#kaina of the great snow sea

[animebw]

I’m gonna be honest, I thought going into Winter 2023 that this was gonna be a bit of a dump season. One of those seasons where anime just kinda sits around farting and we all wait patiently for the actual Good Shit to start coming out again while pretending to catch up on our backlogs.

That... has not been the case.

Bofuri Season 2: Seriously, how does this show get so many incredible action cuts?

Buddy Daddies: Look, it’s probably not gonna be gay, but Spy x Family meets Tiger and Bunny is something we all need in our lives, okay?

Campfire Cooking in Another World: Couldn’t even last a full episode of this one before my eyes glazed over. Dropped.

Endo and Kobayashi Live: Now this is pretty charming! Pity the animation’s such garbage, though.

Giant Beasts of Ars: It’s a damn good season for fantasy anime, y’all.

Handyman Saitou in Another World: Could actually end up a halfway decent isekai SOL if it stops being so goddamn terrible at structure.

High Card: This is exactly my brand of Anime Bullshit(tm) and I am so on board.

Ippon Again: An actually great female-led sports anime? With major A Place Further Than the Universe vibes? Do not sleep on this one, y’all.

Kaina of the Great Snow Sea: Damn. Good. Season. For. Fantasy. Anime.

Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible: As far as Takagi-san knock-offs go, this one is pleasant enough.

The Magical Revolution of the Oh Fuck It These LN Titles are Impossible to Remember Just Call it “MagiRevo”: Buckle up, folks, we might just have another Actually Good Isekai on our hands.

Malevolent Spirits Mononogatari: It’s Noragami but shit. Dropped at 1 episode.

Nagatoro-san Season 2: Yeah, turns out I’m still not above the occasional well made trash.

Nier Automata: Genuine question, is this gonna be an acceptable substitute for the game or will I just be spoiling the experience for myself?

Onimai: I fucking hate the Mushoku Tensei studio so much and I hate myself even more for deciding to stick with this one.

Reborn to Master the Blade: This one might be soon for the chopping block, but I’m holding out hope that its story can overcome its middling production values. We’ll have to wait and see.

Revenger: GEN UROBUCHI’S BACK BABY YEEEEEEHAW

Sugar Apple Fairy Tale: Take notes, Every Isekai: this is how you explore slavery in a fantasy setting.

The Tale of Outcasts: Feels like a 13-year-old’sedgy  Ancient Magus Bride fanfiction. Honestly, though? I kind of really dig it.

Tomo-Chan is a Girl: LET. TOMBOYS. BE. TOMBOYS. WITHOUT. SHAMING. THEM. FOR. IT. Dropped at episode 2.

Tokyo Revengers Season 2: At this point, I’m just watching out of morbid curiosity of how bad the manga’s ending supposedly was.

Trails of Cold Steel: The Northern War: Easily the weakest fantasy anime of the lot. Giving it one more episode to impress me, otherwise it gets the drop.

Trigun Stampede: Y’all are buggin, the CG here is incredible.

Tsurune Season 2: Good god, the glow-up from season one is nuts. KyoAni just does not miss.

Vinland Saga Season 2: Okay, manga readers, let’s see if watching a bunch of sad men farm is as incredible as you say.

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #winter 2023 anime #trails of cold steel #sugar apple fairy tale #onimai #nier automata #tokyo revengers #the tale of outcasts #ippon again #bofuri #buddy daddies #giant beasts of ars #revenger #kaina of the great snow sea #high card #handyman saitou in another world #endo and kobayashi live! the latest on tsundere villainess lieselotte #tsurune #ijiranaide nagatoro san #reborn to master the blade #kubo won't let me be invisible

[kordeliiius]

Nihei can and will charm you in a variety of ways

#tsutomu nihei #blame! #blame #kaina of the great snow sea #kaina #keiArt

[animescreencolle]

#anime scenery #anime background #ooyukiumi no kaina #kaina of the great snow sea

[animepopheart]

Have you watched any hidden gems lately? For me, it would be Kaina of the Snow Sea. I've been loving it strangely enough

Oooh I’ve heard Kaina is good! It gives me Nausicaa vibes. I got a little turned off by the animation and stalled on it but plan to return to the series!

I kind of feel like everything good is a hidden gem this season. There’s so little buzz for even big releases, maybe because last season had so many huge series?

Like, why is no one talking about Vinland Saga? It’s been incredible. Nagatoro has continued to be super sweet and funny. And then among lesser known series, Endo and Kobayashi has been great—funny, cute, and meaningful.

#kaina of the great snow sea #vinland saga #nagatoro #Endo and Kobayashi #wonderfulcatman #thanks for the question Andrew!

[animefeminist]

2023 Winter Three-Episode Check-In

The big forerunner this season? Girls in fantasy shows!

The team split up the three-episode reviews between staff volunteers, with one person putting together a short(ish) review on each series. Like we do with our check-in podcasts, we started from the bottom of our Premiere Digest list and worked our way up.

If we didn’t watch a show for at least three episodes, we skipped it, and we’ve used nice bold headers to help you quickly jump to the shows you’re interested in. We’ve also excluded shows that are continuing on in basically the same vein as our premiere review to conserve space. Unless specifically noted, we will not be mentioning overt spoilers for anything beyond episode three.

We don’t have the time to keep up with everything, so please let us know about any gems we might be missing in the comments!

Read it at Anime Feminist!

#sugar apple fairy tale #onimai: i'm now your sister! #tomo chan is a girl #saving 80000 gold in another world for my retirement #reborn to master the blade from hero king to extraordinary squire #reborn to master the blade #endo and kobayashi live #endo and kobayashi live! the latest on tsundere villainess lieselotte #tsunlise #buddy daddies #the tale of outcasts #the magical revolution of the reincarnated princess and the genius young lady #magirevo #tenten kakumei #kaina of the great snow sea #technoroid overmind #ippon again #the fire hunter #articles

[tetrix-anime]

Ooyukiumi no Kaina: Hoshi no Kenja (Kaina of the Great Snow Sea: Star Sage) - Movie Key Visual and PV. Premiere: 13 October 2023

#ooyukiumi no kaina #kaina of the great snow sea #key visual #visual #pv #anime #Youtube

[straypixels47]

It's been a while since I've posted art!! This doodle was from a little while ago :3 more art coming soon probably!!

#kaina of the great snow sea #art #my art #trying to figure out how to take good pictures still

[gifgifk]

#Ooyukiumi no Kaina #ep1 #anime gif #my gifs #gif #Kaina #カイナ #kaina of the great snow sea

[hybridreviews]

Anime DISCOVERY & TIME of the SEASON Present: The WORST Anime of 2023

Time for "HOW DO I PISS YOU OFF?!" with what anime I thought sucked!

I feel like whenever I’m hearing about any anime news in 2023, most of it has something to do with one company that has such a big stranglehold of the industry and they are pissing you off every chance they get, from not dubbing that show you like but dubbing a bunch of other shows (aka mostly various isekai) that you’ll forget within a week’s time it finished airing, an award show that caters…

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#2023 #A Girl and Her Guard Dog #alice gear aegis Expansion #Anime #Butareba: The Story of a Man Turned Into a Pig #Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte #Giant Beasts of Ars #Kaina of the Great Snow Sea #KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World #list #Masamune-kun&039;s Revenge-R #My Life as Inukai-san&039;s Dog #My One-Hit Kill Sister #My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even At Level 1 #Season 2 #Spy Classroom #The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses #The Marginal Service #The Misfit of Demon King Academy #The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen: From Villainess to Savior #Tonikawa: Fly Me To The Moon #Worst of

[hairunowa]

Kaina of the Great Snow Sea | Yaona

#kaina of the great snow sea #ooyukiumi no kaina #kaina of the great snow sea anime #anime #anime gifs #gifs #yaona #yaona gifs #大雪海のカイナ #anime character #winter anime 2023 #winter 2023 anime #tsutomu nihei #takemoto itoe #HE'S TOO CUTE

[chaztalk]

#anime #anime poll #anime fandom #giant beasts of ars #heavens official blessing #hypnosis mic #i shall survive using potions! #kaina of the great snow sea #kengan ashura #ippon

[canmom]

L'aventure de Canmom à Annecy: Vendredi 3: Kaina of the Great Snow Sea

For Friday I spent my reservation walking right back into Bonlieu Grand Salle, on the premiere of Kaina of the Great Snow Sea: Star Sage. This film was not even out in Japan - I was one of the first people in the world to see it outside the studio that made it! Even though I knew absolutely nothing about the film, I was like, sounds sick, let's go.

It turns out that it's based on a story for TV by the great Tsutomu Nihei (accompanied by a manga, but it seems first conceived as a TV show). I love Nihei's work, but that comes with a wrinkle: this is another adaptation by Polygon Pictures in CGI, the same studio that adapted Blame! as a film and Knights of Sidonia as a TV show. These adaptations are... controversial I suppose, I know people who enjoy them, but I would say generally they are not loved by fans of Nihei's manga. That said, I haven't seen their take on Blame!, and I watched Sidonia so many years ago that I was basically a different person, so I resolved to give them a fair shot.

Also the director and producer came on the stage, both of them holding bottles of beer, and were really fun and energetic, getting us to cheer the film with three segments of the audience going か, い, な (I was in the 'い' group), so in general the energy in the theatre was pretty enthusiastic...

...which means it's truly a shame that the film ended up disappointing.

It turns out Star Sage is actually a sequel film to a TV series that aired in 2022. I did not realise this going in, but it explains a lot: we seem to be starting in the middle of the story, with a lot that happened beforehand. It was easy enough to pick up on the character relationships - most are quite archetypal - but I think it would probably work a lot better on the back of the TV show.

What I really liked about it was the imaginative setting. The 'Snow Sea' only loosely resembles snow; it is akin to a slow-moving fluid, transparent if you sink into it. Floatation is possible only with 'snowfoil sticks' harvested from the animals that live in the snow sea, which are used to create special boats that travel across the surface. There are some cool setpieces with this, such as a huge cliff where the surface of the 'snow' becomes vertical. This whole world is covered by an enormous solid canopy supported by 'orbital spire trees', with city-states built at their bases, surviving on the water that rises up through the trees.

The main characters of our story are Kaina, your standard heroic boy with the Nihei-standard long fringe, and Ririha, the princess of a certain nation. At the outset of the film, they have defeated a nation of invaders in a war by supernatural (or rather magitech) intervention, and they are now setting sail along with Amelothee, a defector from the invaders, on an expedition to the 'Great Spire Tree' where abundant water might be found.

Their mission successfully gets them to the tree, but there they find a technologically advanced nation led by a dictatorial young man Byōzan who enslaves the expedition. Amelothee and her people seem to defect and side with him. Kaina and Ririha attempt to infiltrate the project, and discover that Byōzan intends to find something called the 'Authorised User's Suit' with which he can order the big ancient robots to cut down the spire trees, believing this will save the world. They're captured; Ririha is taken to Byōzan, who needs her connection to the tech-spirits, while Kaina is sent underground to the mines where the workers are searching for the Authorised User's Suit.

Ririha is introduced to Byōzan's mother, who drops some of his backstory, and underlines that he has totally the wrong idea and is in part running on resentment at not being able to see the spirit anymore. Meanwhile, Kaina is for whatever reason immune to the ghosts guarding the old ruins, and finds the Suit, along with the big reveal: this whole thing is in fact a massive terraforming system, and it's basically finished, it just needs two people to give the instruction to complete terraforming to the spirit/AI governing the project (for some reason).

Kaina emerges with the suit, and the workers stage a rebellion against Byōzan. Amelothee was actually only pretending to defect, but despite everything, Byōzan gets the suit back and commands his robots to cut down the tree, but Kaina manages to climb up after him, rescue Ririha, and save the world. The humans start farming, and ever after is lived happily.

The influence of Nausicaa is very strong, if more so the movie than the manga. For example, we have a fantastical ecosystem (complete with bugs) that is actually a terraforming system; a vague prophecy; Amelothee is basically Kushana; Kaina carries a rifle not so different from Nausicaa's. I love Nausicaa, and I think there is a ton of potential in this film; sadly I just don't feel like it's realised. If I would compare it with anything it's actually a fairly obscure scifi anime film called Gin'iro no Kami no Agito, which has a cool setting of overgrown post-apocalyptic ruins but ultimately falls down to a massive ancient scifi machine that needs to be turned off by the right kind of boy.

So yeah partly this is because, for all the imaginative setting, this is just a standard 'boy saves the world' type of plot. Certain elements, such as the terraforming system requiring a final voice command, feel needlessly contrived. But that said, there's plenty here that I like. And the Nausicaa film is not so different.

So is it the visuals? Maybe. And that's probably worth examining...

I will preface this to say that I absolutely do not believe that is impossible to make good CG anime with present day tech. In fact earlier in the festival I watched The First Slam Dunk which was genuinely one of the best looking animated films I've ever seen. Even without the unique watercolour-like shader tech they used in that film, Studio Orange have been doing cel-shaded CGI like their Houseki no Kuni and that looks great, and from what I've seen of Trigun Stampede, it works pretty well there too.

CG should also be a pretty natural fit for the sort of grand scifi spectacle this film is going for. But it left me cold here. So why?

Partly we can look at technical stuff. For example, there is a lack of cloth and hair physics. One of the things that really sold Slam Dunk's CGI was that the characters' loose clothes swung and folded and generally moved naturally. In contrast, the characters in Kaina in their bulky snow outfits look decent enough in stills, but when they move, they move mostly as rigid dolls.

But also it's the way characters move in general. It is hard to really nail down where the problems lie without watching the film again, but it felt like there is a lack of weight, a lack of real impact, as well as a lack of emotion conveyed by the animated acting. The face rigs seem to be quite limited in how far they can really push their expressions, the body language just as much. And the camera is constantly in motion, too much so - which means that a lot of the tools of framing become unavailable.

Likewise, the lighting and composite tends not to use the powerful negative space and contrast that Nihei's manga is so good at. In this case since it's anime-first there's not a manga to compare with, but this is a setting that truly depends on selling a feeling of vast scale, and it just never quite sold it.

(Also... it's a small complaint but the particle effect used when the boats move through the snow sea, which consists of small spherical balls thrown up, just plain looks so bad, it bothered me so much. Like I don't know how this ever got to be the final effect used - it looks like a placeholder.)

All in all it felt sadly lacking in ambition. It's just too conventional; the setting ends up feeling less interesting for the big reveals. What I really like about manga like Blame! is how vast and bleak they feel; by contrast this movie felt small, this big strange scifi world just a backdrop for the usual hero story. I would have been much more interested in a smaller-scale narrative about how people survive in this Great Snow Sea than half-baked spiritualism and magic words that fix everything.

So that was a shame! Still, fun to attend a premiere all the same, and most of the audience seemed to enjoy it more than I did. The team from the studio were actually interviewing people at the exit to the theatre, but I missed the chance to tell them (more politely than the above lol) what I thought. Probably for the best though, they don't really need the advice of some British girl with no industry experience lmao.

After that I made my way back to my hotel to try and get an earlier night. Not a lot of food places were open, especially places doing decent vegetarian food, so I ended up getting a pizza, which was a huge mistake because I know too much cheese makes me feel ill. Next year I gotta make sure to eat earlier.

Saturday was a good end to the festival - besides Barry JC Purves, who I posted about already, I got to see Rintaro! But more on that in a bit~

#l'aventure de canmom à annecy #annecy festival #annecy #kaina of the great snow sea #kaina of the great snow sea star sage #film #anime #tsutomu nihei #Youtube

[kordeliiius]

tried drawing liliha while referencing the biomega art style + adding some of my own design touches

#kaina of the great snow sea #kaina #tsutomu nihei #traditional art #style study #manga #I wanna do this again for kaina himself but mmmmm maybe later #I accidentally gave liliha his nose oops.. but it kinda works #keiArt

[animescreencolle]

#anime background #ooyukiumi no kaina #kaina of the great snow sea #anime scenery

[italeteller]

Me watching Kaina crank his tiny stonecutting laser up to 11: ah he's probably gonna shoot the mecha on a knee or give him a precise headshot to shut it off

Kaina:

#Das Op #kaina of the great snow sea #ooyukiumi no kaina #you shoulda seen my face #motherfucker fired a 10x kamehameha from a pocket device #what the fuck

[animefeminist]

2023 Winter Premiere Digest

Things have cooled off from Fall, but there are still some excellent girls to root for this season.

Which shows do you review? 

We don’t review shows that are direct sequels, shorts, or (generally) for very young children. Anything not licensed and/or immediately available is off the table as well, though we do our best to offer premiere reviews for “Netflix jail” shows once they become legally available. Shows with late release dates will be reviewed separately from the digest.

While shows may change category as they continue to air, for ease of reference this is the order that will be used when discussing shows on our mid-season and wrap-up podcasts. Please note that any shows released in batches/by cour rather than weekly will not be discussed on the mid-season podcast.

How do you write the reviews?

Cy, Lizzie, and Vrai split the majority of shows, with Chiaki and Alex stepping in to pinch hit. The titles were divided by each reviewer’s preferred workload and choice, tackling a grueling 33 titles in just 11 days. Caitlin pitches in on the Anime News Network Preview Guide, so you can see her take on the new shows over there.

Once we have more funding, we’d like to change our current model to provide a wider range of perspectives on more episodes. We’re a long way from that goal, but it’s been a personal wish of ours since launch and we hope to make it happen someday.

Read it at Anime Feminist!

#ippon again #magirevo #the magical revolution of the reincarnated princess and the genius young lady #trigun stampede #nier automata #endo and kobayashi live #endo and kobayashi live! the latest on tsundere villainess lieselotte #tsunlise #kaina of the great snow sea #the tale of outcasts #reborn to master the blade from hero king to extraordinary squire #reborn to master the blade #articles