The last thing we watched, cartoon/animu edition

[meiam]

Yeah, I'm watching Dandadan and really trying to like it, but it's just not clicking with me. There's a lot of elements to it that I really like, but it feels like less than the sum of its parts somehow.

Well all it really have is good production value for animation, the rest is just sorta there.

Currently watching Scavengers Reign on netflix.

The survivors of some kind of space ship catastrophe try to survive on an alien planet.

I'm 4 episodes in (out of 12) and I'm really liking it. This is some sci-fi ass sci-fi. The whole show hinges on how imaginative and interesting the alien planet is, and the crew interacting with the wildly strange flora and fauna.

It's worth a watch just for the creativity of the creature designs.

Tried the first 3 episode, but apparently its another of those show that got cancelled after S1 and I just don't really feel like getting invested in something that might end in a cliff hanger.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Tried the first 3 episode, but apparently its another of those show that got cancelled after S1 and I just don't really feel like getting invested in something that might end in a cliff hanger.

It ends in a satisfying way and would not require a season 2 to feel complete.

I actually had no idea they even had a season 2 planned or were interested in doing one. If they did it could have functioned as an anthology series rather than a direct continuation.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Dandadan episode 3 has the sexy grandma that everyone seems to be hyped about. Honestly, I thought she would be either cooler or funnier. Yeah, so far the most enjoyable part of the show is the great OP. They achieve so little in a single episode, I have to wonder what their ratio is for adapting manga chapters to episodes.

 

[thebobmaster]

Slowly working my way through Frieren. I can't remember the last time I've felt genuinely interested in a show where nothing really seems to happen.

 

[Ezekiel]

I like Gir, but he's often too zany for my taste. This was pretty funny, though.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

.png but you get the idea.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

.png but you get the idea.

I saw allegations (honestly might have been on this forum) that the first episode was so expensive that they fired the director and outsourced the rest of the season to hentai animation studies. Probably untrue, but funny to think about.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I saw allegations (honestly might have been on this forum) that the first episode was so expensive that they fired the director and outsourced the rest of the season to hentai animation studies. Probably untrue, but funny to think about.

Well something fucking happened here.

The Junji Ito curse remains.

But then this video makes a pretty good case as to why Ito doesn't work outside of comics anyway.

 

[BrawlMan]

Well something fucking happened here.

The Junji Ito curse remains.

But then this video makes a pretty good case as to why Ito doesn't work outside of comics anyway.

There is no curse. The problem is that it has to be putting a hands of people that actually care. Especially the ones who are in positions of authority and have the authority to actually put the money where their actual mouth is, and not skimp out on the budget.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

A couple of episodes of

Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere

I'm currently reading the novels this is based on and finding myself utterly fascinated with it. Minoru Kawakami wrote a fantasy/science-fiction epic that rivals your Songs of Ice and Fires' and Dunes' and Legend of the Galactic Heroes' in terms of scope, political complexity and sheer detail and it all looks like the epitome of incomprehensible anime nonsense full of mechs, chibi ghosts, techno-witches and girls with comically large breasts, comically large hair and comically large outfits. All of which might very well make him one of the most based people alive.

The premise? In the distant future, humanity tried to leave earth to colonize space, failed for... reasons, came back down to earth to find out that Japan was the only inhabitable land, lost most of their knowledge about space travel for... reasons, decided that the only way to regain that knowledge is to reenact all of human history according to an automatically updating history book, split the world into a real world and a pocket dimension to accommodate for all the people, the latter of which collapsed for... reasons, leading to a war between the people from this pocket dimension and the real world, which led to the entire landmass being colonized by the European imperial powers (we're still reenacting history, you see, and we're in the 15th century at the beginning of the series) and Japan's only remaining territory being a small fleet of airships where a group of students (among them an Incubus, a slime, an Indian stereotype, a werewolf, a ninja and an anthropomorphic dragon with ties to the Spanish Inquisition) spearheaded by their class clown chancellor get caught up in a global conflict leading up to a looming apocalypse under the backdrop of the various nations reenacting both the 30 Years War and the Japanese Warring States period with futuristic technology, magic, and techno magic.

Now that we've cleared that up, this story unfolds over 11 novels, many of which are around or over 1000 pages in length, two of which have been adapted into two seasons of an anime.

Don't watch this if you haven't read the books. You won't understand a thing. And also don't read the books, you won't understand a thing either. Or, actually, watch the first episode, effectively a single 20 minute action sequence, that sets up the characters and general aesthetics of the whole thing. It's a wonderful little slice of complete nonsense. And it looks and sounds really nice, the production values are weirdly high.

This is the pinnacle of indulgent, megalomaniacal, borderline schizophrenic, practically incomprehensible, overly conceptual auteurist bullshit.

10/10, no notes.

 

[Bartholen]

Legend of Vox Machina, season 3

Still a banger of a show. It's one of the most consistent animated series released in the past 10 years right alongside Bojack Horseman. This season there's been considerable changes from the source material, but IMO for the better. The part of the original campaign this season covers was very "game-like" with lots of travel, planning and dicking around, so a straight adaptation wouldn't really have the required narrative momentum for the season where they face the big bad of the series thus far. The biggest changes have been around Pike, who's been given an entirely new character involving characters who didn't even exist when the original campaign aired. It gives me, a fan, the best of both worlds: I get to see how they adapt iconic moments, but also the excitement of not really knowing how the story's going to play out.

The animation and music are still on point (sans one kind of odd musical choice at one of the highpoints of the season), the action kicks ass and the performances are great across the board. I felt like there were even more easter eggs and nods to fans this time around, and they're always great fun to pick out. Season 4 is confirmed, and I think it's going to be the final one, so if they nail it (and I have every reason to believe they will), LoVM will go down as one of the best western animated shows ever.

 

[meiam]

Legend of Vox Machina, season 3

Still a banger of a show. It's one of the most consistent animated series released in the past 10 years right alongside Bojack Horseman. This season there's been considerable changes from the source material, but IMO for the better. The part of the original campaign this season covers was very "game-like" with lots of travel, planning and dicking around, so a straight adaptation wouldn't really have the required narrative momentum for the season where they face the big bad of the series thus far. The biggest changes have been around Pike, who's been given an entirely new character involving characters who didn't even exist when the original campaign aired. It gives me, a fan, the best of both worlds: I get to see how they adapt iconic moments, but also the excitement of not really knowing how the story's going to play out.

The animation and music are still on point (sans one kind of odd musical choice at one of the highpoints of the season), the action kicks ass and the performances are great across the board. I felt like there were even more easter eggs and nods to fans this time around, and they're always great fun to pick out. Season 4 is confirmed, and I think it's going to be the final one, so if they nail it (and I have every reason to believe they will), LoVM will go down as one of the best western animated shows ever.

That reflect a lot of the reason why I was really disappointed with the anime adaptation (I haven't watched the session). What I found interesting in the concept is that DnD, by nature, will often stray from the conventional story beat. The DnD, or story writer, will often set even so they go an obvious, "cinematic" way (the good guy save the princess from the evil guy or something), but then player will take things in a completely different direction, maybe because they missed obvious clue or because they rolled like crap. This also affect small event, where scenes will play out very differently than would normally have happen.

But the anime seems to suck all of that zaniness out of the session, just to give a very stock show that, if you didn't know, probably wouldn't be able to tell was based on DnD. The only element that tied it to its root was that there was just way too many main character, and that's not really a good thing.

 

[Ezekiel]

Sonic's birthday in three two days. Tails tries to make money for a present. Fails at clearing up leaves. Fails at paper route. Goes to junk yard and makes him a flying machine. Tails in lab coat with crazy hair scientist, Prof. Von Schlemmer. Make machine together. Robotnik disguises himself as the professor. Tails asks him if something is wrong, says he's uglier than usual. Remembered this episode pretty well, for once. Nice feelings.

 

[Ezekiel]

Uzumaki situation is why I wanna get more into manga. Japanese TV animation studios are USELESS. But there were unusual factors. Found this post interesting.

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=22514472&postcount=50

My theory is that the people at AS who greenlit the project and allowed Hiroshi Nagahama to do his thing were fans of his work (in particular his experimental adaptation of Shuzo Oshimi's The Flowers of Evil, which also happens to by my favourite manga by my favourite mangaka), but possibly didn't understand the effort needed to create works of that quality.

Flowers was a project he initially turned down because he felt it was better suited to live action than traditional animation, but changed his mind after thinking about rotoscoping. Shot in live action and traced over with traditional hand drawn animation, Flowers has a unique look to it which nobody at the time seemed to get: "it's weird, offputting and ugly... it must be a mistake!" ...when in fact, that was the entire point. Aesthetically, outside of shot compositions, there's little shared with Oshimi's manga, but the choice of aesthetic was intentional: a perfect match for the themes of the material itself.

So, when Nagahama is adapting an outright horror manga and ends up using motion capture and CG that'll be rotoscoped later to evoke the same psychological effect (being off, too smooth), of course it'll take a lot longer and cost more money than if it was traditionally animated to begin with, but it wouldn't achieve the same effect. You watch Episode 1, and you can tell it’s been rotoscoped, but in a good way. By utilising techniques rarely seen in anime because of how weird it would look, it is the perfect visual representation of the material by somebody who understands Ito’s work on a foundational level and doing his best to make the ideal version in animation.

My theory is that AS didn't fully think through how time consuming and expensive this would be to get the results ideal for this project, so when almost everything was already mocapped and CG'd, you kinda have to adhere to that workflow, and when you remove the person who understands that approach very well and hire lesser talent to finish it up, of course you're going to get very disappointing results.

It's a theory I have. Very easily could be 100% wrong, but going off of the results I'm seeing, it seems like a possibility.

 

[Ezekiel]

And I said that right before watching the animation/budget nosedive in episode 18 of Dirty Pair.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Gundam Requiem for Vengeance. Fun little CGI show that feels like an extended video game cutscene. I guess what is supposed to be unique about this show is that it's presented mainly from the perspective of the traditional "bad" guys, while the iconic white, red, and blue Gundam is a faceless monster who slaughtered their forces and is relentlessly hunting them down. So that aspect of it is quite fun, treating a Gundam like a Godzilla-like creature.

That said, while the mobile suit on mobile suit action is quite fun and well animated, that's pretty much all there is to the show. The human characters are impossible to care about when a) the English voice acting is so poor, b) the Japanese dub is so poorly synced to the animations, and c) facial animations are awful. Like, worse than most modern video games.

But its a very short 6 episodes, of about 20 minutes each. Worth watching if you wanna see mechas fight.

 

[Bartholen]

That reflect a lot of the reason why I was really disappointed with the anime adaptation (I haven't watched the session). What I found interesting in the concept is that DnD, by nature, will often stray from the conventional story beat. The DnD, or story writer, will often set even so they go an obvious, "cinematic" way (the good guy save the princess from the evil guy or something), but then player will take things in a completely different direction, maybe because they missed obvious clue or because they rolled like crap. This also affect small event, where scenes will play out very differently than would normally have happen.

But the anime seems to suck all of that zaniness out of the session, just to give a very stock show that, if you didn't know, probably wouldn't be able to tell was based on DnD. The only element that tied it to its root was that there was just way too many main character, and that's not really a good thing.

Well that's the thing: LoVM isn't supposed to be an adaptation of a DnD campaign, it's the adaptation of the story of a DnD campaign. TTRPGs by their nature will involve a lot of zany, unexpected stuff and improv that, if adapted straight into the screen, would just be a complete tonal mess outside of a flat out comedy (see: Honor Among Thieves). Also a lot of that zany stuff will rarely have significance to the plot. In the original campaign the big story beats were basically always played straight, there weren't really moments where the party was presented with a story beat, and then took it in a completely unexpected direction in the way you describe it. Hence why LoVM, in aiming to be a serious story, adapts some of the moments that involved DnD chaos in the campaign, such as when in the first season Percy, Vax and Scanlan fail to get through a simple locked door, or Vax and Scanlan teleporting inside a dragon. But it leaves out a crapton of other, less consequential stuff, including but not limited to:

• The Sun Tree in Whitestone talking with a Matthew McConaughey -style inflection
• Percy wearing old miner-style overalls under his outfit, and shooting at vampires with the butt flap down
• A lot if not most of Scanlan's antics, such as him insulting enemies to death, his penis being a 1x1x1 inch cube, and posing as Burt Reynolds with a fake moustache
• Percy wrestling Grog for a magical skull during the attack on Emon, and prevailing through nothing but bad dice rolls on Grog's part.
• The party disguising themselves as cows to hunt down a giant bird

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Oblivion Battery. A genius baseball pitcher and catcher duo (which is apparently called a battery, hence the name) are surprisingly attending a school with no baseball team. As it turns out, the catcher lost his memory and no longer wants to play baseball.

I've been on a sports anime kick lately. After Haikyuu, this might be my favorite one. As far as I can tell as a former player, there aren't really any ridiculous powers or abilities. Its all about the friendships you build in sports, the pressure competition brings, and love of the sport. It helps that the production value is on point, as expected as Mappa.

If there's one thing that would make you bounce off the show, it would be annoying characters. It would be a spoiler to talk about it further, but if you found Zenitsu from Demon Slayer annoying, you'll find this show annoying.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre

Before the Uzumaki fiasco on Max there was this anthology on Netflix. This dude really is a one trick pony. He's somehow as utterly predictable as he is completely random - every story is basically the same thing, over and over (character becomes obsessed with something, then dies an unholy death because of it), and the only thing that changes is the subject of horror itself, from basic shapes to basic objects to the more ghoulish campfire stuff.

Ranma 1/2

Ranma, making sexual harassment funny since 1989.

 

[Piscian]

Terminator Zero

My honest assessment is that this is dull anime terminator fanfic. I gave it about 5 episodes mostly because I was recovering from surgery and needed something to space out to. I say that because I don't think I could sit through that many episodes if I wasn't a little high.

In this a engineer in Japan had explicit dreams of the Terminator future and builds an Anti-skynet AI called Kokuru to try and stop skynet. A lady soldier goes back in time to help him..or stop him...I'm 5 episodes in and its not really clear.

The show is divided into two plotlines. The seemingly primary one is the engineer, who is a dick to his kids and unlikable, sitting in an AI room trying to convince Kokuru to save humanity as the clock ticks down hours til judgement day. The AI just goes on and on about how he sucks and humanity sucks and why should it help them?

The secondary one is a Terminator whos gone back in time to ..idk..stop the engineer? Maybe? but for whatever reason is hunting his annoying kids, one of whom is clearly a sociopath, who are sort of being protected by the future soldier lady.

The whole thing is, imho, dull and uninteresting. I don't like any character in this show and it takes great pains to be opaque in explaining why the audience should be invested. Theres literally a scene in the beginning where the soldier lady asks the elder why shes going back in time and what does it all mean and the Elder is like "CAUSE REASONS".

There's also a subplot where the kids nanny, not soldier lady, is also a robot and no one knows why.

The trickiest part of making Terminator good is giving enough information for the audience to get them in the car, but also keep it simple enough that they can enjoy the ride without asking questions. This show does the LOST JJ Abrams thing where every moment is just "MYSTERY BOX" and you're expected to be curious enough to stick with it until the end. I can't, this show is literally boring. 0/10