Spring 2009 Season Conclusion

Author: nova

Found one of these in my mail box this morning. Wats goin on?

I suppose it’s about time to write up a post about whatever survived on my watchlist to the bitter end.

Let me start off with Chrome Shelled Regios. In the end it was a rather plain experience and the ending felt like cheating, even more so than Eden of the East. Either we can look forward to another season or, preferably, shrug at all the incomprehensible last minute terminology and go back to entertainment that’s actually worth the trouble. Regios isn’t totally bad, it just makes too little sense and doesn’t do anything that would make it stand out. Aside from Felli of course. Regios kinda fell into the same trap as Index, it tried to be too epic for its own good.

Welcome to the Mass Naked Child Event.

Next up is Eden of the East which easily takes the cake as the weirdest show I’ve encountered this year. Eden looks and sounds amazingly good but gets quite hard to understand as it progresses. As a mere 11-ep series Eden of the East feels like it ends before it even gets most of the gears running and the ending is pretty much the very definition of abrupt. Maybe the show is was intended as a prelude for the two theatrical movies that are in the works to be released in 2009 and 2010, who knows. Eden is a huge-ass cocktease that ends just when it gets to the juicy parts but somehow I don’t feel all that cheated. Just looking forward to the films.

JC Staff managed to surprise this time over because Hatsukoi Limited was actually a good series. The entire relationship jumble is amusing to watch and in the end everything concludes in a way that should be satisfactory to all parties involved. See, the studio still has it as long as they aren’t thinking they’re doing some epic-scale shit. Hatsukoi looks rather plain and background graphics are about as minimalistic as possible without being SHAFT but the characters are animated quite well – annoying proportion errors and misaligned eyes oh so familiar from KimiKiss are rare.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF-

As expected of the anime industry’s Apple, KyoAni came, saw and kicked butt with K-ON! in a brilliant demonstration of the studio’s absolute dominance as a brand. While this may not be the next Lucky Star or Haruhi, we’re talking about some solid quality moe show with K-ON! It saddens me though that a lot of people seem to still think the series is supposed to be a spiritual successor of Lucky Star or something while it’s obvious that the two shows have surprisingly little in common. I have little interest in retyping what I’ve said in the past, so let me just quote myself here:

Newsflash morons: K-ON! is not a fucking otaku reference parody show. If it was to be compared to any other series out there I’d pick Azumanga Daioh but definitely not Lucky Star. Because the latter mentioned represents the traditional Azumanga-type anime about as much as a combine harvester represents four-wheeled vehicles. K-ON! is an obvious Azumanga-clone, about as clear example as it gets without being a ripoff, and L*S definitely is nothing of the sort aside from its very, very basic setting. Also the pacing and focus of jokes is entirely different in K-ON! when compared to L*S, something that makes a world of difference to me.

[...]

I also find comparing the characters in K-ON! and L*S utterly futile. Sure you may say that Tsumugi is exactly like Miyuki but come on, Mio being a Kagami ripoff? Yui being Tsukasa with extra awkwardness? And Ritsu is just like Konata? Whatever you were smoking. I find very little similarities that exist between Mio and Kagami. Sure, Mio is more serious than her friends and sometimes acts as the voice of reason within the group like Kagami does, but this role of hers has carries much less weight. Kagami is a straightforward, self-confident and mature tsukkomi-character, while Mio is awkward, unsure of herself and often indirect about what she really wants. She sometimes cockblocks Ritsu’s retarded ideas but I can’t really put her under the tsukkomi-category at least as far as the anime is concerned. If anything, Mio reminds me of Azumanga’s Yomi. And she doesn’t even have twintails for aura to pull. And Yui being like Tsukasa? You might as well put an equals sign between being shy and being diagnosed with ADHD-I. Now put her next to Osaka and you won’t be able to tell who’s who. Finally, to draw a line between Ritsu and Konata? Just where do you see a connection? The fact that both are lazy as far as school is concerned? Except that Konata still aces her exams while Ritsu needs help from the ace student Mio, just like the relationship between Tomo and Yomi. There is not a fucking thing that makes Ritsu a Konata-clone. A Tomo-clone? Why not. A Torako clone? That works too.

TL;DR:

Ahem. My overall impression of K-ON! was quite positive. Sure it was something one may call burger-entertainment but it’s not like I never feel like getting some fast food even if it’s killing both my heart and bank account. Cute girls doing cute things-format at its best, Hyakko done right, however you want me to say it. Just don’t expect any new tricks.

What about Natsu no Arashi? Guaranteed SHAFT stuff, though not all that trippy. The original manga was an odd bird by its own right and to task studio SHAFT to make an anime adaptation brings quite expected results. Arashi is a show that sails the dark seas between drama, comedy, slice of life and plot-driven with so good results that just the feat itself is amazing. I’m sure there are people out there who find Arashi merely aimless loitering around to somehow consume the project group’s budget. But personally I found Arashi to be colorful and fresh experience that was both truly amusing and touching.

y so QUALITY?

On to Shangri-la. Let me be straightforward here: It’s not that great of a show. It has an interesting setting, Range Murata, decent CGI effects and amazingly good background art. The thing is that these aforementioned are the only good parts in it. Like To Aru Majutsu no Index, Shangri-la is an attempt to create an epic with a lot of ambition but not much else. GONZO has poured tons of money into all the eye candy and the excellent OP performed by May’n, only to forget that the show still needs directing and character animation. You see, as beautiful as the CGI and background art may be, the characters animation is pretty much terrible. Characters move sluggishly and there are enough proportion errors to rival Akikan!. Thus the much-anticipated action scenes look terrible, especially the aerial battle in episode 12 which isn’t only poorly animated but also extremely confusing. It’s like they cut the scene into a few dozen pieces and reassembled it in random order with about 75% of the pieces removed out of budget reasons. The mystery around Atlas, the ronery loli Karin and Digma-whatevers is still quite interesting and pretty much the only thing left that keeps me watching this show. The protagonists themselves are rather dull and their entire motive is left unillustrated. Sure they tell us that the government is being nasty and people are suffering and shit, but that’s just like hearing about some famine in Madagascar on the evening news – not very involving for the most of us. Uprising in Zimbabwe? Big deal. Government being overthrown in Somalia? Wait, Somalia has a government?

I had some trouble trying to form an opinion on Mai-HiME season thr*cough*Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo. The show was funny and random as heck at the start but went on to become needlessly complicated and serious. Around midway through its run Sora Kake was filled to the rim with incomprehensible terminology and happenings that serve no other purpose than to just confuse the poor viewer. Towards the end the show picked up a bit more momentum and managed to avoid most of the emo-landmines. Fukuyama Jun’s role as Leopard salvaged surprisingly much and aside from a few blue moments the show managed to maintain happy and bright mood, although I feel much of its parody potential was left unused. Sora Kake probably works better as marathoned and was overall decent – just nothing actually brilliant. Guess I could also sing a few words of praise about the excellent CGI-sequences that makes whatever GONZO has ever done pale in comparison.

My Tayutama-face, right there.

About Tayutama…well, it’s a cheap eroge adaptation. You know the drill. Mashiro should be roasted on open fire, Ameri would be nicer if she was mute. Mifu works. A Yumina is fine too. Yuuri is full of shit. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

FEUER!

Let’s wrap this up with Valkyria Chronicles. This is another show I found difficult to determine whether I like it or not. It looks pretty decent and all but somehow up to this point the show has mainly been about…well, nothing. Guess it’s my fault for expecting more than just a few minor skirmishes but I can’t help but to feel cheated when I see episodes filled with all kinds of banalities and ground-level character development. Although this might be the entire point because as far as I have understood the game Valkyria is adapted from doesn’t have all that much character development and the anime is here to fill the gap. So to fully enjoy Valkyria Chronicles anime you need to play Valkyria Chronicles the game. For which you need a ridiculously overpriced piece of already obsolete gaming hardware that’s factory-limited in other functionality. Thanks Sony, but no thanks. Not even for Alicia.

Running on the clock here, that’s all for now folks.