#they both seem like the right combination of completely terrible and extremely watchable

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Winter Anime 2019 Part 3: High on Concept

If you wait long enough, you’ll find something good to say.

Doukyonin wa Hiza, Tokidoki, Atama no Ue / My Roommate is a Cat

What: Misanthropic mystery author picks up tough stray cat, both get healed.

✅ The cat acts like a cat, the misanthrope acts like a misanthrope.

✅ The approach of telling the same simple story from the perspective of two characters that can’t really communicate effectively is interesting.

✅ This is very basic, but it works. I like both characters, and it's generally inoffensive. Pretty much Barakamon with less of a focus on telling you exactly what to feel. Might watch more of this.

❌ I see we’re now at the point where shows get localized titles that sound like lazy translations of bland Japanese names even when the Japanese title is not that bland to begin with. Lovely.

Dimension High School

What: A bunch of kids press XXX and YYY and are sucked. Wooow.

✅✅ The wraparound segments look extremely realistic. If there was more lensflares and shots of feet I’d almost say someone has finally beaten KyoAni in making anime look like a cheap, egregiously overacted J-Drama.

❌❌ Sadly, the puzzle dimension they end up in just looks like homemade MMD animation, because it is. I mean, at least it’s mocapped, but apparently with a Kinect.

❌❌ E.g., they make jokes about clipping and they kinda have to because everything clips into everything else all the time.

❌❌ Did I mention that all they actually do is solve lame puzzles and fail to be funny about it? It’s really getting to the levels of the dreaded “barely animated voice actor improv podcast” at these points.

♎ Suwabe’s in it, and that’s never an outright bad thing. He’s voicing the quizmaster, in the process proving he’d do anything for a paycheck. I wonder if he has a fiverr acocunt.

Domestic na Kanojo

What: Highschooler loses virginity to one night stand, finds out that it was the sister of the teacher he has a crush on. Incidentally, the mother of both also just married his father. Zany!

✅ This is presented like a low-key, slow drama, and it’s not even bad at that. Some good directing going on here, at least in the beginning.

❌❌ Really just too bad that it’s impossible to take seriously with a setup as contrived as this, not to mention taking it as seriously as it apparently wants to be taken. It’s also not exactly original.

❌ I’m not gonna say that sketchy relationships can’t work (it worked fine for KoiAme, for example), but embedding your suddenly also incestuous pupil-teacher affair in the setting of a harem comedy, complete with other sister walking in on attempted drunk blackout kiss, is not giving me confidence that this has the chops to pull it off.

❌❌ The show this reminds me the most of is Love and Lies, and that’s a real bad calling card to have.

Girly Air Force

What: Girl-shaped fighter jets fall in love with a dude.

❌❌ It’s just another military-hardware-is-cute-girls-actually show in the vein of Strike Witches, the kind where they think that having a few plane CG models is already thrilling content.

❌❌ But then it doesn’t even turn out to be that in practice, because most of the episode is taken up by lame “worldbuilding” (i.e., coming up with excuses for why your fanservice show has to be the way it is) and trying to make your bland harem lead interesting, which is a futile endeavour.

❌ The most interesting part is still the CG dogfighting, such as it is. It’s not great either. Also, girly planes are pink.

♎ Honestly got a laugh out of them randomly picking a Gripen as heroine unit  in addition to actual JSADF hardware, because that’s a sleek-looking plane. The biggest prank the JSADF ever pulled on the otaku industry is buying the chubby F-35, which is nowhere to be seen here.

Go-toubun no Hanayome / The Quintessential Quintuplets

What: Empoverished highschooler is hired as a tutor for some rich quintuplets with large breasts.

❌ This is a blatant harem setup that would make a 2003 bishoujo VN blush.

✅ However, in practice it’s much better than it sounds. It knows it’s a wacky romcom with a dumb premise and it does not pretend otherwise.

✅ So it’s lighthearted, but it’s also surprisingly classy. In fact, it’s classier than Domestic no Kanojo, which is a show that’s actually trying to look respectable and failing.

✅ The relationships are also very feisty, with an energy that a comedy needs. There’s a lot of sass to go around here. Probably the best of these I’ve seen in a while, so I’ll give it three eps.

Kemurikusa

What: After getting pulled off the sequel, the Kemono Friends crew made their own version. Presumably there are blackjack and hookers in this show’s future.

❌ If you are a fan of KF’s “charms”, fear not, you would not be able to tell these people made another anime before. It's still total amateur hour.

❌❌ It’s not even the “looks”, though those certainly are not a highlight. The design is okay and the animation is bad, but I’m not incapable of enjoying shows with bad animation. What really kills it is the editing. I usually don’t comment on editing because that’s almost always competent and only very rarely great, but Kemurikusa has uniquely lazy and badly timed editing. Every shot being seconds longer than it needs to be is already an annoyance in low-key dialog scenes, but the alleged action is laughable and allows you a long, unblinking stare at every frame of bad animation. I really do wonder why they even bother with it when it’s so terrible.

✅ The setting seems alright, even though it’s just a reskinned Kemono Friends. At least it’s not gijinka nonsense this time (which makes one wonder where the gimmick characters are supposed to come from, but I digress), and it’s more upfront about what it actually is too. I’d call it mildly intriguing.

❌ I don’t mind mystery and certainly prefer it to exposition bombs, but instead of that this episode quickly establishes the most basic facts... and then repeats them over and over and over some more. Combined with non-editing, this makes for horrible pacing. 

♎ I had no opinion on KF’s longer-term qualities, because the first episode was so boring I never got any further. I won’t have an opinion on this show’s long-term qualities for the same reason.

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka

What: Magical girls are tragic, shoot gun’s.

❌❌ Yo bro, what if magical girls but dark? Surely such a thing has never been attempted.

❌ The particular source of grim here is that these girls are war vets and fight with semi-realistic weaponry, so there’s a fair bit of the ol’ milwank in this one as well.

❌ The best part of the entire show is that the enemies they originally fought looked like cute teddy bears. Of course, this is dropped in favor of just slicing and dicing some random terrorists in the main narrative. I guess “dark magical girl” is still too outlandish a concept, gotta go with ripping off The Punisher again.

❌ The characters so far are nothing special, you got your PTSD Rambo and the generically cute tomodachis she swears to protect. Such contrast!

❌❌ If you must make these 80s action movies with some otaku gimmick pasted on top, would you mind making the action look good at least? Because I don’t care how many gallons of blood you paint in your dramatic but conspicuously non-moving pans.

Meiji Tokyo Renka

What: Spiritually sensitive lonelygirl gets kitsuned to the Meiji era, which is full of delicious beef and some handsome men too I guess.

✅ This isn’t an outright comedy, but it goes all in on everyone’s fabulosity level to a degree that it’s really already three quarters to Dame x Prince.

✅ Similarly, the lead is not quite as unimpressed with these hams as Ani was, but she certainly has a lot more interest in roast beef than in these guys always trying to pull her into sparkly chin-holding poses &c.

✅ Meiji Tokyo Renka doesn’t seem to be anything special, but it gets the tone right and is expressive enough to not become boring.

♎ While certainly watchable right now, with these there’s always the chance that it decides to launch into real drama in the long run, which in turn almost always goes wrong.

Yakusoku no Neverland / The Promised Neverland

What: An orphanage’s happy daily life gets upended by the realisation that they’re just pizza rolls for some demonic entities.

✅ I watched this right after Kemurikusa and let me tell you, it sure helps if you’ve got professionals on the team. This is a highly competent show as far as cinematography and editing is concerned. While there isn’t any reason to go all out on the action sakuga, this show looks real good.

❌ I’m not feeling the character design, to be specific I think everyone’s chin is too big. This sounds like a real assholy nitpick, but be aware that this will impact around 90% of the time you watch this. 

✅ The premise is workable for a shounen manga, even if hardly original (remember Owari no Seraph?) At least it’s not kids with superpowers spamming beams at each other while discussing the nature of heroism, and seems to be going for a more mindgames-based approach in the vein of Death Note. The characters are just barely good enough so far. In the end it’s not so much the premise, but how well the production values are able to sell it. And that’s what Neverland is good at.

❌ It’s specifically a Weekly Shounen Jump manga, and that is huge red flag. Sure enough, while the visuals and mood deliver, the dialog writing justifiably assumes the reader is a moron. Almost every line in this is either straight universe exposition or someone reading someone else’s character sheet back to them. It’s insane and not even necessary because their actions establish all of this just fine, but hey, WSJ readers amirite?

❌ Also, since it’s a successful WSJ property, don’t expect an ending or be prepared to watch this show for years. Most likely both.

♎ This seems like it could be entertaining once the exposition is out of the way and the real meat of the narrative starts. Then again, at that point pacing would come into play, which is yet another achilles heel of WSJ-style shounen manga. Against my better judgement, I’ll probably have a look how this develops, but I don’t expect much.

#anime #winter2019 #impressions #meiji tokyo renka #yakusoku no neverland #the promised neverland #Doukyonin wa Hiza Tokidoki Atama no Ue #My Roommate is a Cat #dimension high school #domestic na kanojo #girly air force #go-toubun no hanayome #the quintessential quintuplets #Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka