Huh. Interesting. I never paid much attention to seasons, since I tend to watch older stuff instead. But now that I've finally caught up on my backlog, I'm actually watching shows as they come out.
The last thing we watched, cartoon/animu edition
- Thread starter TheMysteriousGX
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The Sea Beast -Think How to Train Your Dragon, but with sea monsters. I have still yet to see ant of the movies from that franchise. Sea Beast is already my favorite animated movie of the year. The voice acting, the animation, the writing, the characters, and action are nailed perfectly, beat by beat. It's a fun adventure film that works either for a kid, teen, or an adult. High recommendations. See it on Netflix whenever you get the chance, pronto!
Solar Opposites: S3:Ep 1-8: Eyeroll / Great
Never mind the series being a shameless copy of a copy of Rick and Morty, it's really just dumb. It feels like it was written by a 14-year-old two weeks removed from his last dose of prescribed ritalin. "Fuck" and "shit" are thrown around with abandon to the point it's cringingly noticeable, you can't go 11 seconds without a crude sex joke, and coherence of any sort went out the window right out of the gate. You can tell they're trying to be clever (like how they break the 4th wall talking about their own episodic show or Hulu to whom they are exclusive,) but each of their efforts have been done leagues better elsewhere, including Rick and Morty. At least R&M has some intelligence around it, Solar Opposites is just crass.
Never mind the series being a shameless copy of a copy of Rick and Morty, it's really just dumb. It feels like it was written by a 14-year-old two weeks removed from his last dose of prescribed ritalin. "Fuck" and "shit" are thrown around with abandon to the point it's cringingly noticeable, you can't go 11 seconds without a crude sex joke, and coherence of any sort went out the window right out of the gate. You can tell they're trying to be clever (like how they break the 4th wall talking about their own episodic show or Hulu to whom they are exclusive,) but each of their efforts have been done leagues better elsewhere, including Rick and Morty. At least R&M has some intelligence around it, Solar Opposites is just crass.
Solar Opposites and Rick & Morty are actually largely by the same people. With one key difference: Dan Harmon is not involved.
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Tuca and Bertie Season 2. It was really good, there were a few episodes that kinda dipped but it also had some really spectacular ones that were just awesome. You can kinda feel that things are a little different now that its on Adult Swim and not a Netflix original, but the story and characters are still fantastic and feel just like they did before, but grown from the events of season 1.
This I know. They're basically the same show; it's just that former has no nuance; it's all swearing, sex and fart jokes. It's as if there was a team of 10 writers for R&M, and 2 of them constantly disrupted the process, so the remaining 8 gave them a box of crayons and printer paper and excused them to another room to make their own show.
Through Season 6 of The Clone Wars. I have no idea how this show keeps topping itself each season, but it does. While Season 5 was mostly great except for having the worst story arc of the entire series (which was apparently George Lucas' favorite story arc of the series), Season 6 was just consistently great throughout. Even the two-parter where one of the main characters was Jar Jar Binks managed to strike a balance between being light-hearted enough to serve as a breather after the VERY serious story arc before it without becoming...well, what you'd expect out of the Jar Jar Binks Comedy Hour. The season (and for years, series) finale was also really well done, although I have to admit that if I were to name the plot of the final story arc, "Yoda training arc" would not have been my guess. Season 7 has a lot to live up to, although the two episodes I've seen of that so far have at least met my expectations.
I am now finished with The Clone Wars, having wrapped up season 7. WOW, that ending. Honestly, the ending was one of the best, if not THE best, arcs of the show for me, and really lived up to my expectations, and while the middle arc of Season 7 was a bit disappointing by comparison to the first and last arcs, it was still a really great way to end the show. Definitely looking forward to tackling Rebels, and Clone Wars, overall, more than lived up to the hype for me.
Rebels is good, it took me a while to warm to the new cast but eventually they get there. Some faster than others. Except for Chopper, fuck that guy.
Saw the first two episodes of Season 2. My man still got it!
Watched a pair of Anime series from the same genre, roughly the same time and covering some overlapping themes. First of which is
Ergo Proxy
Mid 00's dystopian science-fiction, starting off in what's one of the very few, possibly the last, large cities that maintain some degree of civilized life and advanced technology in what's otherwise a post apocalyptic wasteland. EP is, mainly, the story of the cities security chief Re-L Mayer, an emotionally guarded young woman with some impressive mall goth fashion, and meek immigrant Vincent Law pursuing the mysteries of a strange monstrous creature called Proxy running wild in the city and it's android workforce developing sentience and going rogue.
Despite its use of some stock Cyberpunk ideas, Ergo Proxy is nothing if not eager to throw in everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to fleshing out that plot. Ergo Proxy is a grab bag of narrative and stylistic digressions that are irritating as often as they're compelling. Where it starts off relatively tightly in setting up its main premise and characters, once it settles into the journey across the wasteland that makes for its second act it starts to get carried away quite badly.
I'm not saying that Ergo Proxy tries too hard, tempting as it is. But I will say that Ergo Proxy tries too much. Straight up, the reason that I'm not the biggest anime fan is that I always felt that 20 minutes are too short a time frame for any serious episodic storytelling, which is why most of my actual favourites tend to have more of a long form approach. Ergo Proxy has plenty of odd one off episodes (among them some borderline non sequiturs like a quiz show and one set in a Disney World parody inhabited by cartoon characters) utilizing ideas that a 40 - 60 minutes episode might have explored enough to turn into worthwhile side stories, but as self contained 20 minutes episodes, never really manage to grow into more than gimmicks
It doesn't help that even once the main plot comes back into focus, the writers couldn't help getting carried away. The series has, quite consistently, a good amount of heavy handed philosophical discussions, that occasionally veer dangerously close to the insufferable name dropping of surface level pop philosophy that made me strongly dislike Taro's Nier Automata. What is a mildly brow raising quirk for most of the show escalates to the point of absurdity towards the end.
Ergo Proxy does quite a good job being a hard boiled dystopian action thriller when it actually wants to be, but in the end, just when it seems like its ready to put its experiments of varying success behind itself, it unravels into some of the silliest and most over the top operatic JRPG cheese that a series like this could possibly end on.
There is some likeability to Ergo Proxy's weird patchwork of valid, if sometimes cliché Cyberpunk tropes, airheaded new age prog rock operatics and left field non sequiturs inbetween but that charm isn't really enough to push it into genuinely good territory. Much moreso, Ergo Proxy feels like the work of a talented amateur, it's something that shows great promise in many different places, a lot of its art design is absolutely on point, but the writing betrays a lack of focus and restraint. Too many digressions, too many gimmicks, too much dialogue spelling out what should only be alluded to, too much semi spiritual pretension. I'm a shameless maximalist most of the time, but in case of Ergo Proxy, a bit less would have probably been more.
A much more succesful example of a dystopian anime series is Texhnolyze, which I'll write about later.
Ergo Proxy
Mid 00's dystopian science-fiction, starting off in what's one of the very few, possibly the last, large cities that maintain some degree of civilized life and advanced technology in what's otherwise a post apocalyptic wasteland. EP is, mainly, the story of the cities security chief Re-L Mayer, an emotionally guarded young woman with some impressive mall goth fashion, and meek immigrant Vincent Law pursuing the mysteries of a strange monstrous creature called Proxy running wild in the city and it's android workforce developing sentience and going rogue.
Despite its use of some stock Cyberpunk ideas, Ergo Proxy is nothing if not eager to throw in everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to fleshing out that plot. Ergo Proxy is a grab bag of narrative and stylistic digressions that are irritating as often as they're compelling. Where it starts off relatively tightly in setting up its main premise and characters, once it settles into the journey across the wasteland that makes for its second act it starts to get carried away quite badly.
I'm not saying that Ergo Proxy tries too hard, tempting as it is. But I will say that Ergo Proxy tries too much. Straight up, the reason that I'm not the biggest anime fan is that I always felt that 20 minutes are too short a time frame for any serious episodic storytelling, which is why most of my actual favourites tend to have more of a long form approach. Ergo Proxy has plenty of odd one off episodes (among them some borderline non sequiturs like a quiz show and one set in a Disney World parody inhabited by cartoon characters) utilizing ideas that a 40 - 60 minutes episode might have explored enough to turn into worthwhile side stories, but as self contained 20 minutes episodes, never really manage to grow into more than gimmicks
It doesn't help that even once the main plot comes back into focus, the writers couldn't help getting carried away. The series has, quite consistently, a good amount of heavy handed philosophical discussions, that occasionally veer dangerously close to the insufferable name dropping of surface level pop philosophy that made me strongly dislike Taro's Nier Automata. What is a mildly brow raising quirk for most of the show escalates to the point of absurdity towards the end.
Ergo Proxy does quite a good job being a hard boiled dystopian action thriller when it actually wants to be, but in the end, just when it seems like its ready to put its experiments of varying success behind itself, it unravels into some of the silliest and most over the top operatic JRPG cheese that a series like this could possibly end on.
There is some likeability to Ergo Proxy's weird patchwork of valid, if sometimes cliché Cyberpunk tropes, airheaded new age prog rock operatics and left field non sequiturs inbetween but that charm isn't really enough to push it into genuinely good territory. Much moreso, Ergo Proxy feels like the work of a talented amateur, it's something that shows great promise in many different places, a lot of its art design is absolutely on point, but the writing betrays a lack of focus and restraint. Too many digressions, too many gimmicks, too much dialogue spelling out what should only be alluded to, too much semi spiritual pretension. I'm a shameless maximalist most of the time, but in case of Ergo Proxy, a bit less would have probably been more.
A much more succesful example of a dystopian anime series is Texhnolyze, which I'll write about later.
Season 1 is generally agreed to be a little weak and the show finds it's stride in season 2 and beyond.
Also, Chopper wants to know your location so he can blow you out the nearest airlock.
Anime was different back then, it seems like every show was getting okay-ed for 26-50 episodes and most writter didn't seem to know what to do with this many episodes, so you always have the mid section being just faffing around. Ergo Proxy suffered from that acutely because its just a beginning in dome city, a road trip that goes nowhere and then back to dome city, so you could have easily cut out the entire road trip and the story would pretty much just be the same. Today it would only have gotten 11-12 episodes and would have been made better for it, but hey, it got a radiohead ed so there's that.
Texhnolyze
That explains a lot, actually. See, I wouldn't even propose taking out the journey to Mosk entirely, it's not like there's no worthwhile stuff in there. Mainly, I'd be really sad to see that one episode of them just hanging out on a ship gone. But then you got that really dopey shit which the quiz show (which, to add insult to injury, also contained a lot of pretty integral backstory) or the Disney Land thing. Without a doubt though, it could have been a good bit shorter and would have been better for it.
Yup, the end credits theme is Paranoid Android.
The anime that used "Guardian Angel" by Juno Reactor as its opening. Also first used in the next-to-last fight scene in Drive (1997).
I'd totally forgot that. Which is weird because Paranoid Android is one of their most notable songs(with a really weird Music VIdeo). Then again, I haven't watched Ergo Proxy in Years.