#solicit bryn's anime opinions

[canmom]

Are you still watching Centaur World? Looking forward to anything you have to say re: Season 2 and the ending.

Ahaha, writing something about this was something I had planned, once I'd finished talking about Houseki no Kuni. But since you've asked~

So, on rewatch, Season 1 of Centaurworld held up very well. It maintained a good balance of humour and pacing, the characters were appealing, and the driving character arc was compelling. I definitely want to say more on that in a minute, but let me comment on Season 2!

Centaurworld is kind of structured like a joke: you have setup, and then payoff. In this case, the payoff is a grand finale featuring reprises of the ideas set up earlier in the story and resolving its major emotional arcs (namely: Horse learning to chill out and connect to her new friends, reuniting Horse and Rider, and Wammawink learning to let go). This setup-payoff structure produces some of the best moments, such as the unexpected reprise of Comfortable Doug with a solo in the S1 finale; it's generally a good basis to build a story around.

Unfortunately this really put themselves in a tough place at the outset of season 2, having fired most of those guns and thus lost most of the narrative momentum. They had some exposition to handle, such as establishing the character of the General and the nature of the Minotaurs as chimeras (which would be thematically important) before we could deliver the big Nowhere King backstory to the finale - an understandable decision given the actual impact of dropping it all as essentially one big 90 minute Disney musical, but with much of Horse's arc already resolved, it left little ground to cover in the first few episodes so it kind of felt like spinning wheels for a bit, even if it was setting up the same payoffs for the finale.

It's just tough for 'imposter syndrome/performance anxiety/did I make the right choice' to live up to 'I must get back to my wife rider in whom I've staked my entire emotional existence in life thus far/will I be too changed for her to recognise me'.

There's also an unfortunate tendency to take a good joke that was evidently popular in the first season and try to spin a lot more out of it; Comfortable Doug's many appearances in Season 2 had the feeling of that time My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic made a whole joke about the fan favourite drawing error 'Derpy Hooves' (disablism aside) - it just felt strained, rather than novel. OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh - Comfortable Doug was like, actually a significant character already! - but it felt like ‘ok here is more of that guy you like so much’.

All the same, after a couple of episodes to ease back in, it hit its stride around Holes Part 3, with the theme being fleshing out the rest of the Herd (who were for s1 almost entirely joke characters) and seeing Horse go through a crisis of confidence.

Honestly? Although Becky Apples was kind of funny, I think there would have been potential if they had put Horse back on the other side of the rift and developed her relationship with Rider onscreen.

There's still a lot to like, and once they actually spelled out what the Nowhere King's deal was, he actually made plenty of thematic sense as a villain. The main problem is perhaps that, by saving it all to the end, we basically have no understanding of what the main conflict is and just see him as 'generic bad guy' until the finale. It's a shame because, conceptually, it's actually a really good use of the 'world of centaurs' concept; an attempt to take a part of oneself and suppress it for the sake of respectability all being portrayed as something horribly misguided and traumatic is... juicy!

I think they made the best of it. It's an impressively ambitious project - the sheer number of songs far exceeds anything I've seen in TV animation - MLPFIM and SU could manage a song once every two or three episodes, whereas this can drop two or three every single episode, almost always with an impressively choreographed animated sequence. If I were more literate in musical theatre, I might be able to better recognise if they're riffing on existing musicals or just using certain familiar song structures. Regardless, it's compelling.

In terms of animation... there was some really strong work at many points. I noticed a very impressive bit of effects animation in the whaletaur episode in s1, and s2 had a couple of "oh, they really had fun there!" fight scenes. There's also a lot to be said for the sheer animation challenge of animating a cast of mostly quadrupeds constantly walking about and emoting. Wonder if anyone's put some up on sakugabooru? ...yeah! mmhm!

When I first watched this show, I was on a bit of an obsessive kick about solid drawing; at that point it felt like the greatest principle of animation was the kind of James Baxter/Toshiyuki Inoue/Mitsuo Iso/Hiroyuki Okiura/Shinya Ohira/etc. feeling of a convincing 3D object in space. Which is to neglect... basically all else in animation. Rewatching it I noticed a lot of the other good they're doing in terms of timing and making things feel bouncy and active; there's some very charming bits of stylisation, with Wammawink sometimes almost looking like a Jonni Phillips character. I'm ashamed I ever felt I could dismiss it as toonboom puppet animation.

I think the main thing that both bugs and interests me, is, well, the sorta faux-anime/disney look they use for the human world. Let me try and explain...

Here's the official turnaround of the main human character, Rider:

And here's a closeup of her face:

You can see that her head structure is very much of the anime template... but it's a kind of, slightly different mode of stylisation; elements like armour are reduced to sharp graphic shapes which can kind of feel like they're made of cardboard. The lines are very even, and much thicker than they would be in anime, with digital precision; there are also very few areas of higher detail to break up the large flat shapes. And, just, it really feels like nothing has any thickness to it! Basically she looks like she's drawn with vectors. And to me... that just doesn't quite work.

Faces are incredibly subtle, and what seems like a very minor tweak, like an increase in line weight, can completely change the impression of a face. The human characters here remind me of the designs of Infinity Train - there's nothing technically wrong with them, they have clear design language and are simple enough to be animated very nicely, but there's this curiously stiff quality. It's interesting as a sort of case study, because these designs are generally a lot more ambitious in terms of anatomical realism than most of what you see in Western TV animation at the moment, so it draws you to try and work out 'what's missing?'

That said, I do feel like the human designs in Season 2 tend to have a stronger identity to them.

On the other hand, I really do like Horse's pre chibification design. The full design sheet is far too big and detailed to include here but it includes some fascinating instructions to the animators:

"A real horse could never hit this pose. Don't be afraid to completely break the anatomy at times."

"Her front legs can act more like arms. When this happens, gravity no longer affects her body like it normally would. No need to make her back legs support her full weight."

"She can hold objects magically. It should always look as ridiculous as possible."

This one on quadruped construction is also fascinating.

Horse's design appears to take quite a lot of the way Dreamworks would construct a horse in a movie like Spirit. (You can see the full collection of design sheets and concept art for Spirit here).

In both designs, the model begins with two spheres, and there is a very clear indication of the plane changes around the bridge of the nose, which gives Horse's face a very strong recognisable structure as she moves around. I imagine it was quite a lot of work to keep animating it though.

Of course, the arc of season 1 sees Horse gradually transform from this kind of Disney/Dreamworks mode of stylisation to a much more simplified graphical design as in a modern TV cartoon.

Visually, this basically removes all the hard right angles in Horse's original design and replaces them with rounded shapes with few clear boundaries. Thematically, this represents a character adapting to the values of Centaur World, i.e., chilling out, learning to communicate and respect their friends rather than fighting a war. Although Horse initially reacts with horror to her transformation, ultimately this is treated by the narrative as unequivocally good; after the finale, the same starts to happen to Rider; we only see the beginning but eventually she's gonna end up like this:

This sense of design language is pretty pervasive. Notably when we see the past of Centaur World, its designs much more resemble the human characters; for example, a certain deertaur:

This design has considerably more complex shapes and sharper angles compared to the current era of Centaurworld, and symbolically this represents that this is a troubled character (who will eventually become the villain).

My feelings about this very explicit design sensibility (many characters joke about how Horse now resembles two beach balls glued together) is... hmm. Of course, Centaur World is a parable - it signals that we shouldn't take its lore too seriously when it starts going out naming characters things like 'Horse' and 'Rider'. Formally, putting these two animation styles side by side and giving them alternate meanings is a compelling device. It naturally makes sense to add a visual layer to the metaphors in the story.

And yet, I miss the element in the first season where the cuteness was experienced as an imposition; the centaurs heavily implied to be burying themselves in their childlike antics to escape from the war, as a perhaps rather unhealthy thing to do. I feel like more could have been done to either develop ro trouble the implied associations - round/soft/cute/willfully ignorant vs. angled/hard/serious/joyless/unable to connect, maybe even look to find some synthesis instead of ultimately just upholding one pole of the presented dichotomy! Haha maybe that's asking a bit much though...

The other fascinating oddity about it is just how... blatantly they paint the Horse/Rider relationship as romantic. Like basically all the drama they get out of it in S2 is about that! All the narrative beats! I wonder what AO3's done with this...

...fewer than I expected if I'm honest. Actually Nowhere King/Woman seems to be the most popular ship, followed by Splendib/Zulius (reasonable, even if they didn't exactly develop that one much outside of a 'this is happening, here's our ship name' joke). But for a show that spent an entire episode parodying fandom, it's really not got much out there at all. Maybe my expectations are rather uh, miscalibrated by MLPFIM's fandom lmao.

As a story about a war, it's of course not really about a war at all, and all military matters are treated in the vaguest terms, totally subordinate to the character arcs. 'The General' might as well be Dad for all the actual soldiering he does. That's fine though, because it's a story about interpersonal relationships and growth, and the war is just set dressing metaphor. (Rider pleading to do war crimes was funny though.)

Anyway, all in all, it's really got a lot going for it; whatever flaws I see in it I think are mere 'unrealised potential' than anything that really kills it, and I had a great time watching again. Very glad I gave it another go in a less miserable state of mind lmao.

[canmom]

Extremely curious as to your thoughts about the revue starlight show and finale movie

Ah, now there, I am due for a rewatch of RevStar, and I haven't yet seen the finale movie! (I really should have by now it's been out more n half a year lol)

RevStar is interesting because it seems to be the most overt attempt to follow in the footsteps of Kunihiko Ikuhara I've seen. Like Utena, it's drawing on the imagery of the Takarazuka Revue - in fact, literally set in a performing school that's blatantly patterned on Takarazuka, and its thematic thrust is a criticism of its structure. But it's also got got all the highly symbolic compositions and characterisation expressed indirectly through imagery that makes Ikuhara's work such analysis fodder, especially in the big song-duel sequences that happen almost every episode at the turning point of each character arc. (Yeah, just like Utena.)

These character song-fights are definitely the part that grabs my attention most, although I take kVin's point in his writeups that the light-hearted slice-of-lifey school sections are also very well executed, full of charming rhythms and creative camerawork even in minor moments. Just... I'm not super attached to school stories. The quieter moments are obviously necessary to set up the character conflicts that underlie and give meaning to the duels... but I probably wouldn't have watched it if not for that.

Actually one thing I didn't realise is that in RevStar's case, the stage musical came first, performed in 2017, the anime releasing the year after - though this is a case of being one big multimedia project rather than adapting a stage musical to anime which really would be novel. After the success of the anime there were subsequent productions, and I believe this is one of those later ones, featuring the incredible voice of Tomita Maho as Tendou Maya:

In these posts I've spoken a lot as if studios, rather than people, are the main agents that make anime, but of course "a studio is just a building" - it just so happens that a lot of studios have become shorthands for certain creative teams (Shaft and Shinbo, Trigger and Imaishi). I don't know the same background for Kinema Citrus but I get the impression that they're a well run studio (their work just previously on Made in Abyss is also exceptional) - and I've heard they're good about paying their international freelancers decent rates and on time as well which really shouldn't be exceptional but, anime!

But anyway, the thing that immediately stands out to me on RevStar's animation is just how flowing and lively their action animation feels when it's basically all being done on 3s. Big camera moves, running, fast-paced swordfights, all on 3s kind of defies belief, and when I started rewatching RevStar a few months ago, I paused and framed through some of the fights like :O It's the ideal of Mitsuo Iso's 'full limited' deployed on an impressive scale, primarily by the unbelievably talented young Takushi Koide - and 'talented young' seems to be the description of just about the entire team from what I gather from kVin's writeups.

So, the Ikuhara influence is not just based on the obvious resemblance of the Takarazuka theme - director Tomohiko Fukuhara got his first episode director job working on Penguindrum and then became kind of his right-hand man on subsequent projects like Yurikuma Arashi. kVin relates here, in the first of a fantastic series of production notes:

Who is that Furukawa fellow who’d get viewers so excited? If you had asked a few years ago, the answer would have been a fairly impressive action animator. Ever since Penguindrum, though, his name has carried more weight. Before that show, he’d never even drawn a Storyboard, but Kunihiro Ikuhara sensed something in him. Furukawa ended up co-storyboarding the openings and up to 6 episodes in the second half, alongside some other rising stars like Shouko Nakamura, Mitsue Yamazaki, and Katsunori Shibata. (...)

─ Although Ikuhara’s style is of course not a miracle conjured from nothingness – it initially came down to his real-life theatrical inspirations plus endless Osamu Dezaki-isms filtered through Shigeyasu Yamauchi‘s lens and some Junichi Sato comedy – he’s always had this much of an inspiring effect on the youngsters who work under him. And, in modern times, no one has absorbed his precepts better than Furukawa, who’s actually become integral to Ikuhara’s working process. He assisted him on every one of his new projects, from minor stuff like his ending sequences on Kokoro Connect, BROTHERS CONFLICT, and NORN9, to acting as co-series director on Yurikuma Arashi.

So while it's tempting to see it as a cynical attempt to rip off the style of the great auteur Ikuhara, it's more than this - perhaps one day we might speak of an 'Ikuhara school', the way we speak of Yoshinori Kanada.

That said, since the comparison is inevitable, RevStar is definitely much more straightforward than Ikuhara tends to be. The storyline and in-fiction stakes are spelled out a lot more concretely: win the competition and you get a wish, and you can use it for such things as time travel. Because, yeah, there's a mid-season 'this is actually a time loop' reveal, just like Madoka! It's also much less reliant on the device of repeating 'bank' footage and general repetition-based jokes than Ikuhara - yes, there's the sequence where the uniforms are pressed at the beginning of each duel, echoing Utena's famous stair climbing, but that's about it.

Still, like an Ikuhara anime, it places a great deal of weight on shot composition (favouring very striking symmetric shots), symbolic elements, flower language, etc. - here's your inevitable Emily Rand citation. This is most overt in the stage shows, naturally, which take the theatrical setting to introduce all kinds of set elements that relate to the theme and design of each character. There are plenty of other strong visual elements that become recurring motifs of the series as a whole, such as - of course - the mysterious giraffe which oversees the fights and seems to represent the viewer... and to a slightly lesser extent, Tokyo Tower, the Position Zero mark, etc.

Another comparison: while Ikuhara tended to go on very stark, flat compositions that emphasise the unusual architectural setting, Fukuhara and Koide seem to prefer to push a sense of inhabiting a 3D space with their tilted cameras and unusual angles, which apparently was a pretty heavy workload for the layout artists. (Something they take to extremes with the dramatic CG camera moves in the fights themselves).

Speaking of character design, this is probably the show's biggest stumbling. It's very much the dominant moe standard, which is a shame, because as kVin says they could have done fantastic things by really pushing the shōjo manga inspirations visually as well. (To be fair, Ikuhara's post-Utena work has also not pushed the envelope nearly as much on drawing styles either.)

Unfortunately, kVin also reports that this production was in a pretty stressful state for most of the duration, and at one point it was in the air whether it would be finished. It was definitely on the wave of shows hiring international freelancers, something Kinema Citrus has made a habit of (who knows, I'd love to draw animation for them one day), and evidently it did in fact get finished, but it's another unfortunate case of an ambitious show being achieved mostly by straining the animators to their absolute limits. This is perhaps more a case of great ambition than poor showrunning, but I wish we could have an industry where ambitious projects like these could be given the proper time to be realised.

(^ i don't remember this scene, maybe it's from the movie? been a while though lol)

It's interesting, come to think of it, to compare the 'shine' of the girls in the Revue with the 'spiral power' of Gurren Lagann. Both represent ambition and drive, but while Gurren Lagann is a full-throated celebration, RevStar laments that these girls are thrown into a wasteful, destructive competition in which one will eventually overshadow the others, and even condemns the audience that enables it with a literal giraffe-turns-to-camera moment. (Such a 'you, the viewer, are complicit in enjoying the show we made!' is always a tricky line to walk, of course, and I'm not sure if it quite pulls that off, although it's definitely amusing in the moment.)

I find this theme interesting bc, although I could never be a stage performer, it's not like a similar dynamic doesn't exist in my chosen field of endeavour. Everyone wants to be the next Bahi JD or Weilin Zhang, and I no kidding, I definitely do too! My current overly elaborate animation project was started in large part in a sense of like, attempting to prove I have what it takes to compete in the sakuga arena - not really the best place to create from, although it's been interesting to learn the subtleties I hadn't grasped at the outset.

Anyway, that's the preamble out of the way. Am I putting too much effort into these? I'm supposed to be drawing up a commission sheet. ...eh, it's fun though!

haven’t heard of it | absolutely never watching | might watch | currently watching | dropped | hated it | meh | a positive okay | liked it | liked it a lot! | loved it | a favorite

don’t watch period | drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes | give it a go, could be your thing | 5 star recommendation

fav characters: Yeah I can't pretend otherwise, it's Tendou Maya. Something about a really arrogant ambitious girl, it's a hell of a vibe, and very appropriate for the show's themes as the perfect otokoyaku who's the obvious favourite to lead the revue - and thus the foil to Karen who hopes to reshape the hierarchical system. Her song is the one I still listen to occasionally.

There's something to be said for (Ba)Nana, who seems a comedy character at first, turning out to be the one who has won the competition every time and each time wished to relive the year - not because of a self-destructive devotion like Homura, but simply because she can't bear to let go of this group of school friends. That's a funny spin on the concept!

least fav characters: I can't really say I dislike any of these girls. There are sufficiently many that I have trouble remembering all of them lol. Not surprising that there was a gacha spinoff.

fav relationship: ooh, this one's tough - tbh I was not as good at keeping track of characters and relationships on my first watch so I have trouble remembering all the dynamics. Anyway, the love triangle between Karen, Hikari and Mahiru (primarily, the Karen/Hikari side) is the central driving dynamic, although 'childhood promise' is not a trope I find particularly engaging. More interesting is perhaps Maya and Claudine, the initial jealous clash slowly turned into like, supportive but hurting power couple ig. I gotta rewatch it though.

fav moment: ...would it be too obvious to name Pride and Arrogance? ok, how about every time the giraffe says 'I understand'. I've kind of picked that one up - thank you Unicode Consortium for adding a giraffe emoji.

headcanons/theories: ...ok, what exactly is the giraffe getting out of this? it's set up as kind of an Incubator-like figure, tempting the girls with glory and creating this punishing structure that forces them to turn on each other to realise their ambitions, culminating in the wish... but we don't have any daft story about entropy to 'explain' that. Maybe they actually spell that out at some point and I forgot?

unpopular opinion: Honestly what's even the popular opinion about this show? If you're the kind of person who likes this kind of thing, "it's good". if not, it's "revue what?"

how’d you find it: Overall, definitely one of the standout anime of the last few years - a very compelling series which realised grand ambitions with many really inspiring sequences. Not quite as semiotically overwhelming as your Ikuharas, it's a lot more upfront about what it's about, but it delivers that with aplomb.

The places where it's weak are mostly where it doesn't set itself apart from the limitations of late-2010s digital anime - the backgrounds in particular have that, I'm not sure what word, but like very even 'digital painting' feel without a lot of character, and the character designs as mentioned are too conventionally moe for my taste (although I think the outfits for the fight sequences are great) distinguished mostly by hairstyle. But that's a minor complaint.

I can't wait to get around to watching the movie, since I hear that's fantastic. Actually, come to think of it, why don't we do it for Animation Night this week?

random thoughts: RevStar is one of those 'multimedia projects', and I think it's really interesting how musical theatre in Japan seems to be hooked into the other creative industries in a much more significant way. I feel like it would be unthinkable for a TV show or game to be accompanied by a musical over here, but while it's not exactly common in Japan, the fact I can easily think of two examples (this and the YoRHa musical) kinda strikes me as noteworthy. I guess it's somehow connected to the whole idol subculture?

Hope that satisfies, I look forward to watching RevStar again though so I can give a more substantive engagement with its characters, themes etc.

[canmom]

i crave your thoughts on gurren lagann

hell yeah anon, I'll try and give you your money's worth. here let me find the one meme cut in the gif picker sdfsdf

Gurren Lagann! Hiroyuki Imaishi's magnum opus, and in essence the foundational text of Studio Trigger! What a show, what a show. It's basically about celebrating a certain concept of active, virile masculinity, which isn't usually my thing, but it does it with such charm and bombast that I can't not love it all the same.

Hiroyuki Imaishi is basically the last devotee of the once dominant Kanada School. You can read about that history in a great deal of depth over on Matteo Watzky's blog, or just skip to his piece on Imaishi. Matteo can spot some of the elements of the Imaishi mix that I would miss, like the allusions to profoundly influential Dezaki anime Ashita no Joe in Kanada's death sequence. (Damn we're crazy overdue for Dezaki aren't we?)

But of course regardless of whether you've got an encyclopedic knowledge of all the important anime since the 70s, you'll get Imaishi's style immediately: it's bombastic, it's comedic, it's got extreme stylisation and snappy motion and dirty jokes and doesn't take itself at all seriously but (contra Watzky, imo) can still carry a surprising emotional charge through the sheer energy that infuses everything.

So, Gurren Lagann! I wrote an Animation Night post on this one too, written not long after I watched the series so I was able to give a fairly substantial review. But let's write something a little more.

Famously, the show that Gainax made in the aftermath of Eva [i remembered that totally wrong it's FLCL they made in the aftermath of EoE - thanks for catching that @attemptsupon ] Made ten years after ever and clearly a sort of working through many of the the same themes (psychological metaphor through otaku cultural imagery), it's certainly not exactly relentlessly upbeat and hopeful, with Simon's arc certainly hitting some dark points, but certainly a very different sort of story: depression and grief conquered by sheer determination etc. etc. The great achievement of Gurren Lagann is to make this feel exhilarating rather than hokey. And of course, it's substantially a coming-of-age story, with Simon learning to step into the shoes of his idol Kamina after his death. And yet, one that ends up kind of ambivalent: after his victory, Simon becomes a hermit, withdrawing from the society he built...

The series comes in two broad arcs: the initial one follows the humans rising up to defeat the Beastmen who once conquered them; the second after a major timeskip sees divisions appear among them as they attempt to rebuild society, followed by another escalating series of battles against the universal force called the 'Anti-Spiral' which wants to snuff life with the humans' special power of willful evolution, which the humans answer with a series of bigger and bigger robots that scale first to the size of planets, then ultimately to the point of chucking galaxies as shurikens (it's a very goofy show).

Along the way Simon has to contend with his wife Nia being mind-controlled and imprisoned by the anti-spirals, and his friend and comrade betraying him to form a military dictatorship which wants to suppress the heroes who won the humans freedom in favour of mass-produced (ultimately useless) robots and a pyrrhic evacuation plan; later he is trapped in a lotus-eater dream by the Anti-Spirals. In every case, the winning strategy is to be unreasonable, attempt impossible things, and your spiral energy will grant you the powerup you need.

So for a story that's primarily about cool and sexy guys being cool and sexy in ridiculous ways that defy reality, what becomes of the girls? Where do they fit into this universe?

Yoko is definitely there for fanservice in some significant part - though the Gainax animators lavish as much animation talent on, say, a boob squishing against a wall as everything else and the passion there makes it all feel less cynical. Sexuality is certainly appropriate to the show's themes but... well let's just say the hot springs episode is a lot. Anyway, she doesn't get dropped, but she goes from being a core part of the main trio who fights enthusiastically in their battles and expresses and acts on a convincing attraction to Kamina... to being increasingly sidelined, especially in the second half where she has a schoolteacher B-plot. Despite this, I am fond of Yoko.

Then there's Nia, who Simon initially finds in a box, discarded by the Spiral King Lordgenome (at the time the show's villain, though he later gets a kind of redemption). She's... more frustrating, in that she gets to exert fairly little agency in the story or even, in a story that's all about throwing caution to the wind and boldly pursuing your immediate desires and ambitions, seems to have much she's fighting for. She takes care of Simon when he's mega-depressed following Kamina's death, and then becomes Simon's love interest; she's a terrible cook and generally a bit of an airhead, and she's p likeable... and then she's a prisoner for most of the second half, at the end of which, she dies! That's just kind of how it is though. I don't want to belabour this point and get stuck on doing nothing bat shallow pop-feminist analysis, but I would have liked more.

Imaishi certainly grew on this point though. Kill la Kill shows that you can put that same bombastic personality into girls and it's fantastic lmao

One other thing - the Gurren Lagann recap movies are a mess, because they faced the impossible task of taking two cours of an already pretty dense story and cramming it into less than half the runtime which means the character arcs are mostly just gestured at rather than actually felt. So despite an impressive animation upgrade to the already strong final sequence, and the incorporation of Yoh Yoshinari's splendid animation from the Parallel Works collection, they are better taken as a supplement to the series. Two cours may seem a lot but it'll fly by.

Here's the meme format:

haven’t heard of it | absolutely never watching | might watch | currently watching | dropped | hated it | meh | a positive okay | liked it | liked it a lot! | loved it | a favorite

don’t watch period | drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes | give it a go, could be your thing | 5 star recommendation

fav characters: Everyone on the cast loves Kamina - especially the camera! - but let's try and pick some less central characters because they give us plenty to choose from.

Viral's a fun one. He's as determined as any of the main cast but because the beastmen are not blessed with Spiral Energy he just gets his ass kicked over and over.

Lordgenome's generals are a fun bunch. Naturally I like Adiane.

Ron, the mechanic, is fascinating, not least bc like having an effeminate gay guy on the team (in a very curious set of design decisions, really wanna know what was going on there) is an interesting element in the show's story about masculinity. I only wish they'd been brave enough to have Kamina respond positively to Ron hitting on him. Another place Imaishi grew I suppose, considering Promare!

least fav characters: Despite my complaints above, I wouldn't say Nia is a least fave - just disappointing they didn't do more with her. so instead uhhhhh that minor character Kittan. Can't say i liked that guy. His showing in Parallel Works doesn't help matters lol, that one really makes you sympathise with the beastmen he fights.

fav relationship: We don't get a lot of gay ones to pick this time around lol. Ron/Kamina would have been sick like I said above but they weren't brave enough to make Kamina not be straight, which would be a genuinely interesting decision. (Although it's funny just how many 4chan dudes were made to question their sexuality by him to the point that 'gar for kanada' became a meme!)

Anyway, of the ones actually portrayed onscreen, Yoko/Kamina has the most convincing performance of attraction from both sides. I think it's fun to interpret Simon freaking out over seeing them together as him feeling adolescent attraction to Kamina rather than Yoko though. It doesn't really change the story much and it makes his grief all the more stark.

fav moment: The battle scenes are suitably exhilarating but I'm not sure which one to narrow it down to. there's a moment perhaps in the battle over the Spiral King's base where the music takes on this register that just makes it all feel so grand and horrific in scale, I find it hard to describe exactly how, but i would say that bit i guess! Kamina's death didn't have the impact it might've because it was spoiled for me going in (but who knows if i'd even have watched it if not for that praise) so it was kind of like... ooh, here we are, the famous bit where this guy dies!

headcanons/theories: Drawing a blank here ngl. It's pretty upfront about what it's doing and there aren't a lot of holes to patch.

unpopular opinion: Can't think of anything I have to say about this show that is all that out there honestly. I mean, except that it would be way cooler if it was gay, but Imaishi literally made that film lmao.

how’d you find it: Just plain fun, like Imaishi always is, but with enough substance to not be forgotten immediately. I took a long time to get around to seeing it but I found it held up very well, even with the hype. Could easily be the definitive super robot show, but I haven't seen enough of em to say.

random thoughts: To me it seems natural to see Gurren Lagann as essentially the first Trigger project before Trigger actually existed, the same way Nausicaa is the first Ghibli film before Ghibli actually existed.

Now Trigger is an odd beast - their style is deeply rooted in anime history and at the same time stands very distinct from just about any other studio working in the industry. Of course Imaishi's shows all look like Imaishi's shows, but you also have stuff like BNA that's in a similar territory. I think that's really cool! Though that said, they're certainly not just the house of neo-Kanada school. Their two shorts in Star Wars Visions illustrate their range pretty well: Imaishi directed the one where Lio Promare is a sith which was a fun spin on the aesthetic elements of a now very stale franchise, but they also had one which went for a much more realist aesthetic as a samurai movie and did a decent job of calling back to the 90s vibe.

Politically - I said Imaishi's gotten better, though of course being pro Kill la Kill is itself very controversial lmao. (I should probably read that Beautiful Fighting Girl book at some point.) But that said, for all that he has absolutely boundless energy and an admirable well of like, general anti-authoritarian feeling, it does feel like it often ends up a bit muddled. That's fine though - it's not exactly what these films are about.

Also shame Trigger's labour practices are well, labour practices of an anime studio!

Speaking of super robot shows and Trigger, everyone raved about SSSS Dynazenon so I guess I gotta watch SSSS Gridman and then that at some point. I'll admit... the main thing that's stopped me is mostly that the design sensibility of the robot lmao

[canmom]

PMMM?

Oooh, OK then. So I actually wrote an Animation Night post on Madoka, back on Animation Night 10 - hard to believe that's 81 weeks ago now. Back then, though, my posts were much shorter and I didn't discuss the production in much detail. However I did end up talking about SHAFT again later in the post about Kizumonogatari on Animation Night 51.

Anyway, I love Madoka. I admit, my engagement with the series has just been the original anime and Rebellion, and not any of the expanded world of gacha games and manga and the spinoff anime adapting the gacha - but I would rank Rebellion as one of my favourite animated films and I can't wait to see what they do with the upcoming sequel.

Last time I wrote about Madoka, I mostly wrote about Gen Urobuchi. I generally speaking think he's an immensely talented writer and I've enjoyed basically all the stuff he's worked on from Psycho-Pass to Fate Zero (yet to watch through Kamen Rider Gaim or play Sayo no Uta but I hear great things), but Madoka wouldn't be half the show it is without the incredible design work of Ume Aoki, distinctive direction of Yukihiro Miyamoto [and Akiyuki Shinbo overseeing all SHAFT projects, but see below], fantastic animation of too many key animators to name, gorgeous music of Kalafina and of course the absolutely brilliant Jan Švankmajer-influenced [Animation Night 50] collage animation of the incredibly talented duo Gekidan Inu Curry [see sakugablog for a nice retrospective of them].

The Madoka series excels in choreography and storyboarding - the classic austere, geometric SHAFT environments and striking camera angles, and the abstracted dance-like action sequences in which aesthetic elements and symbols flow into each other. And then they kick that up another notch or several in the movie, which indulges fully in Inu Curry's style. I still consider it some of the most beautiful sequences of animation set to music I've ever seen.

Anyway, I've only seen a bit of the SHAFT oeuvre (alongside Madoka, that's Bake- and Kizumonogatari), although the story of the studio is fascinating, like something out of a play - the charismatic Akiyuki Shinbo and his friends reorganising a fairly minor studio into one of the most distinctive of its time. Let me quote kVin (who else?):

The task Shinbo received at SHAFT wasn’t simple: he wasn’t going to direct a new series, but rather the whole studio. He became an overall supervisor of their entire output, while also guiding younger artists to make sure this style would live on. This marked the beginning of his unusual moonlighting, juggling jobs in a way that didn’t really allow him to do as much classic directorial work. To date, Shinbo has never been the sole director of a SHAFT series because he can’t. But he didn’t face this crazy challenge all by himself, of course. With his good pals Tatsuya Oishi and Shin Oonuma they formed the appropriately nicknamed Team Shinbo; a group of artists with compatible sensibilities, who had worked together in the past, and shared the desire to construct a new SHAFT.

kVin notes that the SHAFT style is an heir, through the influence of artist Nobuyuki Takeuchi who had had a significant role on Utena, to an incredibly influential director I've still yet to give a proper discussion on Animation Night, Osamu Dezaki, by way of - of course - the master of symbolism-dense, technically avant-garde anime, Kunihiko Ikuhara. I'll save a full discussion of that for another time, though. In any case, this was successful - perhaps too successful. Many of their best animators got caught up for years in the sprawling Kizumonogatari project, while kVin and other commenters more familiar with their work say the SHAFT style, once bold and innovative, became frozen in and lost its original contextual meaning, and some years later many SHAFT staff ended up leaving the studio for less overbearing work environment.

Madoka came just two years after Bakemonogatari, though, so the Team Shinbo style was still plenty fresh. Not surprisingly, it was quickly a huge hit. In Western fandom, it kind of became that meme show, where the magical girls have guns and being meguca is suffering. There's a bunch of extremely bad misreadings out there (it's grimdark! it's a 'deconstruction'! and the backlash to that - didn't you hear, gen urobuchi wants little girls to not have hope!) but that's just how anime fandom is I guess. It's certainly in dialogue with other magical girl shows, but to me it seems in a clearly appreciative way. Thematically, it's frankly not too far afield from something like Sailor Moon.

But you've asked for me to answer an ask meme, so let me do that instead :p

haven’t heard of it | absolutely never watching | might watch | currently watching | dropped | hated it | meh | a positive okay | liked it | liked it a lot! | loved it | a favorite

don’t watch period | drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes | give it a go, could be your thing | 5 star recommendation

fav characters: Homura - more on that when we get to 'unpopular opinion'! - and Kyōko, I generally really like the concept of a burned out cynical traumatised magical girl lol

least fav characters: is it too easy to say Sayaka's cardboard violin-playing boyfriend with nonspecific anime disease whose name I can't even be bothered to look up? I guess that's the whole tragedy of her character, she wants to save this boy who just resents her for it, but you can do so much better Sayaka!

fav relationship: haha well Homura/Madoka is obviously the central framing one innit, but actually there are dynamics I really like here, especially in Rebellion. again, more on that in 'unpopular opinions'. outside of that, I think you could write pretty good fic of just about any pair of girls. They hint a bit at Sayaka/Kyōko during the last big fight sequence in Rebellion (possibly more earlier? it's been a while?) and that's cute. I admit I'm not much of a shipper these days.

fav moment: There's many I could name, but one I keep coming back to is the sequence in Rebellion when the magical girl squad deploys and each of the girls gets a brief abstract sequence illustrating their vibe. The music and imagery is sooo good here. I also love the gunfight later in the film with the time-frozen bullet trails. And the incredible climactic battle when the whole world breaks down around Homura as she realises the truth of what's going on and becomes a witch again. Am I just naming the whole of Rebellion at this rate? OK, I admit it, years on in which I've watched literally hundreds more animated films, I still think this one's great.

headcanons/theories: This is clearly a redemptive headcanon that's not especially well signalled by the text, but the reason for all the nonsensical stuff about entropy and ancient aliens is that Kyubey is a low-level functionary who doesn't understand anything half as well as it pretends. The Incubators didn't cultivate human civilisation over the centuries and give us technologies, that's just a convenient lie in the moment, and Kyubey doesn't really understand what it is that they're harvesting from the magical girls very well at all. But because the girls are like, what, middle schoolers, they don't have the background to pull Kyubey up on his misunderstanding of thermodynamics lol.

unpopular opinion: OK. oKAY. let's do this again shall we. strap in. I went over this some time previously when I first watched Rebellion (good god that was hard to find, tumblr's search functions are a travesty) but my comments amounted mostly to *gestures at Stirner, who I hadn't read and still haven't*, so let's have another shot at justifying this Take...

Here we go: I still don't think Homura is the bad guy at the end of Rebellion. Which seems to be the shared opinion of every girl I know who's seen the film but in wider fandom is basically nonexistent as a take. I don't necessarily think Homura has the answer, but I don't think Madoka permanently sacrificing herself for the sake of every hurting person in the universe was a happy ending in the first place - Homura's insistence on being the one to save Madoka and her lack of imagination in trying to reconstruct the pantomime of a 'normal' life is surely an unhealthy fixation, but she's right that the situation was intolerable and something did have to be done about it. The tension between Madoka's agency and Homura's, and whether their desires and self-sacrificing impulses can be reconciled, is a productive one.

Now, the end of Madoka is something that produces endless interpretations. Back in May last year there was a fascinating discussion on here between @azdoine, @businesstiramisu and @anarcha-catgirlism getting into the characters' various saviour complexes and the possible religious readings of their arcs in the series's broadly Buddhist cosmology.

Visually, the film pulls out all the symbols in the SHAFT toolkit to suggest that Homura is as evil as she makes out - the mouth closeups, the headtilts, the cadence and tone of the dialogue. But it also gives us quite a few lines of evidence that Homura is onto something. Notably, it makes clear that Homura has not saved Madoka at the expense of all the other Magical Girls - outside her pocket universe, the Law of the Cycle still exists. Whether Madoka can truly be happy there is another question. It also gives us a very blatant image that Madoka as 'Madokami' is still suffering with an arm covered in self-harm scars:

Admittedly this film is about as visually dense as an Ikuhara anime and I don't blame anyone for not reading the implications in this very brief cut but it's fairly important, I think. Madokami may be taking the girls up to heaven, but it's a very impersonal heaven, and the strain it's placing on her is evident. Because I've increasingly caught on that a universal self-sacrificing impulse to save everyone, however understandable, isn't actually a great thing.

Even if you can't sympathise with Homura - and I admit, a lot of my sympathy comes for her rhetoric (desire over rules) more than her actions, and you could make an argument that trapping Madoka in a false pocket universe after struggling to escape one made by the Incubators and herself across the whole film is deeply ironic - overall, in any case, I feel that the ending of Rebellion is at least a very apt extension of the tragic arcs of the two characters. Not to mention a fascinating discussion point and far richer than the happy ending that was, I believe I read at one point, originally planned before Shinbo requested a darker ending.

Yeah, it is very sudden, probably too much so - that presentation does make it seem like a 'shocking twist! Homura's bad now' which is perhaps one reason why a lot of people reacted badly to it. I'm not exactly sure where they should have foreshadowed it; at least it's not like they don't spend a lot of time on it afterwards showing you just where Homura is coming from.

how’d you find it: Without Rebellion, I feel like Madoka is 'merely' a very good magical girl anime with excellent art direction, some creative twists on the format, and a darker tone than usual... with Rebellion, it's something fascinating that has completely hooked me.

So I really can't wait to see if they can keep the ball rolling in the Rebellion sequel, whenever that lands. Although the breakup of Kalafina will be a tragic blow. I don't know how you do Madoka without Kalafina.

random thoughts: More a bit of trivia than anything, but as far as one of the lasting influences of Madoka, Yoko Taro asked Kimihiko Fujisaka to think of the series when designing the Intoners for Drakengard 3. Which proved to be a great decision.

I admit, there's a whole side of Madoka which I am not familiar with. I tried starting Magia Record once but bounced off what seemed to be a simple recap of the opening beats of the series - I need to give it another shot some time because there are some spectacular clips from season 2. Per some of @azdoine's posts which I only vaguely recall, it sounds like they've been monkeying around a bit with retconning some of the themes and logic of the series which would be a shame but whatever, I don't believe in 'canon'.

Hope that satisfies you as an answer, anon!

[canmom]

Since I feel like they are generally sort of up your alley, I'll ask for your thoughts on Flip Flappers and really any other 3Hz anime you feel are worth commenting upon :3

ehehe sure! I had the pleasure of watching Flip Flappers at the house of @mogsk and @schizsune. Fascinating anime thematically, lots of splendid creative animation (not surprisingly it got the sakugablog treatment, though by liborek rather than kvin, who's laser-focused on the visual aspects). actually it seems like the anime blogosphere had such a field day with this series that there's a website just to compile everything that people wrote. It's definitely dense enough that I need to watch it again and read more of the writing about it to fully appreciate all that it does! But I'll do my best.

Anyway, in keeping with the format:

haven’t heard of it | absolutely never watching | might watch | currently watching | dropped | hated it | meh | a positive okay | liked it | liked it a lot! | loved it | a favorite

don’t watch period | drop if not interested within 2-3 episodes | give it a go, could be your thing | 5 star recommendation [this is a weird scale. i don't think there are many truly universal recs lol. but there are some things about flifla which may not be to a given reader's taste]

So let's preface this with a brief description of what this show even is for people who aren't familiar (obvs you are :p ).

Flip Flappers is an original anime directed by Kiyotaka Oshiyama, his first series director job after impressing with Space Dandy episode 18 and previously working on Ghibli projects and Dennou Coil. On the most surface level, it's about the relationship between two girls - at the outset, the seemingly demure schoolgirl Cocona and the wildly energetic Papika who suddenly appears in her life. They are together able to enter a realm known as 'Pure Illusion' - essentially a series of dream worlds which, it soon becomes apparent, represent the internal worlds of various characters around them. They do this under the stern control of an organisation called FlipFlap, opposed by a kind of cult called Asclepius.

All we really learn for a good while is that both are competing for mysterious objects called 'Amorphous', the conditions for which vary a lot with each world. To this end, we go through a variety of settings and tones - one episode may be an action spectacle in a Mad Max-like desert, another a mystery-horror. Generally speaking these wildly disparate settings are driven primarily by the emotional arc: Cocona figuring out what kind of lesbian homosexual she is going to define herself as.

The anime asks a fair bit of the viewer to figure out what it's doing beyond the gorgeous animation. Large periods of time pass between episodes which typically throw us in in media res, and we need to pick up on relations between characters and how they evolve through implication a lot of the time. It's v much a director's show with a lot of information conveyed by storyboarding and imagery, as Emily Rand expounds.

It assumes quite a lot of literacy with anime - episodes will pastiche a class-S yuri anime or a Kanada school super robot show, and of course the whole structure of the show is full of big nods to Evangelion, which really set the tone for 'psychoanalytic anime'. It's also packed full of allusions to philosophy of mind and psychoanalysis, both overt and structural. e.g. there's a rabbit-like creature called Uexküll after the scientist who coined the term 'umwelt', and the girls' route to Pure Illusion is a sparse cupboard called the Thomasson, which is a pretty obscure one examined in this post.

As such, psychoanalysis and ~queerness~ are the angles taken by the existing longer-form critical analysis, such as this video by zeria, who ranks it as their favourite anime:

In it, they argue that while absolutely about psychosexual development, the series represents essentially a critique of the overly narrow theories of Freud and Jung and is, going off the invocation of 'assemblages', a bit more Deleuzian in its outlook. Which is admittedly kind of the reading that you'd expect someone like Zeria to make, but they make a pretty good case.

Anyway, if I ever run FliFla on Animation Night, I might try and dig a bit more into all of this. Let's quickly run down the questions though...

fav characters: i'll be kinda basic with this one, but probably Papika; just plain fun to watch her antics lol. i admit most of the satellite characters feel more like symbolic instruments than people.

least fav characters: the pervy robot Bu-chan, even if the Kanada School episode inside his mind was fun, and he has his narrative functions, this was definitely the element that most made me sigh

fav relationship: given this show is all about developing one particular relationship, there's not a lot of options outside of cocona/papika here!

fav moment: probably the episode where we see like a dozen different interpretations of Papika and how she might relate to Cocona was the one that most sticks in my mind?

headcanons/theories: I'd have to watch it again with fresh eyes to see if there's anything beyond what's like, very overt in the text. apologies that i can't give more here. it doesn't really feel like a show very invested in 'worldbuilding' in any case.

unpopular opinion: maaan. the discussion of what amount of sexuality is 'necessary' to its themes and what is 'unnecessary' fanservice by 'perverts' makes me feel like i have bees in my head and open the safe where we keep the word 'libidinal'. i don't think i have an opinion fully baked enough to state here though.

how’d you find it: admittedly, bc of the context i watched it, with a big gap in time before when we watched the first half and when i got to see the second, it was kind of disjointed which made it harder to follow than it should be. still, i was extremely impressed by the animation and creativity and thematic ambition. i can see the criticism of pacing problems, and this probably has a lot to do with the production running increasingly behind schedule and almost collapsing towards the end, a problem rather endemic to anime - it didn't hit FliFla nearly as hard as its spiritual successor Wonder Egg Priority at least. overall it's still very good and i'd like to watch it again - maybe on an Animation Night to come.

random thoughts: the hyper-angular huge eye character designs (by Takashi Kojima, also the chief sakkan) are fascinating - they feel like they're pushing an extreme of anime design principles, which certainly gives the show a unique flavour.

I feel regretful I can't go much deeper than this but I think I'd basically have to do another rewatch and a lot of poking-through-essay-writing to get into the real meat of it!

As far as other work by Studio 3Hz, I regret to say I haven't seen any! I do like their parent studio Kinema Citrus's work a lot though so I definitely ought to check out more if they have a defined style, and it's cool to see a studio making original work as much as adaptations. Recs are welcome ^^

[canmom]

I will grant that I'm tipping my hands here as someone whose far more narratively- than visually-focused but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on Star Driver, since its script was written by the same screenwriter as RGU

oooo, i'll admit, this is I think the first I've heard of it! but the combo of 'written by the Utena writer' and 'animated by Bones' is unquestionably tempting. so I can't offer anything substantial right now, but I'll go looking for a nice encode and (if I'm lucky) fansub and hopefully get back to you on this one. Just skimming WP, it sounds like it's a kind of biological-mecha thing set in a school, but I'm sure that does it no justice whatsoever.

If I may go for another that I feel you may have seen and that I feel is deeply underrated, Kyosogiga!

Now this strikes me as one I really ought to have watched (I noticed while writing the RevStar post that "anime blogger with good analysis and taste" Emily Rand also cites it as one of her top ten anime of the decade)... but alas, this is one of the gaps! Let's get that on the torrent queue as well. Thanks so much for the rec :3

Still, now I'm alerted to it, let me find out - what even is this thing? Actually this seems to be a little complex to elaborate...

Kyōsōgiga (an allusion to 'scrolls of frolicking animals' which are seen as a precursor to manga) starts with a priest who creates a kind of alternate dimension using his power to make drawings that come to life, centred on the 'Mirror Capital' 鏡都 Kyōto, a hard-to-translate pun on once-capital of Japan 京都 Kyōto. There, he draws a rabbit character who comes to life and some highly Buddhist shenanigans take place:

One of his drawings, a rabbit named Koto, whom he drew as the God of the Mirror Capital, came to life upon striking a deal with a Bodhisattva. Lady Koto managed to win the love of Myōe. After finding a war orphan, Yakushimaru, and taking him under their wing as an adoptive child, the family dimension hop to Kyoto for a better life. Myōe draws two siblings for Yakushimaru. Yase, and Kurama. The five of them live happily together until Lady Koto, having fulfilled her end of the deal with the Bodhisattva, has to be taken away. With their time as a family at its end, Myōe leaves Yakushimaru the title of high priest, and his prayer beads, telling him that he will return with the beginning and the end in tow.

The anime picks up (I presume?) when a girl called Koto stumbles into this alternate world, and seeks a way to get home, while Kurama seeks to bring back the original Lady Koto - but unfortunately to reopen the connection between Kyōto and the real world is a big threat to the multiverse. Of course Koto must be connected to the original family somehow.

Emily gives a more thematic description:

Kyousougiga is many things. It’s the television directorial debut of Rie Matsumoto, who had previously worked at Toei Animation across a variety of the Precure franchise. It’s stunning, with amazing visual and audio direction as well as storyboarding and cinematography. Like many anime series and pieces of media in general, Kyousougiga is also a look at the idea of home and family.

“Home” in Kyousougiga is first established as the Mirror Capital, a drawn replica of Kyoto that High Priest Myoue created to escape the world with his family. But “home” is also the near-empty room where Koto meets her mother and sees her father’s face for the first time. It’s the hill where they watch the city and sunsets together. Or a ruined garden at the so-called end of the world, after a much-needed airing of grievances. “Home” isn’t a place but the people you love isn’t a new narrative, but Kyousougiga tells it so beautifully, with characters you want to root for, and the stunning visual setpieces that Matsumoto loves.

So that sounds like the exact combination of complicated emotional metaphor and visual creativity I love, and I have clearly been sleeping on this one. Appreciate both recs a lot :3

[canmom]

Hunter x Hunter

lol ok sure

the things I know about 'Hunter Hunter' are...

the X is silent

it's a battle shōnen that leads with an exam/tournament arc, and the premise on the face of it sounds painfully generic. ig this seems to be kind of the point, a dense blender of every shōnen trope?

as far as I recall being told, it's built around an extremely complicated magic system so its many fights are all about like, strategising to exploit that system - sounds like the territory of a web serial you'd read on a forum somewhere :p

but there's apparently a really cool psychosexual body horror bit later on called the "Chimera Ant" arc, which is probably the main reason I'd be curious to watch it?

...and that's about all I know. I think I'll watch it at some point - I'm not completely averse to shōnen (of the current big ones, Mappa's Jujutsu Kaisen wasn't bad, although it felt like it lost a lot of steam in the second cour; I found it harder to get into Demon Slayer) so I don't want to write it off unfairly, especially when the 2011 Madhouse anime seems to have accrued a ton of praise (not sure which one you're reccing here).

I won't do the ask meme since I don't really think I can offer anything meaningful about the characters etc. by skimming wikipedia.

[canmom]

Death Parade

Ah, now this one is one I should definitely make time for. Yuzuru Tachikawa's later project Deca-DENCE was a lot of fun with a really great design sense (coincidentally one of its animators, Dong Chang, has produced some very good tutorial content on Youtube) and some excellent action cuts, and Death Billiards [Young Animators Training Project short]/Parade [followup TV anime] was apparently his passion project. I recall kVin-senpai praising it. The premise (a bar where the deceased compete to find out the circumstances of their death, before being consigned to oblivion or granted resurrection) sounds fascinating, and anything that gets described using words like 'crazy' is usually up my street.

I realise some of these 'solicit Bryn's anime opinions' posts have turned into 'Bryn solicits anime recs' but hey, there's a lot of anime and it's easy to miss stuff. So I appreciate you reminding me of this one, anon! Whenever I get round to watching Death Billiards/Death Parade, I'll be sure to write what I thought.

[canmom]

for the anime thing, what do you know about Komi-San Can't Communicate?

Can't say I know a lot...

...so turning to my usual sources, let's put out feelers... aha! A short writeup by kVin in the Fall 2021 Anime Overview! kVin-senpai (;p) is full of praise for the direction and animation:

Between the two [Ayumu Watanabe and Kazuki Kawagoe] they’ve created an atmospheric backdrop to the colorful cast that allows them to nicely pad the madness, greatly smoothing the transitions into the occasional sweet moments. And when it’s time to fire on all cylinders, which is essentially every other second in the show, their ability to make animation inherently fun to watch keeps on shining. While this is unsurprising given Watanabe’s pedigree—and his extensive experience at Shin-Ei Animation, where those precepts are the norm—it’s a very welcome turn for Kawagoe. His career had been dedicated to OLM’s much more limited productions, so it feels good to see a full realization of a potential we’d only caught glimpses of.

...but admits he's not the biggest fan of the manga it's based on - so he also praises the anime for addressing many of the issues with pacing and jarring changes of tone.

But you didn't ask what kVin's opinion was, you asked what I knew!

Now, my immediate impression from looking at the clips excerpted in the article is wow, that sure looks digital as hell. Which provides the opportunity for a digression...

I come down pretty hard on digital compositing sometimes (ironic since actual cel photography was almost completely gone by the time I was even in my teens so I'll always be working digital), but it's not that it can't be done well: look at Violet Evergarden and Heike Monogatari (and any prior work of Naoko Yamada), or donghua like Fog Hill of Five Elements, or many works of French animation (including mostly-CG works like Arcane), or indeed recently Wonder Egg Priority before it collapsed. Makoto Shinkai is probably a lot of the reason these filters all got popularised but he can genuinely use them well. Such examples demonstrate that you can use those suites of filters to good effect if you use them carefully. I'll even admit it works in cases like Ufotable's Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel trilogy, which uses a lot of the methods I am less fond of like filling areas of flat colour with gradients.

So maybe 'digital' isn't what I'm complaining about exactly. I suppose one thing I really like in animation is like, a real clarity of line, shape and form. Good digital compositing, to me, preserves the strength of the underlying drawings and maintains that intoxicating feeling that a moving drawing has, where the shapes come together and feel 3D but alive because a human drew them. Bad digital compositing swamps that animation with effects - in the worst cases, doing things like taking good, well-drawn 2D smoke and fire FX and turning them into indistinct dark blurs.

[As an aside, it's been interesting to see digital versions of rougher, more characterful linework coming back into style in shows like Ranking of Kings and even Demon Slayer. I feel like the defining look of 2020s anime is still up in the air, but I'm glad we're starting to break from the 'Shinkai with less money' aesthetic lol.]

All that said, if I click through further, I see this beautiful opening, which answers all my objections by being a thorough work of cel animation complete with constant background animation (only a little CGI) and excellent design of shadow shapes. Really lovely stuff:

So to give credit where's due for this part, elsewhere Natasha illgenes praises it and cites the relevant artists:

Tetsuo Yajima’s storyboards really allow us to be a part of these classmates’ bright, colorful, and optimistic world, and folks like Kazuki Kawagoe bring those cherished moments to life with snappy, but nuanced character animation. It clearly takes inspiration from Watanabe’s previous work After the Rain and its opening, but I can’t help but be charmed by such a dazzling celebration of youth.

Of course it would be impossibly expensive to make a whole show that looks like this but damn, can you imagine?

The actual show, going off clips on sakugabooru, is more light-flare and gradient heavy than I like, but that's an absurd basis to judge a show on and this whole weird bugbear aside, it looks pretty fun. If I ever watch it properly, anon, I'll try and find something more interesting to say! ;p

[canmom]

Saraiya Goyou?? if u know

news to me, but another jidaigeki series by manglobe, a couple years down the line from Samurai Champloo? intriguing...

looking into it some more, director Tomomi Mochizuki is apparently quite a storied individual, with an ambitious approach to space that was realised by talented animators who came off landmark shows like Urusei Yatsura, and he's known among other things for that famous looping intro to Kimagure Orange Road. apparently he's a director who likes to have a really thorough control over a whole production, often doing both script and storyboard, and excels at telling stories of character drama in confined spaces. he's also the only outsider to ever direct a Ghibli film (Ocean Waves). so, let's put a pin in this one too.

sorry I can't give you a more interesting story just yet - but I do appreciate these recs a great deal!

[canmom]

Animation Night 98 - Kyousougiga

So, because I spent so long on Houseki last week, I haven’t been very well prepared this week. I have a couple of ideas in the pipe - German animation (yeah really! did you know The Neverending Story is German?), Yuri Norstein, and the British traditional animation studio that I entirely forgot existed which is Cosgrove Hall to name a few.

However I don’t have any of those on my hard drive yet, and by the time I’d done a writeup, eaten dinner, and downloaded the films it would be very late indeed...

Instead, let’s follow up on a recommendation that @anarcha-catgirlism​ made me during the pretentiously titled ‘solicit Bryn’s anime opinions’ ask meme. We’re gonna watch Kyōsōgiga, the original net animation turned anime TV series directed by “Izumi Tōdō”... the collective pen name used by a number of Toei Animation producers. “Tōdo” is, if you can say a pseudonym for an ambiguous set of people is ‘best known’ for anything, best known for the renowned Pretty Cure (usually abbreviated PreCure) magical girl series - something I will one day investigate in depth but not this day.

So while this may be a collective creation of Toei “Only Anime Studio That Still Has A Union” Dōga, the main name attached to the series is actually Rie Matsumoto. Prior to Kyōsōgiga, she had indeed mostly worked on PreCure starting with assisting with direction of 18 episodes of Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star in 2006 at age 21, working her way up through episode direction to direct a movie, HeartCatch PreCure The Movie: Fashion Show in the Flower Capital.... Really?! in 2010 (try saying that fast). It seems she soon got a reputation as one of the youngest directors in the anime industry, although that may not be true anymore.

So what’s this all about? Here’s what I dug up last time upon receiving the rec:

Kyōsōgiga (an allusion to ’scrolls of frolicking animals’ which are seen as a precursor to manga) starts with a priest who creates a kind of alternate dimension using his power to make drawings that come to life, centred on the 'Mirror Capital’ 鏡都 Kyōto, a hard-to-translate pun on once-capital of Japan 京都 Kyōto. There, he draws a rabbit character who comes to life and some highly Buddhist shenanigans take place:

One of his drawings, a rabbit named Koto, whom he drew as the God of the   Mirror Capital, came to life upon striking a deal with a Bodhisattva. Lady Koto managed to win the love of Myōe. After finding a war orphan, Yakushimaru, and taking him under their wing as an adoptive child, the family dimension hop to Kyoto for a better life. Myōe draws two siblings for Yakushimaru. Yase, and Kurama. The five of them live happily together until Lady Koto, having fulfilled her end of the deal with the Bodhisattva, has to be taken away. With their time as a family at its end, Myōe leaves   Yakushimaru the title of high priest, and his prayer beads, telling him that he will return with the beginning and the end in tow.

The anime picks up (I presume?) when a girl called Koto stumbles into this alternate world, and seeks a way to get home, while Kurama seeks to bring back the original Lady Koto - but unfortunately to reopen the connection between Kyōto and the real world is a big threat to the multiverse. Of course Koto must be connected to the original family somehow.

Emily Rand gives a more thematic description:

Kyousougiga is many things. It’s the television directorial  debut of Rie Matsumoto, who had previously worked at Toei Animation  across a variety of the Precure franchise. It’s stunning, with  amazing visual and audio direction as well as storyboarding and  cinematography. Like many anime series and pieces of media in general, Kyousougiga is also a look at the idea of home and family.

“Home” in Kyousougiga is first established as the Mirror  Capital, a drawn replica of Kyoto that High Priest Myoue created to  escape the world with his family. But “home” is also the near-empty room  where Koto meets her mother and sees her father’s face for the first  time. It’s the hill where they watch the city and sunsets together. Or a  ruined garden at the so-called end of the world, after a much-needed  airing of grievances. “Home” isn’t a place but the people you love isn’t  a new narrative, but Kyousougiga tells it so beautifully, with characters you want to root for, and the stunning visual setpieces that Matsumoto loves.

The animation in the clips I’ve found looks vivid, stylish and energetic so I’ve got to say I’m really excited. It’s not entirely clear to me what the best viewing order is: apparently the first episode of the TV series is “A re-airing of the original ONA with some cuts and a new soundtrack.” and it seems the recommendation is that this is redundant with the ONA, so we’ll take the revised version plus the 5-10 minute OVAs. However, if somebody knows better, please let me know the ideal watch order!

Phew, finished that in record time, leaving the whole evening clear to enjoy some anime! Since we’ve got a whole cour and some ONAs to get down the hatch, we’ll be starting p much immediately, so please take your seats in the Animation Night Cinema of twitch.tv/canmom while i run and warm up my chilli!