bit for falling for such an obvious scam, as they return to the hotel they’re staying in, and have dinner together. It turns out that the woman has also lost her family in the war. She also grew up in a nice coastal city, just like Porfy, and then offers Porfy more food.

Isabella meanwhile packs up her stuff after a bad day, and then returns home to her hotel room WHERE MINA IS. In the same cafe, her brother (at least, I think it’s her brother, either that or it’s her husband) and father are doing their usual business, and it becomes apparent that her brother/husband doesn’t like Mina one bit, and how he dislikes how Isabella treats Mina like her lost daughter. Her father shrugs it off as normal behaviour for him.

Then, we switch to Mina, as APOLLO LANDS ON HER BALCONY! He’s been searching for her all along, and finally managed to find her, but he gets scared away by a sudden Isabella entering the room. Mina recognizes him, though. It turns out that she had a small fever (which was the same that killed Isabella’s daughter, Lily). Isabella is indeed incredibly kind to Mina as she helps her with her medicine. Her brother/husband then enters the room, and starts arguing with Isabella over Mina. Mina is the one to break them apart, by begging not to argue. Her brother/husband then leaves, saying that Mina’s going to help Isabella get customers the next day.

Meanwhile Apollo FAILS TO GET THROUGH TO PORFY, and can’t convince the guy that he’s seen Mina! The episode ends as Mina’s luring customers for Isabella, AT THE EXACT SAME SPOT AS THE DAY BEFORE, while Porfy’s still searching at other places.

Now this episode showed exactly what this series is best at: lots and lots of building up, foreshadowing, symbolism and subtle references. You want these people to find each other so much, and yet at the same time they continue to just barely miss each other. At the same time, the tarot cards in this episode just spoke book-parts in terms of foreshadowing. The woman (I think Olga was her name) that Porfy meets finally feels a bit interesting again. Not just because she’s like him and lost all her family, but also because it feels much more like the two of them just bumped into each other naturally, compared to the rather questionable Sicily-arc.

The past two arcs of Porfy really lacked what makes the rest of the series so great. There was hardly any building-up, and they just didn’t feel as unified as the rest of this series was. The reason why the first thirteen episodes were so great was that they were vital in establishing the characters, but the Sicily- and Maximilian-arc really slowed down the development. Still, they did serve their purpose, and they were vital in order to keep Porfy busy and get him to Rome. These arcs were really meant for him to straighten out his thoughts and let him catch a bit of breath.

And seriously, what the heck could the creators be planning for the next bloody episode?! I mean, Porfy and Mina are incredibly close to meeting each other, but do the creators really intend to let them meet each other in Rome, or will they continue to play this cat and mouse-game for a bit longer?

Himitsu ~The Revelation~ – 17

by psgels, posted in Himitsu ~The Revelation~



Short Synopsis: Two policemen end up murdered.
Highlights: Solid episode, and a bit more background on the MRI-team.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Christ, this episode took bloody ages to come out. I finally managed to locate a version of this episode on Share (Perfect Dark didn’t help much either). And if this was the only series, then okay, but the same thing happened for Porfy no Nagai Tabi and Ultraviolet as well. A raw for Porfy appeared with a delay of more than four days, and Ultraviolet’s fifth episode still hasn’t shown up. What happened?

In any case, it again took me a while to figure out what really went on in this episode, but it turns out that this was about a group of three policemen, of which one accidentally shot an innocent criminal. He convinced the two others to keep everything a secret, and he kills the wife of the policeman who was beginning to suspect what he had done, making it seem like an accident. This policeman then out of revenge for his wife starts killing off the three policemen.

It’s ironic, how out of all four policemen, the only one who was really evil and started everything was the only one who lives. He’s going to jail, indeed, but the bastard did drag three others into the own problems he created, in an attempt to get away from his responsibilities.

There was a bit of experimental animation here and there, when a scene changed from one location to the other, there was this neat transition-effect. IT worked pretty well to give a bit of energy to the whole episode. Mahou Shoujotai used a similar technique once, where it also put emphasis on these transitions on purpose, in order to keep the viewer on its toes. The effects are quite interesting.