Hromino

You do know Gunma Prefecture, don't you? Let me reassure you, many Japanese people know little more about it than you do. When you say Gunma, all that comes to mind for most is the spa town of Kusatsu, and the fact that it is one of the few landlocked prefectures. According to surveys, it is the least attractive prefecture for tourists. So, this anime tries to tell us more about it. I consider the focus of the season itself, or rather its broad scope, to be a big positive: it does not try to portray Gunma as a poor little misunderstood area with so much to offer, or to self-mockingly ridicule itself as a total dump. Similarly, it is not only one-sidedly oriented towards audiences outside Gunma, but also towards the people of Gunma themselves, who it is also trying to educate, and share interesting facts about their homeland that they may not know. Stereotypes are treated with exaggeration and humor and are not presented as pure 100% absolute facts. The humor works, the presentation of everyday life is varied and interesting, the animation and soundtrack are purely average, and the characters are about as flat as an ironing board. However, given that by the nature of the season the characters having no depth does not play a major role here, and there is an ending (however absurd), which is very unusual for a twelve four-minute episodes, I am throwing the aforementioned shortcomings to the wind and awarding 4 stars.

I had almost given up on this artist, because I was convinced he was experiencing a gradual decline in his creative powers and heading inevitably to the bottom of the artistic abyss. If one could explain Makoto's creative failures of the last few years to me, lost in dullness and rumoring, by the fact that he was just saving and gathering his strength for this gem, then I would let him be forgiven for these indiscretions and enthusiastically pat him on the back. What I expected from him, I certainly now got: polished visuals, fluid animation, sunsets and picturesque skies bordering on the kitschy, lots of shots of trains, full of melancholy, and an excellent soundtrack, albeit this time performed by my favorite band Radwimps; but all this now goes hand in hand with an interesting storyline, which, although God knows how far from being original it is, and even if some might call it a mixture of various anime tropes, it is handled exceedingly well. It offers various interpretations of the story, making the movie resonate strongly with the audience even after watching it. It is playful, cute, and funny, but it is not primarily touchy-feely in a stupid way. It is classic Makoto, all of his trademarks are there and in large quantities, but at the same time it is a distinctive and unmistakable work in the context of Makoto's oeuvre. It is an oeuvre that teeters on the thin edge of superficial likability, where you can see both a merely audio visually compelling story, and a multi-layered piece that will not let you rest for a minute and will resonate with you for quite some time – and Mitsuha and Taki have clearly pulled me towards the latter. After a very long time, this is finally one hyped anime that I can relate to and ride the wave of, too. A small insignificant plus for Shinkai for making me buy both a movie on DVD and its soundtrack after nine years. And a minor minus for getting really crushed by the phenomenon and not being able to resist shelling out a disgusting amount of yen to visit a themed café and buy a bunch of crap like notepads, pens and postcards. What a cheeky movie! (Seen at Toho Cinemas Nijo, Kyoto, 11/2016.)

Not knowing how he actually got to watching the season in the first place, even though its synopsis smacked of nothing less than a travesty, and when the animation studio involved also did not raise his hopes up, the poster and trailer perhaps even making him grow tired, and the director's name evoking associations with the kitschiness of the artwork of his previous movie venture, Hromino's review was written quite incredulously with a smile on his face, and a five-star rating emerging, the first five stars awarded to an anime in two years. This was a thoroughly pleasant surprise, in retrospect appearing to be a successful attempt to avoid the mistakes that another anime by the same studio based on similar themes suffered from. Grimgar, Ashes and Illusions is a TV show that primarily focuses on character believability, and it does not hesitate to sacrifice action scenes, faster narrative pacing, or epic grandness of story to achieve it. The audience's ambivalence is justified, as the expectations of the above and the subsequent discovery that all of this is completely or entirely absent in Grimgar, Ashes and Illusions can naturally lead to a sense of disappointment. For me, however, the opposite is true. The characters are thrown into an unfamiliar world, finding themselves in the same boat, so to speak, as villains having trouble killing even a small goblin, are forced to get used to the unfamiliar world. However, apart from the alien world, they also have to get used to each other in order for the disparate group to act cohesively; and it is the building of relationships between them, listening to each other, trying to understand each other despite their aversion to each other, adapting to the next member or, on the contrary, coping with the loss of another member that the creators have managed to portray to perfection. Everything feels natural, believable, fluid, nothing is forced, the silences and the unspoken things also functionally serve the narrative, and as the characters form bonds with each other, the audience also gets used to the characters. Another important element of the narrative, I think, is that there is essentially no single hero who overshadows the other characters in terms of his abilities or the focus of the plot on his person. There is the main hero, Haruhiro, who comments on the plot, but he is more than a little far from being truly "heroic"; compared to the rest of the team he does not abound with any special talents, the plot rather just flows around him, and in terms of narrative significance, he is given the same emphasis as the other team members, so thankfully there is no recurring problem of an overly powered character with whom the audience has no need to sympathize. However, if anyone feels that Grimgar is someone who thrives on merely commenting on the grim lives of the poor souls stranded in an alien world, they would be mistaken. Along with the increasing understanding among the members of the group, the characters' mental maturity and fighting abilities improve, and this is vividly demonstrated to us in the last more action-packed section of the season. Plus, if we add to the positives mentioned so far the very well executed artwork, and soundtrack, we have a great course that I have been sampling with great gusto every week. It could be faulted for its somewhat sparser, more static animation in places, as well as a couple of vocal tracks that seemed rather disturbing and intrusive in certain scenes, but fortunately it does not change the final impression – and the final five stars. If a second season is ever made, the creators can count on me to be watching again.

After watching Sword Art Online, I had considerable doubts about Tomohiko Itō’s abilities, then after watching the first season of Silver Spoon, I subtly resorted to the opinion that perhaps it was only in the case of SAO that this director had taken on somewhat unfortunate material, and after watching Erased, I am definitively inclined toward the latter opinion; convinced that I could give the same material, had it been produced by other directors and studios, a mere one star without much hesitation. Ito proves here that even from a dubious chaotic subject matter of a wannabe psychological, wannabe sci-fi and wannabe detective story, he can create a well-composed whole narrative and present the audience with a show that, although working with characters who are not always logical in their reasoning and do not always have plausible motivations, nevertheless makes the characters likable to watch. Although the show gradually bears more narrative illogicalities caused by the wobbly rules of time travel, it still manages to somehow hold itself together, and which – though it reveals the killer’s identity very clearly really early on – does not kill the suspense, but on the contrary works with it excellently, manages to engage the audience’s attention quite skillfully until the end, and is very well animated and voiced to boot. In the future, I would like to see Itō and the main screenwriter create an original work, independent of any predetermined subject matter, where they could fully showcase their creative abilities. After all, he is a brilliant director, and even from a material with many holes and silly mistakes in it, he was able to create a piece of work that at the very least is worthy of a strong 3 stars.

I am now writing down another anime on the list of works that had a lot of potential to appeal to me, but where the potential was criminally wasted by the producers. Subete ga F ni Naru has a promising start, excellent artwork and animation, a fairly decent soundtrack and one of the most excellent openings I have ever had the pleasure of seeing in the world of Japanese animation so far, but unless the director and especially the screenwriter are in luck, it is hard for the audience to get enough of the above for the entire run of the eleven episodes. I can imagine quite well what the subject matter might have looked like in the hands of another production company, just as I can understand the reasons for the success of the book's prequel in Japan. However, its anime adaptation, unfortunately, I cannot help but think of as a screenwriting travesty, which was just exhausting, and the final point – itself otherwise very interesting – was my imaginary deliverance from this journey. I have no idea if the screenwriter was so lazy that the result of his work feels like a slavish rewrite of the book, or if he was simply ignorant of the unwritten rules of movie adaptations, but either way, the creation of so many dysfunctional, and bullshit contentless scenes deserves to be handed a kind of anti-award; to both the screenwriter and director. The director’s absolute lack of feeling for the progression within the plot, obsession with repeating certain scenes to the point of madness, and inability to portray the depth of the characters on screen, who thus appear to the audience as unlikable, irritating, and contrived, should also be duly appreciated. As a result of all of the above, I had an experience similar to that of the other reviewers below: they were thinking the screenwriters were so disinterested in their work the result was just "ahem, okay..." when the killer was revealed, and wanted to fast forward the series, or felt a dire need to shut the characters up. It is a great shame to have so cruelly wasted the potential of the source material, which deserved to have been handled much better. I give it a bland 2 stars.

If anyone desires to know what screenwriting cluelessness and confusion looks like, I can highly recommend they watch the second season of Seraph of the End. Not that my expectations after the first season were all that high – I started out watching the second season purely out of interest to see if the production company had by any chance managed to muster up a little more inventiveness, and make this most audience-pleasing blend of well-known shōnen tropes a work of its own – but I was really not expecting the kind of creative constipation that I got here. For the first nine episodes, absolutely nothing happens, the plot goes absolutely nowhere; and only generic filler is thrown in the audience’s face. This consists of frenzied chatter, training and minor fights, or fights with no real consequence, only to have the production company build up the plot to an insanely breakneck speed at the end in the last three episodes. Those episodes then try to cram in as many events as possible, which do finally move the plot forward, however, on the other hand, without making any real sense. Maybe the producers were trying to make the audience all the more eager to switch to the manga (conveniently, they are caught up to the last chapter here), to find out what the show was actually supposed to be. With such an approach, the audience would have probably had a heart-attack when, after watching the last episode, they realized that shit, there had actually been much more the production company had had to work with. Sometimes, on the other hand, the audience could have been amused: the interaction between the main hero and his friend seems pathetically ridiculous, even though they could suspect that might have been the intention of the production company all along. Then again, sometimes they might have realized that not all of the aspects of a show aimed at the widest possible audience have yet been fulfilled: and this is when they get introduced to two new very feminine, very well-endowed characters. The level of drawing, animation and soundtrack then appears to be back to more or less the same level as the first season. At the end of this season however, this reviewer might bitterly lament and throw a fit at the producers, even if subconsciously he knows that when the third season arrives, he, like a lamb to the slaughter, would blindly eat it up, so he ends up giving it a strong one star.

Death Parade is a beautiful example of how trying to develop a short piece of work into a fully-fledged television show does not always complement the original work. While Death Billiards was not exactly a top-class piece of work that made my suspenders burst with suspense and excitement, it was thanks to its excellently built suspense and mysterious atmosphere, short running time, and open ending that left the audience’s mind full of questions and was therefore quite cathartic. So, in that regard, Death Billiards stood out as a stand-alone work, and after watching it, I did not expect any sort of follow-up in the form of a fully-fledged season. Therefore, rather, unfortunately, Death Parade did not boost the value of the original work in any way. To my disappointment, the season follows a silly and, for me personally, a severely unpleasant pattern almost the entire time: throw in an as-yet-unseen game, and always choose two participants so that their interactions will cause the greatest possible amount of emotional outpouring on-screen, and to move the audience as much as possible. This of course entails showing over-the-top emotional outbursts as much as possible, shouting lines full of pathos, and would-be philosophical horseshit, which again is just a means to manipulate the audience’s feelings. I refuse to engage in such games with the production company. I am not sure if the original Death Billiards suffered a bit from being embarrassingly calculated, but if it did, it certainly did not suffer to this extent. Thus, only the soundtrack, along with the opening theme song, and the outstanding visuals are worthy of praise, which of course is not enough to make a season successful. Maybe it would perhaps demand more elaborate characters, psychology, a deeper story and for the repetitiveness to be kept to an absolute minimum? But alas, this is just a first-rate attempt to emotionally manipulate the audience by any means necessary. For the soundtrack, the artwork, and the good things left from the original Death Billiards, I give it a very weak 2 stars.

The ladies and gentlemen at Bones have once again proved their worth, and served up another visual pickle of mostly stand-alone episodes, whose playfulness this time actually impressed me, although they somewhat failed to hit the mark completely for the second time now. However, this should not be taken as criticism, because, as with Space☆Dandy, I was treated to interesting characters, quality artwork and animation, a pervasive atmosphere of unrestrained creativity, and an ode to the animator's joy, a simple subject matter translated into narrative and playful animation. Plus, in the second half of the season, the plot develops really well. When you put this together with a decent soundtrack – meaning both the soundtrack during the episodes and the opening and closing theme songs – the four stars are automatically awarded, albeit a bit weaker this time around, especially as the first half of the season suffers from the same syndrome the second season of Space☆Dandy had. The plot is rather lacking to my taste, and to an excessive extent is too much into playing around with its visual elements, which may be enough to please the audience for one episode, but not over the course of several episodes. However, thanks to the people at Bones for dropping the self-consciousness, starting with the mushroom-like-man episode, and they did a great job of whetting my appetite, which lasted until the end.

... or how someone took a good idea to the production studio, and the creative team there got all excited about the subject matter, but then in the process of turning it into a ten-part anime, they hit a brick-wall and all their ambitions were brought to a screaming halt. Even Hromino was quite pleased with the first few episodes, pinning his hopes on Inari, and trying to be generous and willingly forgive the production team for some of their lapses in judgment for the sake of a pleasant experience. However, seeing how the episodes progressed, the initially fresh and original anime turned into a chore, and Hromino had to cool himself down with a cold shower, and as he lowered his head rather sadly and he sighed unhappily. Quite naturally, this show shares similarities with another anime, Gingitsune, from the previous year, which was also set in a Shinto shrine setting with a young girl as the main heroine dealing with the supernatural. Gingitsune definitely came out as the better of the two; primarily with more likable, fleshed out and better-utilized characters, more or less balanced quality of episodes, and a nice, relaxed atmosphere. Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha, by contrast, gives me the impression of a kind of unrefined cluelessness and inconsistency on the part of the production team, which seems to be accurately represented by the main heroine’s increasing helplessness as the season unfolds. Visually, the anime is engaging, the soundtrack is passable, the traditional Shinto deities Susano-o no Mikoto, Amaterasu-Ōmikam, and Uka-no-Mitama-no-Kami, are depicted in an interesting way, and the first half of the season is really very funny, but the interesting points are then drowned out in the second half of the season, where all we get is a rushed, trite, fairy-tale ending with a few curtailed plot lines, a ton of tropes, and a lot of untapped potentials. Shame, shame, shame. The anime could have definitely turned out better.

Having anticipated Typhoon Noruda being a full-length feature, the resulting 27 minutes running time was already something of an early omen that my expectations were quite unlikely to be fulfilled. Thus, it was so: although Studio Colorido should be praised for the visuals and the soundtrack composer should also be given a manly pat on the back as expected, let the screenwriter drown in his own excrement. After reading the synopsis, I was expecting a denouement of sorts, but I would not have expected such a moronic, stupid, and upside-down plot, combined with annoying tropes, even from some of the other producers I have ridiculed in the past. Perhaps if Typhoon Noruda had just simply been made into a proper movie, this disappointment could have at least been a little tempered, and the otherwise completely uninteresting characters (including the main heroine around whom it all revolves!) could have at least been a little more sketched out in order to engage the audience than they do in for a few minutes in this short film, but what the hell. So, as with the previous short film by the same studio, the production company get brownie points for the successful audiovisual experience (special praise goes to the final track by the band Galileo Galilei, through which I actually discovered Typhoon Noruda), but it is definitely not enough to make a good short. A very, very weak 2 stars, which may be lowered to 1 star after the movie has been fully absorbed.