Words fail me

She shows political promise

TIN STOMPâ„¢!

Gawds, what an effin’ terrible show. For a moment I thought the “girl falling from the sky” scene in the beginning was a parody, turns out they were serious in the end. Avoid avoid avoid, and one more black mark in Teh Rie’s body of work.

C is ++

<Tim>LET’S MAKE MAGIIIIIIIC!</Burton> So what exactly is C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control (a more pompous anime name is hard to recall)? Judging from the first episode, this seems to be a mad medley of Yugi-Oh, Boogiepop, Eden of the East and MEGUCA IS SUFFERING. What C does have in spades is an amazing sense of style, which makes it a more probable successor show to take over from the Star Driver timeslot rather than Ao no Exorcist. Even if nothing delivers on every other front for this show, I can see that visual asthetic take it to cult status, just like it did for all things Kiraboshi. That being said, this show is far more surreal than Star Driver ever was and is clearly meant for an older crowd with its noitaminA slot, and given the way the plot plays out in the first 20min  the watcher is unsure what the general direction of this show will be. Again, there are parallels with Star Driver, which never did mesh well its action and school slice-of-life halves. My verdict is cautiously optimistic, and we’re VERY unlikely to see a 1st ep this season that’s more attention-grabbing. P.S: The E.o.t.East similarity fascinates me, because whatever that show was trying to do, it never raised itself over its major failing of trying to stretch its cellophane-thin plot over the credibility rack without using fantasy elements. C clearly isn’t going to redo that doomed experiment, because we can see the supernatural is afoot here. In my opinion, this already makes it easier for the watcher to swallow whatever nonsensical plot twists (and in this type of show, there are bound to be at least a few) arrive down the road.

Gintama – I Love This World, Warts and All

gintama widescreen 01

AND THEN SHINPACHI WAS A ZOMBIE.

So Gintama is back, and it’s like it never left. Even better, the intro arc probably makes zero sense to a newbie, but then that was never the point, was it? Welcome back, godking of non sequitur shows.

P.S: Real slacker is SLACK.

Arrival of HUEG filler arc for Bleach. And you know what that means…

…..better animation and plot than canon material, yup. It never fails to amuse me how the filler material is always better than Kubo’s canon stuff, which is purely down to the cyclical time management of Jump animation projects. Usually when canon material is more or less being played out on TV, the movies are in development, and the latter takes precedence in terms of team resources. So the canon episodes on TV are just an unrecognizable mush of bad animation, made even worse by the bad original writing of the various Jump authors in their mangas.

That reminds me though….haven’t I seen this before?

skrullz, skrullz evorywur

Bleach 317

Hmmm. Well, I guess if ripping off Blackest Night was OK for Kishi, Kubo can have a turn too. The amusing thing is that Kishi made a complete bland stew out of decent material, so I’m wondering if Kubo will turn the half-assed Secret Invasion into something palatable. (There is also a fine line besides ripping off something for your source manga and doing it for throwaway anime storylines) The setup, with Soul Society fighting against “itself”, also seems to be a variant of the Zanpakutou Rebellion arc, except with presumably more backstabbing. This being shounen and being Bleach, I don’t expect that to be very prominent a plot feature because it’ll probably still resolve itself into the familiar fight-challenge boilerplate patterns. Fans will get their wish of custom fight pairings, but I suspect they’re going to be disappointed in a lot of cases, because copouts WILL happen. A nice touch in this first episode is the canon references to the original manga events (specifically in the Deicide chapters/episodes), which makes for some nice continuity.

P.S: Is this the first time in a long while Ichigo’s bankai speed is shown explicitly? That’s hilarious and sad all together.

X-Men Teh Anime – Better than the general concept has any right to be

Grandma, what a big....arm span you haveLook who showed up

NOTE: This show is two episodes in at the time of review.

This show is far better than its other Marvel anime predescessors Wolverine and Iron Man, but that’s hardly a great feat. Now, since Wolverine is better than Iron Man (which not only had bad Stark characterization but mysteriously transported him to Japan to pair with an annoying genki girl for no good reason), one might deduce that the production teams are learning from their mistakes as they go along. I’m not too sure how valid that reasoning is, because I think all three shows were done in parallel at least in terms of general conceptualization. Still, what IS clear is that X-Men not only has a better character designer, the animation budget on display so far seems more well padded as well, which makes the first 2 eps a real treat especially when everything X-Men was previously under the aegis of western animators. I think the best explanation that fits the facts is that this particular series is meant to drum up momentum for the upcoming First Class film, which would explain the bigger resources used.

The show leverages on the Whedon created character Armor, who due to her Japanese ancestry makes for a easy (and plausible) plot reason to move the X-Men team to Japan on a rescue mission. (For obvious practical reasons this is a general requirement to bankroll this project, like with the two other sister shows) In this continuity she hasn’t met any of the senior X-Men before being swirled up in the U-Men main plot, who are the boogeys here. The series jumpstarts a bit from the end of the movie franchise with the death of Jean Grey, and retains the annoying Emoclops Summers from the same source. Now complaining about writers mauling Scott’ in mainstream Marvel continuity is a lost cause, some fans are still bitter with the shacking up with Emma, but generally speaking the Scott of the anime is the worst offender in terms of character assassination for the poor guy since the Dark Phoenix saga. If you get me, a notorious Lamerine (see?) hater, siding with the furry Canadian over Mr Optic Man it just goes to show how far the character has sunk. Now, anime shows have no issue with emotastic main leads, but it’s generally hard to carry the writing concept for a Western-centric franchise. Team dynamic stories do tend to ride this kind of development better though, so let’s hope he snaps out of it, especially with Ms Frost appearing. Then again, considering how Frost is used in the plot here, it might make things worse.

There are other minor things to point out, such as Storm being way too genteel or seriously nerfed in the powers department, all significant problems for a character that de facto led the X-Men for long stretches in the 00 years. Now, I have a sinking suspicion that all these changes are due to the traditional Japanese writer mindset, as presumably Frost is there to round out the tough nails girl quota and everyone with ovaries has to be written otherwise to please the otakus back home. This might be fatal down the road, or it might not. Still, Wolverine, Beast and ol’ Xavier are pretty spot on, which is encouraging. I found particular amusement in Wolverine, since he’s pretty much Takamura from Hajime no Ippo in terms of writing and acting, which is due to them sharing the same voice actor. (I was half-expecting the DYNAMITE PUNCHCLAWS song) In terms of the technical aspects, I’m pleased to see episode 2 maintaining the level of art design and animation, which gives me hope the quality won’t fall off a cliff by mid-show. Hopefully this will be the one gem that allows more superhero shows from the West to crossover into the Japanese animation world, and usher in more quality efforts in the future.

UPDATE: I was making ribald jokes on Emma having obtained a Better Bodies mod, but turns out there’s precedent in mainstream Marvel products. Ah well, she’s pretty much the rich man’s Power Girl now. Or a rich man’s ojou, judging from the cliche hair twirls.

Gosick Mid-Season Update

not manly
manly

CONTRADICTION,  YOUR HONOUR!!@

So, at episode 12 of Gosick, has this show gotten any better? The answer, manifestly, is a big honking NO. In fact, the verdict is now DOA. Turns out that the first arc was the height of deduction for this series so far, which is staggering for a whodunnit. We’re talking elementary school reasoning capabilities at work and Victorique continues with her staggering leaps of poor logic that gets worse and worse as the cases come along.

Now, I understand (adopts otaku-browbeating condescending tone) that the focus of the show is really the gothic lolita, which is all it takes to sell it the show to the scum that will actually fork out cash for it. But even they have to admit she never gets any better in characterization and makes a mockery of the “old wise crone” act she always loves putting on in terms of maturity. The humour quotient also takes a huge plunge and is just made more insulting by Kujo (who is really one of a kind for Victorique) being the densest, most annoying Watson ever in the history of whodunnit literature in all forms of media. In fact, I would suspect him of being a Watson parody if the writing had shown the slightest bit of cleverness with his character, but instead he’s simply just your dumb harem lead transplanted into a different genre, as shown by his rejection of Avril to settle for the daily dose of ritualistic abusement at the hands of the not so brilliant Sherlock rip-off.

The sheer ineptitude of our muscle help here is demonstrated in the third arc (Golden Wolves) in which not only is he of zero use subduing the killer, but he had to be improbably saved from falling to his death by Victorique (the most laughable case of physics ever). If the aim of the character was to annoy me into a blinding rage, I congratulate the writing team, because they’ve succeeded splendidly. Not only are his lines pure drivel (I dare anyone not to grit his teeth at the constant VICTORIKA?^2) but the voice actor also plays his part in making Kujo pure plot poison every time he opens the mouth. My personal theory is that the character was written in this fashion because of the need to contrast the two archetypes, and Victorique is such a poor sleuth that Kujo HAS to be written in this fashion to make her sound brilliant. Any cliché attempts to beef up his character with the third son of soldier backstory is completely laughable, as shown in the pics. Of course, if the show had been clever it would have tried to equalize the dynamic by fusing the Inspector with his sister and having a more level-headed Watson give acerbic one-liners on the soundness of her deduction.

All in all, this show is a huge dud. About all I can recommend is the art direction for the architecture and background sets, which is generally far more inspired than the work for the character designs. Still it’s clearly not enough to save the train wreck.