Ah, the spy genre. Where our lead characters have to take care of dangerous threats, international bombings, diplomatic turbulence… and obese felines who steal photographs.
So obviously this was a bit of a silly episode, but at least it gave us a bit of a chance to get to know the lead characters, which is also important. I would have preferred it if the creators just dumped that strange photograph subplot and just showed the characters as they are on their days off, but this episode had its charms.
On a side-note, at first I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, but on second thought I’m beginning to like this series’ tour of the world with languages more and more. I now understand why it was impossible for the creators to find a good voice actor for the lead character: is there really someone who speaks fluent in Japanese, German, Chinese and Russian all at the same time? And who knows how many more languages are going to be featured? In any case, it shows that Shanghai is growing into the international metropolis that it is today. For the series’ faults, you can at least say that it’s not looking down on its setting. Or not in a way that I can see anyway.
Also, the animators choose the strangest places to use their budget at. Most of the times, filler episodes like this don’t receive much of a budget to play with. Take a look at how well that fat cat was animated; I’ve hardly ever seen cats animated this life-like in such a TV series. Also, the crowd shots in this episode are also really well done: you can see that the streets are alive with people, who may not all be moving, but all have their own designs. And then there also are these things as the food, and the camera that they used in this episode. All were really well drawn.
Rating: * (Good)
I liked the silly photograph plot, it was fun to see them take photos of all that food. (It made me hungry.) The cat stealing the bag wasn’t realistic at all, but hey, who cares? 😀
As for the languages, yeah, I said the same thing last time. Aoi is obviously supposed to speak many languages, it would be impossible to find a seiyuu who is fluent in all of them. The credits says they have a Chinese language coach so at least they’re putting some effort into it (unlike other anime I’ve seen). And they’re going out of their way to get native speakers for the various foreign languages (though the German waiter in this episode didn’t sound like a native speaker… or is it just me? I thought he had an English accent, but then, I don’t speak much German.)
Anyway, I like this series so far. It may not be the best ever, or even the best in this season, but it’s good entertaininment. I just hope that the animation will be better next time, it was really bad in this episode.
So this time it was German and again (like with Sora no Woto) I’m surprised again that they actually made it understandable.
The waiter sounded pretty native to me, he just pronounced his sentences [b]very[/b] clearly. It’s understandable, as he is in a foreign country, but it was still funny.
Aoi’s seiyuu did a pretty good job at pronouncing his line, too…his accent was only minor.
Kazura on the other hand sounded just [b]too[/b] funny…I had to listen to it two times to actually get what he ordered and even now I’m not 100% sure what the thing apart from “Kartoffelsuppe” was. Good that they had subtitles.
I really like this show, but I don’t understand why they waste episodes on filler like this in really short series. Like you say, there are better ways to develop characters without silly subplots. the chikara block did this with the sora peeing episode too. In a semi-serious show like this, these things feel out of place, and it’s only got so many episodes to make something of its plot. I was a bit disappointed.
This episode wasn’t about character development nor about character interaction, the development part probably next week . the strange photograph subplot and cat scene pretty much for a detailed account of how the world work in Senkou no Night Raid, the creator decided to make it in comically manner, which I thought they done pretty good job without being boring or to serious, plus it manage to stay true with its theme
I wouldn’t say the Chinese is fluent, but it’s not as bad as in most animes.
Among all other series this was the worst episode of April. After each episode Senkou makes me want to ask a big “So???!?”
The handful of words spoken in Engrish during episode two when the bombs went off bring the language count to five.