(Before anyone gets on my case, yes I know I’m using a different title than the official English one, but I think “WTF” fits more than “What the hell”, since it’s more local slang-y. Call me dumb if you like ^_^). This week on Odd Taxi, things get heated in da club…and the story comes together nicely.
Welcome all to another episode of Spice and Wolf! Apologies for the wait on this one, I’ve recently discovered Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire and it’s taken a fair chunk of my time. Not because I don’t enjoy writing these or because Spice and Wolf isn’t good, it is. But it scratches just the right itch for me. Enough about RPGs though, lets dive into this weeks episode!
And what better place to start than with me gushing about production again! I know I’ve done this before in the far flung past of episode 1 but seriously, I’m impressed. We are 3 episodes in to this season of Spice and Wolf and I’m pretty sure its already had more animation than the entire first season. From the large festival crowds dancing and cavorting in the streets, throwing wine on each other, to the more intimate moments between Holo and Lawrence in the inn. Even the small stuff like background characters cheering and laughing it up during Fermi’s challenge were nice touches. This isn’t to say Spice and Wolf doesn’t have stills or panning shots, it does. But they are integrated much more cleanly and have these fun animated scenes between them to break them up. It’s a small but very important thing to recognize I feel.
Continue reading “Spice and Wolf S2 – 3 [Wolf and Irreconcilable Differences] – Throwback Thursday”
After an episode like this one, I hardly need to say a thing.
Continue reading “Fumetsu no Anata e – 05 [Those Who Follow]”
Welcome back to Nomad! This is a bit of a late post, I apologize for that. Busy busy weekend. So how about we skip the preamble just jump right into it!
This is a weird week for Nomad all things considered. There were no huge revelations, no big game changers, it just sort of… happened. Effectively acting as a check-in for the rest of our old cast so to speak. This isn’t bad! It’s all useful and important information. Nomad uses it to remind us who each of these characters are with their new designs and to remind us of their relationships with each other. The only person we haven’t yet seen is Yukiko, and technically Yuri I guess since he hasn’t talked yet. We get to spend some time with Oicho, Sachio, Santa and Bonjiri as they hang out and discuss Joe. Mulling over how they feel about him, how they still care for each other, etc. This is all good stuff but I wouldn’t say any of it was amazing or standout.
Helghast: After the mayhem of the Metal Float, this week honestly felt like a Carole and Tuesday episode with Vivy getting a hard reset back into Diva and getting back to the musical side of things with a special insert OP. I do like her personality change as it’s overall less stiff than her previous version. She feels a lot more human with her confidence and expressions of a veteren songstress looking to make it big beyond the main stage of Nialand. It even extends to her willingness to throw herself off the building in order to get more information when the AI cube of Matsumoto makes his return in an almost reluctant way. While the first half of Vivy had setpieces keep getting bigger and bigger with falling skyscrapers, falling space stations and an AI island gone crazy, the twist of Ophelia’s future sucide doesn’t seem to have that WOW factor but I’m sure the author has several surprises for the viewers to lose their minds over. I can think of why an AI might end their existence due to the fact that they have failed their mission. While this may or may not be the case with Ophelia, Diva has proven that such a thing is possible at the conclusion of the Metal Float mission. Having her come to terms with it when she regains her memories and seeing how that will play into preventing her AI younger sister’s sucide will be moving at say the least.
This is it ladies and gentleman, this where Eighty Six redeems itself. Forget all of the Starbucks Philosophers and Liberal Arts jokes, Eighty Six is taking its shot. And I couldn’t be happier. So lets dive right in shall we?
Immediately before we get into all the politics, the narrative and all that jazz I want to talk production. Eighty Six is not the most well animated show of the season. That’s simply a fact. The CGI robots are fine and are used minimally however this is primarily a talking heads show. But what talking heads they are. Some of the shot composition, lighting and scene transitions were absolutely kino this week. Whether it be Undertaker and Lena’s moonlit conversation, the broken mirror, Lena’s reflection in the window or the bleeding fountain pen. Eighty Six was absolutely packed with clever shots. Connecting themes and events with physical objects that brought out the most in every single scene. Credit to Director Toshimasa Ishii and his team for this one. As for the actual politics and narrative of the scenes themselves? Well that was pretty good to.
I don’t know the process by which episode counts are decided for TV anime, but Fumetsu’s 20 seems like a strange number given the industry’s general adherence to multiples of 12 and 13. Some may perceive the glass to be half full – seven extra episodes, oh boy! – but after watching “A Large Vessel,” I can only view it as half empty. Fushi’s attempted escape from prison and resulting torture were stuffed into a twelve second montage, undercutting the horror of his experience and muddling his subsequent search for an exit. Parona’s encounter with a would-be rapist was neutered by its placement late in the episode (though her previous wall-scaling scene was suitably tense). Characters are being robbed of the ability to process their experiences, and in a series like this one, which is about the experience of life across cultures and species, that’s a serious issue. “Just add more episodes” is a hated catch-all phrase of mine, but fuck it, I’ll join the chorus in this case: Fumetsu deserved 26.
Another week, another episode of Spice and Wolf. This episode we see Lawrence hunt for answers, Holo for some quality time and Fermi for a relationship. Will any of them succeed? Lets jump in and find out!
To start off let’s talk about my only issue with the episode: Flashbacks. There were a lot of them. Credit where it’s due, these flashbacks did serve a purpose. They not only reminded us of certain events but the events they referenced prepped us emotionally for the episode. They put us in a specific frame of mind to view the episode through. From the flashbacks to the sewers arc in Season 1 to their first meeting, etc, these all prime us to see how their relationship is currently being strained. Lawrence going out alone to hunt for answers, Holo’s concerns about traveling with a mortal, it all connects. But we also already know all of this. Maybe this is only a complaint because we literally just finished watching Season 1. However I couldn’t get over how annoying the flashbacks cutting into the story sometimes was.
Luckily, that’s the only negative I got.
Continue reading “Spice and Wolf S2 – 2 [Wolf and the Calm Before the Storm]”
After last week’s detour, we’re back to a nice relaxing drive in the taxi! Well, mostly. There were good, bad, and just confusing parts to this week’s ride – so let’s get to it!
Lenlo: God Mars Red is just so… aggressively mediocre. About once per episode it will have a good, focused moment of vampiric humanity. Of immortals interacting and living in a mortal society. And then the rest of the episode is just mediocre political subplots, vampires we don’t know or care about subplots and downright terrible action sequences. There’s only ever one scene of any value in these episodes. You could watch that one scene on youtube, skip the rest and lose absolutely nothing. And that’s a damn shame.
Wooper: Last week our heroes declared the Granedger to be its own sovereign nation, but that claim feels silly now that the show is handing out massive warships like Oprah. “You get a dreadnought, you get a dreadnought, everybody gets a dreadnought!” Not only are they being given to antagonists left and right, those antagonists are being defeated just moments after receiving them, making this whole arc feel even hastier than usual (a real feat for a series like Back Arrow). We’re just making all of this up as we go along, it seems, but at least that improvised feel leaves room for plenty of fights – the Rekkan Emperor kicked so much ass this week that he must have broken both ankles. Am I crazy, or did he manifest as both an arrow and the bow that fired it during his battle with Tae’s dreadnought? I had to rewind that scene a couple times to double check what I’d just watched, and I still don’t really understand it. Looked pretty cool, though! All the cult/prophecy nonsense about Arrow destroying the world is just background noise, as far as I’m concerned – give me more fights and less story, please.