An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Month: March 2020

Good Animation Does Not Equal Good Action – Star Driver Spoiler Review

Star Driver is a mecha show that presents itself as passionate and stylish. It certainly looks the part; it’s brightly colored with a fairly particular style lending flair to good standard animation, including some particularly gorgeous environments. The character movements are graceful, which extends to the show’s Mechas usually moving more like dancers than lumbering multi-ton machines. The costumes range from the colorful end of ‘normal’ to the garishly absurd, and at first the plot and setting seem to follow suit with a conflict between our chronic hero and a fun, loony group of ‘villains’ who, like Team Rocket, are more amusing in their capering than legitimately threatening. Perhaps it’s a little heavier, but this still seems like it’s going to be a fun and engaging show with some kickass action.

If you, like I, watched the first episode or two of Star Driver and thought that, then the show tricked you. The presentation stays the course, but almost everything you would have guessed about the content is pretty far from the truth. And in this case, at least, that’s not a good thing.

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An Epic About Robots, Love, and Surfing – Eureka Seven Spoiler Review

Eureka Seven is, in my opinion, a rarity in that it’s a show that gets the long, escalating epic journey just about right. Because this show is no doubt a marathon. At 50 episodes it’s not the longest anime I’ve watched start to finish, but it is in a high tier that most shows don’t go for, and you do feel the weight that time investment can bring to bear. So I suppose the question is if Eureka Seven uses its time well, and if it’s worthwhile.

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Seasonal Selection – In/Spectre Episode 11

Here we get it, Iwanaga’s fourth solution and the big climax of In/Spectre. In episode eleven. It’s well-done and at least takes advantage of some of the benefits of being an anime rather than a manga. In Episode eleven. This is the big one – the final push against Steel Lady Nanase and the last shot to foil Rikka’s scheme. This is episode eleven.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 12 (Final)

This was the final episode I expected, but not the one I might have hoped for.

All in all, what happens this episode? Exactly what you would you expect would happen. Orochi fires off its doom rocket (I can’t really call it anything else since it’s kind of nuke-like but not exactly and not given any particular name) and the first act of the episode is the struggle to intercept it before the Azur Lane home port is annihilated. We get, admittedly, a decent action sequence for this show between Purifier and Enterprise on the chase. You know Enty is going to intercept, but it at least tries to sow some doubt the way a good action scene should, and the fighters are a little less static than a lot of the fighting in this episode in particular. Purifier still has a fun personality, too. I’d comment that it’s one hell of a slow rocket but frankly if you watched episode 1 you know to not expect anything to be logically consistent with the real world.

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Ia Fhtagn – Demonbane Spoiler Review

In the spirit of Mecha March, this week we’re going to take a look at another deep, symbolic, long, twisted, psychological… ha! Just kidding, it’s time for Demonbane.

Demonbane (or, if you prefer, Kishin Houkou Demonbane or Roar of the Machine God Demonbane) is a property that I can only assume is the result of a series of drunken dares culminating in “I bet you can’t write and market something with panty shots of the Necronomicon as a selling point”. Needless to say, they did it, and the anime form of the slice of insanity that resulted is what we’re looking at today.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 11

Hm? It’s been a long while, but episode 11 of Azur Lane is finally here. And to start with, its very “by the book”, but right now I’ll take the safe execution.

In specific, this episode is basically dedicated to taking on the escorts for Orochi, at least in terms of what burns time. At the start we’re in battle with Purifier, but in classic Azur Lane Anime fashion she excuses herself very quickly to enable the “First half talk, second half fight” structure for the episode as a whole, and that is by in large what they do.

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Imitation, um, Sure is Something – RahXephon Spoiler Review

Welcome back to Mecha March! Today I’m reviewing RahXephon, aka Xerox of Evangelion. Yeah, I’m just going to come out and mention the biggest issue with this show right at the start, because it is in everything and better to just get it out of the way: RahXephon is a show that lives almost entirely in the shadow of Neon Genesis Evangelion and really, really wants to simply be its famous predecessor. Characters, themes, images… a lot of them are lifted straight from Evangelion, serial numbers filed off and remixed just enough to claim to not be just Evangelion all over again.

But does it work? Drawing influence, even strong influence, from a predecessor can be alright. Being a mimeographed copy of your predecessor, slowly degrading from replication, however, is not. There isn’t an exceptionally sharp line dividing one for the other, the “too similar” failure state from the “more of the same, but ultimately OK” pass. Even though RahXephon strives to become Evangelion, if it puts in enough of its own work, it could be fine. Evangelion had a lot of good material, after all, and didn’t always implement it perfectly, so there might be room in the shell for something else.

The task set, let’s start digging in to RahXephon.

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