Tag: anime

Sonny Boy – 8/9 [Laughing Dog/This Salmon Chazuke Is Missing Its Salmon Nya]

by Lenlo, posted in Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction, Sonny Boy

Welcome all to a very late post about Sonny Boy! I haven’t been very good at my job recently, this internet one not my real job, and for that I apologize. We have a lot to talk about this week though so enough about me, lets jump into it!

Right off the bat I want to talk about my feelings about Sonny Boy as a whole. I went into this show with high hopes. It looked visually interesting and Natsume has worked on some pretty great stuff in the past. But 9 episodes in I can comfortably say that Sonny Boy isn’t for me. Visually I still love it! Sonny Boy is doing things no other anime has in a good while, leading to some very memorable scenes. But this visual diversity has led to the show becoming narratively obtuse. Like there’s no structure, no set idea, behind what is happening. This leads to the visuals and the story feeling at odds with each other to the point of, often, incomprehensibility. And 9 episodes in, it feels like Sonny Boy doesn’t care enough to fix that.

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Haibane Renmei – 6 [End of Summer/Rain/Loss] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Haibane Renmei, Throwback Thursday

Welcome all to the halfway point of Haibane Renmei! Or close enough to it at least since it’s thirteen episodes. We have a lot to cover this week and I’m running late so lets dive right into it!

Right off the bat I have to say that this was exactly what I wanted. Last week I said that I was afraid of Haibane Renmei becoming like every other SoL. That we would follow their daily lives but that nothing would meaningfully change and thus no one would grow. And as if in direct response, we got this episode next. This feels like a turning point, the exact kind of thing I asked for last week. An event that causes things to start to unravel. Where characters shift from reactive, like Rakka has learning about the world, to proactive, where she can start to search things out for herself. Now while I doubt that Rakka, and be extension Haibane Renmei, would be that overt about it I do expect things to change. And I’m very excited for that.

In the meantime though lets talk about why I like this episode.

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Haibane Renmei – 5 [Library/Abandoned Factory/Beginning of the World] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Haibane Renmei, Throwback Thursday

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Haibane Renmei! This week we are once again following a new character in Nemu. Is it any good? Was it as engaging as the last? Lets jump in and find out!

And what better place to start than the theme of the episode? Haibane Renmei is a very dense show, lots of religious symbolism and the like. Should make for a good jumping off point! The problem though is that Haibane Renmei covered so much that I’m not sure what the theme is. Is it about making mistakes and living with them, eventually learning to see they aren’t actually mistakes like in Nemu’s story? Is it a general creation myth about the town? Or maybe the whole thing is about the many paths life can take, I don’t know! What’s nice though is that Haibane Renmei doesn’t feel like its struggling with its messaging. This doesn’t feel like the shows fault, if that makes sense. Rather it has earned enough trust from me by now that its more likely I’m just not connecting with it.

So lets try to fix that, explore a few of these, and maybe piece it together along the way.

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Haibane Renmei – 4 [Trash Day/Clock Tower/Birds Flying Over the Walls] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Haibane Renmei, Throwback Thursday

Welcome everyone to another week of Haibane Renmei! This is another slow one like the last, yet for some reason I can’t help but like it more. Is it the characters? The subject focus? Read on to find out!

So like I said, this week was another slow episode with the primary difference being the focus character. Where last week focused on Hikari, visiting the temple and her time at the bakery, this week is about Kana. And just like Hikari, Haibane Renmei shows us a day in her life. We visit the clock tower, the shop, do morning chores etc. Yet despite how mundane all of this was for some reason I liked this one a whole lot more! Something about Kana’s day to day was just more… satisfying? Engaging? I suspect it’s because of the message, the “theme” of Kana as a character. Or perhaps it was the concepts which Haibane Renmei introduced this week, building off of the last. Either way though one fact remains true: I really vibed with this episode and I’m once again looking forward to more.

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Sonny Boy – 6 [The Long Goodbye]

by Lenlo, posted in Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction, Sonny Boy

Welcome everyone to the big event, the big twist, the turning point for Sonny Boy! Did it work? Was the episode good, does it all make sense now? Lets find out!

Lets open this post by immediately giving you a tl;dr for my thoughts on the episode. And the verdict is… I think it was good, as far as turning point episodes go. Everything about Sonny Boy this week was unexpected and took the series in a new, interesting direction. It both answered a lot of questions while asking many more and was an all around dense episode. My only issue with it is that Sonny Boy, once again, was needlessly abstract about it. Visual ideas, creative scenery, etc, it’s like someone decided how they wanted the episode to look and fit the content to it rather than fitting the looks to the content. In that way a good portion of the episode kind of just feels like art-house fuckery. Abstract images devoid, or at least porous to, meaning. And I can’t ignore that despite liking the actual story.

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Sonny Boy – 5 [Leaping Classrooms]

by Lenlo, posted in Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction, Sonny Boy

Hello everyone and welcome to a very late post for Sonny Boy episode 5! Sorry about that. Between my new 40k models coming in and this episode just being freaking weird I didn’t have much motivation to write. However that’s no excuse! You people come here to read posts about currently airing shows and come hell or high water you will get them! So without further ado, lets jump in.

Right off the bat I have to explain the reason for this being so late: What the fuck is this show? I’m… not totally sure on how I’m supposed to parse this. The themes are all very straight forward, we identified them before. Sonny Boy is all about growing up and transitioning out of highschool and into the wider world. About figuring out who you are, what you stand for and finding your place in society rather than letting others dictate it for you. I think this is all pretty clear, yeah? But the manner in which Sonny Boy presents it is so abstract as to almost be intelligible. I can’t tell if this is just Natsume being himself, as both ACCA and Boogiepop had their own eccentricities, or they simply aren’t that confident in what they are doing. Only time will tell I suppose.

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Haibane Renmei – 2 [Town and Wall/Touga/Haibane Renmei] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Haibane Renmei, Throwback Thursday

Welcome everyone to week 2 of Haibane Renmei! This episode isn’t to surprising. It establishes the setting of the story and a number of surrounding locations, but what a setting it is. We have a lot to talk about this week so lets skip the animation and jump into it!

Right away I have to say that I was impressed not only by how much information Haibane Renmei packed into the episode but how natural it felt. There were no long winded exposition dumps or classroom scenes with a map. Instead it was a series of events that fit together, each opening up a new aspect of the world. Take the start of the episode for instance: After a while of running around in rags the others eventually offer to take Rakka into town to get clothes. From there getting clothes leads into a discussion of money, work and their place in the town. With that leading into the nature of the town itself and how it connects, or in this case doesn’t, to the rest of the world. I want to say this is nothing special. But with how anime normally treats exposition it honestly kind of is.

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Sonny Boy – 4 [The Great Monkey Baseball]

by Lenlo, posted in Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction, Sonny Boy

Welcome all to episode 4 of Sonny Boy! Apologies for the delayed post, Otakon was this weekend and ended up going so its been busy the last few days. As for Sonny Boy, this is a weird episode, arguably a bad one, but one that interested me nonetheless. So without further ado lets dive in!

To start I thought this episode was pretty visually boring. Large portions of the episode consisted of nothing but wide shots as the characters talked about baseball. No pans, no interesting angles, not even motion to draw or keep the eye. Just wide character shots. And while I liked the lineless mini-versions of the characters, an almost painterly style, that didn’t make the scenes any more engaging. Now a friend of mine made the argument that these shots were to sell the “realism”. That it put us in the shoes of the characters as Cap wouldn’t shut the hell up about baseball. But all that tells me is that they made the scenes boring on purpose, which is even worse. Whatever the case, whatever the reasoning, I didn’t find this episode of Sonny Boy to be that visually engaging outside of the opening swimming scene. With that, lets talk narrative!

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Haibane Renmei – 1 [Cocoon/Dream of Falling from the Sky/Old Home] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Haibane Renmei, Throwback Thursday

Hello and welcome everyone to the next season of Throwback Thursday, Haibane Renmei! I know nothing of this show going into it and after 1 episode I can comfortably say: What the hell have I gotten myself into? So without further ado lets dive into the 1st episode!

Starting off, Haibane Renmei looks… dated. And fuzzy. But mostly dated! I’m unsure how much of this is just artifacting from how I am watching it and how much is the show itself, so for now I will give it the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, it has the clear look of a show caught in the transition from cel to digital. The story and atmosphere calling for the more personal touch of paint yet suffering from the cheap and familiar look of the first digital animations. This isn’t to say it doesn’t have its moments, Haibane Renmei end’s on a particularly gruesome scene that shocked me out of my preconceptions about the show. But the coloring of the characters in this first episode felt flat and lifeless at times. My hope is that some strong editing and a good narrative can make up for this moving forward.

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Sonny Boy – 3 [The Cat Who Wore Sandals]

by Lenlo, posted in Finished Series: Adventure/Fantasy/Science Fiction, Sonny Boy

Welcome to another week of Sonny Boy! This is a pretty trippy episode all things considered, but one I still enjoyed. So without further ado lets jump in!

On the visual side Sonny Boy is still weird. I continue to like it! The flat coloring and low line count is very appealing and I think it works with the surreal presentation. Stuff like the background falling and splitting like a curtain was great! Yet some stuff, like Rajidani’s toys that he creates with his power, still feel out of place. The white outline around them combined with their incredibly cartoony nature doesn’t mesh well with the students. One could argue that this is on purpose! That these toys were made from a different world, a different set of rules, from the students and thus shouldn’t fit with them. I’m not opposed to that argument and I’ll wait and see how Sonny Boy continues to use them as sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. For now though consider me wary of their continued inclusion.

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