Winter Anime & Fantastic Children
Jan. 13th, 2013 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foxinthestarsBeen too long since I posted again...
Before I get into it, I have started playing LaTale (after promising it to myself for a full month since Glitch went away). It is fun, although the translation is so bad that conversing with NPCs beyond "gimme my quests, k?" seems like a time-wasting chore and I have little to no idea what a lot of the items do. Still, fun.
But anyway!
The Winter anime season has gotten underway, and it was only my second time frantically watching ANN & Crunchyroll's newsrolls and chasing to sample the new stuff, but it already feels somehow routine, and maybe I was a little saner about it this time (and for streaming, is it just me or did CR almost pitch a shutout, srsly?).
(BTW, while watching said newsrolls, it also came out that Acchi Kocchi and Shinrei Tantei Yakumo are being licensed; I enjoyed both of them and was glad to see them get some love.)
The one real standout is Chihayafuru 2; in the first episode, Sumire (the new girl) annoyed me, but my faith in this show is unshaken and I fully expect some dynamism that will make things better.
As for entirely new material, I am guardedly interested in seeing how Maoyu will play out. The concept is very appealing, and the attacks of romantic comedy are within tolerances. It seems a bit odd for the main couple to have hit it off so well so quickly, but it's too sweet to complain much about, and it's a bit annoying how it seems to bend over backward to disempower the Demon Queen with the romantic comedy/body issue stuff when seriously she's the prime mover of the series, but the Hero is having his fish-out-of-water moment, too... So yeah, I'm still at "guardedly interested" but I am interested.
The only other things I decided to keep on my list after the first episode or two were Yama no Susume which looks totally sweet so far but is a short (3 mins per ep), plus The Unlimited and Amnesia, which I'm just keeping around in hopes of shameless fun. The Unlimited I was going to pass over entirely as a spinoff of a show I haven't seen until I saw reviews that seemed to bode well for shameless ESPers-trashing-Nazis fun (I'm just coming off the Psychic Force kick, what can I say?); and with Amnesia I made the mistake(?) of looking up a review/synopsis of the original game so I now have an idea just how wrong this could potentially go, but until that happens, shameless reverse-harem psychedelic-eyed-prettyboy fun.
(And perhaps someone can tell me if I'm passing over a real gem here...)
Here and there in the shameless stuff and the sampled-and-discarded pile, I was niggled by a seeming rash of writers trying to be funny and coming off more as if they Just Didn't Care, but maybe it's just me...
Of course, looking back to last season, Shin Sekai Yori is the only thing I'm still watching, and it regularly threatens to collapse under the weight of its own weirdness but somehow holds together so far if you can just ride out eps 5 and 6 or thereabouts. I've been a bit less invested since my favorite character died, but I'm still interested enough to see where all this is going and look forward to each new episode. Zetsuen no Tempest on the other hand, well, I got so interested in it at one point that I went and read ahead in the manga --- only to find that it completely jumped the shark after bogging down in self-referential games of its (initially fascinating) magic system's blue-and-orange logic. After a bit of back and forth I googled up the only spoiler I still cared about and walked away. And it started so promisingly, too... ::sigh::
In among that, I also went ahead with my promised monthly indulgence in back-catalog anime; not really a marathon this time as the show wasn't so conducive to it, but anyway, I somehow took it in my head to watch Fantastic Children. It got a lot of good reviews, I did find the old-school kids' anime art style refreshing, and I will say it's a compelling story if you see it through to the end, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it without qualification as it takes a bit of patience and fortitude. The first half of the series is ponderous, to use the term half-punningly; it's heavy, it's slow, and it's puzzling. It throws tons of stuff at you that is mostly relatable and interesting and does all (or nearly all) come together beautifully in the end, but it doesn't even start to be really explained until episode 13. This does serve a purpose, though, as when the reveals start coming, they really do work, but it's stuff you would never have swallowed* if they tried to feed it to you upfront without all the setup as to its bearing on the lives of characters we can relate to. Those relatable elements from the first half do at times get overshadowed more than I'd like, but shine through in other ways that I do like. All the way through it stays slow, with a bad habit of lingering on intense emotional reaction shots before bothering to explain them, but in the later parts the substance is enough to support that pace so that it doesn't feel as plodding as it did at first. I also think the climactic scene at the end deserved to be more beautiful than it was; it was beautiful, just not quite up to the scale of its ambition. I will say this show is not a feminist-pleaser; I'm sure there's a Bechdel pass in here somewhere, but almost all the female characters are damsels or are overly defined by the men around them, and the heroine, especially early on, can just get frustrating in her silence and passivity (like pulling teeth, seriously).
If you have the patience for it, tho, it's ultimately an epic and bittersweet tale of science gone too far, of hatred and jealousy, of love and atonement, of longing and letting go. It is worth seeing, just be warned you're in for a haul before it really starts paying off.
*Do you wanna know? HUGE GIANT SPOILER...
You're sure now?
Reincarnated space aliens in search of their princess whom they scientifically beamed to Earth's afterlife.
Yes, it is a good story in context --- but yes, there is a reason they spent a dozen episodes softening us up for that.
Before I get into it, I have started playing LaTale (after promising it to myself for a full month since Glitch went away). It is fun, although the translation is so bad that conversing with NPCs beyond "gimme my quests, k?" seems like a time-wasting chore and I have little to no idea what a lot of the items do. Still, fun.
But anyway!
The Winter anime season has gotten underway, and it was only my second time frantically watching ANN & Crunchyroll's newsrolls and chasing to sample the new stuff, but it already feels somehow routine, and maybe I was a little saner about it this time (and for streaming, is it just me or did CR almost pitch a shutout, srsly?).
(BTW, while watching said newsrolls, it also came out that Acchi Kocchi and Shinrei Tantei Yakumo are being licensed; I enjoyed both of them and was glad to see them get some love.)
The one real standout is Chihayafuru 2; in the first episode, Sumire (the new girl) annoyed me, but my faith in this show is unshaken and I fully expect some dynamism that will make things better.
As for entirely new material, I am guardedly interested in seeing how Maoyu will play out. The concept is very appealing, and the attacks of romantic comedy are within tolerances. It seems a bit odd for the main couple to have hit it off so well so quickly, but it's too sweet to complain much about, and it's a bit annoying how it seems to bend over backward to disempower the Demon Queen with the romantic comedy/body issue stuff when seriously she's the prime mover of the series, but the Hero is having his fish-out-of-water moment, too... So yeah, I'm still at "guardedly interested" but I am interested.
The only other things I decided to keep on my list after the first episode or two were Yama no Susume which looks totally sweet so far but is a short (3 mins per ep), plus The Unlimited and Amnesia, which I'm just keeping around in hopes of shameless fun. The Unlimited I was going to pass over entirely as a spinoff of a show I haven't seen until I saw reviews that seemed to bode well for shameless ESPers-trashing-Nazis fun (I'm just coming off the Psychic Force kick, what can I say?); and with Amnesia I made the mistake(?) of looking up a review/synopsis of the original game so I now have an idea just how wrong this could potentially go, but until that happens, shameless reverse-harem psychedelic-eyed-prettyboy fun.
(And perhaps someone can tell me if I'm passing over a real gem here...)
Here and there in the shameless stuff and the sampled-and-discarded pile, I was niggled by a seeming rash of writers trying to be funny and coming off more as if they Just Didn't Care, but maybe it's just me...
Of course, looking back to last season, Shin Sekai Yori is the only thing I'm still watching, and it regularly threatens to collapse under the weight of its own weirdness but somehow holds together so far if you can just ride out eps 5 and 6 or thereabouts. I've been a bit less invested since my favorite character died, but I'm still interested enough to see where all this is going and look forward to each new episode. Zetsuen no Tempest on the other hand, well, I got so interested in it at one point that I went and read ahead in the manga --- only to find that it completely jumped the shark after bogging down in self-referential games of its (initially fascinating) magic system's blue-and-orange logic. After a bit of back and forth I googled up the only spoiler I still cared about and walked away. And it started so promisingly, too... ::sigh::
In among that, I also went ahead with my promised monthly indulgence in back-catalog anime; not really a marathon this time as the show wasn't so conducive to it, but anyway, I somehow took it in my head to watch Fantastic Children. It got a lot of good reviews, I did find the old-school kids' anime art style refreshing, and I will say it's a compelling story if you see it through to the end, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it without qualification as it takes a bit of patience and fortitude. The first half of the series is ponderous, to use the term half-punningly; it's heavy, it's slow, and it's puzzling. It throws tons of stuff at you that is mostly relatable and interesting and does all (or nearly all) come together beautifully in the end, but it doesn't even start to be really explained until episode 13. This does serve a purpose, though, as when the reveals start coming, they really do work, but it's stuff you would never have swallowed* if they tried to feed it to you upfront without all the setup as to its bearing on the lives of characters we can relate to. Those relatable elements from the first half do at times get overshadowed more than I'd like, but shine through in other ways that I do like. All the way through it stays slow, with a bad habit of lingering on intense emotional reaction shots before bothering to explain them, but in the later parts the substance is enough to support that pace so that it doesn't feel as plodding as it did at first. I also think the climactic scene at the end deserved to be more beautiful than it was; it was beautiful, just not quite up to the scale of its ambition. I will say this show is not a feminist-pleaser; I'm sure there's a Bechdel pass in here somewhere, but almost all the female characters are damsels or are overly defined by the men around them, and the heroine, especially early on, can just get frustrating in her silence and passivity (like pulling teeth, seriously).
If you have the patience for it, tho, it's ultimately an epic and bittersweet tale of science gone too far, of hatred and jealousy, of love and atonement, of longing and letting go. It is worth seeing, just be warned you're in for a haul before it really starts paying off.
*Do you wanna know? HUGE GIANT SPOILER...
You're sure now?
Reincarnated space aliens in search of their princess whom they scientifically beamed to Earth's afterlife.
Yes, it is a good story in context --- but yes, there is a reason they spent a dozen episodes softening us up for that.
