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Huh, I was not expecting Appare-Ranman! to kill off a major character, particularly not one of the members of team Appare and particularly not my favourite character in the series. Like, the preview certainly looks like this is a "for real" death and not an "he almost died" moment and that makes sense since he finally got to have his big hero moment the episode before. I'm still not sold on the villain as a particularly interesting one in comparison to all the other race contestants, despite spending the episode showing off his "major threat" status and wild personality. But killing Kosame is a bold move. I never like losing my favorite character but I appreciate the show making the decision to do so if it pays dramatic dividends.
I loved this week's Fruits Basket episode, featuring "Cindarella-ish". Just some great dry, occasionally self-conscious humor on the part of all the characters. It's good to see skilled storytelling that can also make fun of itself. My wife was in stitches too.
So I'm still slowly watching through GitS SAC 2045 on Netflix and I just watched the episode featuring that ridiculous GIF Wisteria had linked in the old thread (the guy in the bathrobe doing backflips and shit). It's only a little better in proper context; it's supposed to be incredibly weird, but the extra layer of their 3DCG style is just... a lot of weird on top of that. It does turn into a big ol' boss fight that's kinda neat. But really the show so far has been incredibly middling. My favorite thing about it is the OP, I just wish it was attached to a more interesting story.
I've been following the Twitter account @SailorMoonSub since she started livetweeting the Sailor Moon live-action show, and she's since branched out to a BUNCH of other titles, both on her own time and "sponsored" by followers (read: donated to charities and funds like BLM). After a year and 8 months, she just finished Revolutionary Girl Utena + Adolescence Thereof, so I decided to give the show a proper rewatch after 12+ years.
Guys.
This show is a trip.
I'm only up to episode 5 and I'm going nuts trying to figure out what is straightforward and what is metaphor/allegory/simile and I'm pretty sure the only straightforward thing here is how obviously Freudian the Ohtori Academy architecture is. And watching the OP/ED with the series finale and Adolescence fresh in mind (thanks to the livetweet) hoooooooo boy there's "evolving OPs" that change with each new plot twist but this is a show where the audience's perception of the same animation changes almost episode to episode and it's fantastic.
(Also, early on in Ep 3 when Utena claims to Anthy that she only wants "a perfectly normal boy" and Touga basically "Hello ladies" into scene half a second later had me choking on the ground.)
Godspeed my good man. I look forward to your impressions when it's all over, because I seriously couldn't get through the second episode of this one but still muster some curiosity to know how it went.
Curiosity finally won out and I watched Monster Girl Doctor. Is it good? Nope, but it's not horrible either which feels really weird. It's fanservicey without being too far with it's fanservice. If any of that makes any sense. No, the biggest problem I have is it feels like when they were writing scripts they sat down and just created a checklist of things to hit: Lamia? Check. Centaur, check. Spider woman, harpies, mermaids, all check. And last weeks episode finally had what I knew was coming, a loli who is actually several hundred years old so it's totally OK for Glenn to do an examination on her. Honestly the cleverest thing this anime does is having an octopus woman named Cthuly.
Huh, I was not expecting Appare-Ranman! to kill off a major character, particularly not one of the members of team Appare and particularly not my favourite character in the series. Like, the preview certainly looks like this is a "for real" death and not an "he almost died" moment and that makes sense since he finally got to have his big hero moment the episode before. I'm still not sold on the villain as a particularly interesting one in comparison to all the other race contestants, despite spending the episode showing off his "major threat" status and wild personality. But killing Kosame is a bold move. I never like losing my favorite character but I appreciate the show making the decision to do so if it pays dramatic dividends.
Full disclosure: I too have watched this show. About the first 3 or so episodes? It's definitely *very* horny and very scourge. It goes through the effort of doing a lot of world building and character development, but it's all in service to the nondescript, self-insert enabling, titular Monster Girl Doctor to feel up scantily clad monster girls in the name of science.
Crunchyroll is now up to date on Healin Good Precure, the current series which is dangerously prescient in its depiction of plague-spreading villains who also hurt the environment. It also has a penguin who suffers from anxiety and a rabbit who wears cute pajamas.
Sooooooo, about that Netflix Dragon's Dogma anime. I decided to give it a chance, convinced it would be mediocre, but entertaining enough to kill a few hours.
I miscalculated.
It's actually aggravatingly, aggressively bad. I made it to the end of episode 2 before a particular bit of zero-irony, "both sides are just as bad" moralizing made me quit in disgust. I could have endured the incredibly stilted body language of the characters and the awkward dialogue that could maybe fit in an actual videogame* but has no business being in a TV show, but the whole thing has a slimy veneer of "humans are the real monsters" misanthropy that I'm really not in the mood for right now.
*Dragon's Dogma the videogame probably has better written dialogue than this
Yes and no? The opening parts of the game are pretty dry and boilerplate until the rug gets pulled out form under you in the back half of the game (and into the DLC).
I only said "probably" because my memory of the game's dialogue is pretty fuzzy (although I definitely remember gems like "These are masterworks all, you can't go wrong"), but I've played it. It's one of my favorite videogames! I don't think I would have given the show the time of the day if I didn't love its source material.
EDIT: Speaking of rug-pulling, I skipped ahead to the end of the last episode to see if they had adapted the truly wild shit that goes on at the end of the game, and... It doesn't seem to be the case. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, this adaptation has its own story to tell, and I can respect that.
...I just have zero confidence that the people writing this show have anything interesting to say about anything.
Caught up on Appare-Ranman after falling behind by a few weeks, and I still love the show. I have a few small quibbles with it, but I'm still loving it as a feel-good, entertaining show. I for one am glad that Jonnny's spoiler didn't end up being true. While watching I had pretty much zero doubt that Kosame would pull through because just being genre savvy, this isn't that kind of show. But I'm still thankful nonetheless because I don't want or need this show to go down those roads. The small quibbles are:
1) Xia Lian is a great character, so I'm mildly annoyed that in the 12th episode, they invented a female baddie for her to square off against in that thing that media does where it likes to segregate fight sequences by gender. This happens a lot, and it honestly just feels pretty anachronistic at this point. It's not the worst thing in the world, but especially in a show like this where Xia Lian's character is all about kicking ass and proving the patriarchy wrong, it's just kinda eye-rolly that her big showdown was against another woman.
2) The climax here is taking place in Nebraska. Which is neat because it's the perfect halfway point if you're making a show about trekking across the Continental US. And while Appare-Ranman has actually done a way better job of being faithful to the period it's trying to portray than most media in general, let alone anime, I can't help but nitpick here. North Platte, NE is a real place, and it was not that nice! Yes, it was a major train hub on the Union Pacific line, but it almost looked like a metropolitan place rather than a small town of <10k people in the middle of nowhere. Also another problem is the big bridge scene in what feels like just outside of North Platte. North Platte is a town along the Platte River, which bisects most of the state of Nebraska. The river has cut a "valley" through the planes in that state, but it's nothing huge that you'd imagine. And by the time you hit North Platte, everything is pretty damned flat in Nebraska. There's no giant hills or cliffs or anything justifying a bridge that high over the river, if that is indeed the Platte.
The Platte River is famous for being literally "a mile wide and an inch deep" since the river flows through flat prairie lands and used to routinely flood. So a bridge that tall over a river that you can't even navigate via a canoe is... kinda pointless! As was Appare's whole DIY bridge - they could have just forded the river and worst case scenario you just dry off the breaks afterwards when you get to the other side. That whole scenario only really makes sense if that's the Missouri River, which forms the Eastern border of the state. Which they'll eventually have to cross if they're going to make their way to Chicago. But again, the whole scenario feels like goes down right outside of North Platte, and afterwards they return to North Platte to lick their wounds. That being the Missouri River instead of the Platte would solve the look of the problem, but not the logistics, since the drive from the Eastern edges of the state to where North Platte is, is at least 4 hours going at top highway speeds in modern days; they wouldn't have returned to North Platte but instead gone to Omaha which is like, right there on the Missouri River and a way bigger city historically. Also, the rail lines in Nebraska never cross the Platte! They stay on the Northern side of the river the entire time; it doesn't really make sense to build a bridge over a river you don't actually have to cross.
Edit: That said, it feels super genuine to have the race follow along the train tracks for that stretch of the race, since that's basically what US Route 30 does, being the road along the Union Pacific line. Even if Route 30 itself didn't exist during this show's time; I'm sure a dirt road was still there.
But yeah, otherwise really love this show. Since Nebraska is the literal halfway mark across the Continental US, it feels like they planned for this show to get a sequel to address the 2nd half of the BIG BOSS race. I hope they get a 2nd cour greenlit! I want to see more of this show and its cast.
INDEED! The first 14 episodes are out now on Netflix for people to watch, and people really should get on it. It's one of the best shows in ages IMO. It really helps that Studio Wit hired a professional novelist who specializes in crime heists to write the scenarios/script here. There's nothing worse than an unconvincing scenario because your writers just don't have the chops to pull it off successfully. Not that these crimes are particularly realistic, but they feel convincing and have fun twists to them in ways that Joé-schmoé anime script writer wouldn't begin to know how to handle. (IMO anime tends to have the same issue Batman comics/shows/films always have where they can't ever hire a decent writer who specializes in crime mysteries to actually show off Batman's detective skills.)
The remaining 9 episodes just came out on Japanese Netflix, so I expect fansubs for that to begin coming out for that in the near near future. I can't vouch for Netflix's subtitles/dub, but I would bet hard money that they're ass. Someone with a stomach for that should report back on how they handle all the bilingual segments of the show in the dub, because I can't see that translating at all.
So I feel a need to complain about the latest episode of Misfit of Demon Academy.
Specifically how it feels like we just skipped over a fair amount of story. Up until now, things seem to have proceeded at a good pace; not too fast but not dragging either. It's not a fantastic show, but it's entertaining enough.
But we go from Anos being asked to kill a hero spawner magic cloning girl who we met two episodes ago, to suddenly open warfare between the two races. Now, I get that the heroes want to kill the demons because a wizard did it, and that there's only one episode left, but give a bit more build up to this event for pete's sake.
Just a follow up: apparently JP Netflix also uploaded the ENG subs on their side, so it’s watchable right now if you have no compunction with using a VPN or downloading rips.
I’m downloading right now so I can’t speak for the quality of the Netflix subs. I would normally wait for fansubs to clean up Netflix’s usually awful work, but the guy who did the first half is apparently AWOL, and a lot of fansubbers these days don’t bother with redoing already officially translated stuff, so I’m not holding out hope.
Also, a warning to anyone looking to watch this via VPN: apparently the ENG subs for episodes 18 and 19 were swapped on accident, so GL getting through that until they can fix it.
I wrote up my impressions of the film back on TT2 but it's worth reiterating again on TT3.
The movie is fine. It looks really good (it's not by the same studio, but by the same director and has the same production values as the Dragon Quest: Your Story movie) and I would not be opposed to 3DCG anime looking more like this and less like the travesties that are the Polygon Studios productions. It's well paced, has a lot of fun moments, and a variety of interesting locales. The choreography of the action scenes work well, and the way characters animate/the warped physics involved is peak Lupin. It's very much worth watching if you're a Lupin fan, or Lupin-adjacent, or even Lupin-curious. I'm kinda sad this is coming out now, because this would be the perfect vehicle for introducing Lupin to a wider Western audience if it got real backing to stick around in theaters. But c'est la vie. From that trailer, the dub sounds workable. The heroine sounds off though.
All that said. There are two types of Lupin III media. There's the Lupin that tries to be its own thing and takes risks with mixing up the formula/tone/characters/etc. And then there's the Lupin whose only goal is to ride the nostalgia coat tails of Castle of Cagliostro. This is firmly in the latter's camp. It's not lazy and cheap about it like a lot of Lupin media can be, and is a lot closer in quality to being a Plot of the Fuma Clan than one of the 90s TV movies. but if you've seen a lot of Lupin III and are a vet of the franchise, then you've already seen this film whether you've actually seen it or not. It takes zero risks and is completely predictable from beginning to end. It's Lupin comfort food, through and through.
It's still mighty fine comfort food though, and bleeds Miyazaki-Lupin. The OP:
And the mildly spoilery ED:
My favorite thing about this movie is that it's a period piece. We're getting so far removed from the show/comic's origins that it takes a lot of extra work to make Lupin III stories work in a modern setting, and I'm beginning to believe that by default it's best to just treat Lupin the way we generally treat Sherlock Holmes and leave him in his own time period. Letting Lupin be a master thief without having to be like a master programmer/hacker plays to the strengths of the character.
My least favorite thing about this movie is invariably my least favorite thing about most Lupin-things, where the emphasis on a guest-heroine sidelines Fujiko to an afterthought. Which seems like an inevitable part of being a Cagliostro-clone that I spoke to before. But Lupin III is at its best IMO when Fujiko is allowed to be a meaningful part of the story and her and Lupin get to do their thing where they do danger-flirting/foreplay.
I'm rewatching Jojo on Netflix and its so weird that the subbers can't keep character's names straight in the first couple seasons. Like, people bent over backward to give characters legally sound names like Santoviento and then just type "Santana" again. Mostly its a lot of little errors (and weird decisions on when to capitalize). But the weird part for me is Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency are censored but I'm in Stardust Crusaders and watched in detail a guy get his face sliced off with a razor. And I'm not sure but I think one of the previous episodes had some censored violence so it will be weird if this is inconsistent through this one series.
Also, rewatching Battle Tendency, I completely forgot how chummy the good guys are with Nazis. Like, they are the "frenemies" more or less but also Caesar says "Oh, yeah, I've been doing Hamon experiments for my government" and I totally missed that he was working for the fascists' before this rewatch. And I kind of remembered Von Strohiem as a Nazi ally but also a fuck up who always loses. But its not really how he comes across watching it again. Jojo keeps taking time to say "Man, that Nazi is really quite brave. What a man." Its a lot ookier than I remember in that regard,
A lot of names got changed in the loc because a lot of rock musicians are notoriously litigious about things that reference their brand (whether real or just potentially, see the Ion Maiden game that got renamed to Ion Fury because Iron Maiden is a bunch of losers).
A lot of names got changed in the loc because a lot of rock musicians are notoriously litigious about things that reference their brand (whether real or just potentially, see the Ion Maiden game that got renamed to Ion Fury because Iron Maiden is a bunch of losers).
I've been watching the Netflix Baki show, which was not a wise decision. It is the most Dad anime I've ever seen in my life, full of middle aged or older men doing the craziest shit imaginable, all written from an author that I cannot believe has ever seen two real humans fight each other. I've seen six episodes and Baki hasn't fought a single guy! It's just fights between Karate Dad's and a giant 19 year old gangster who survived a half dozen gunshots and his mouth exploding from chomping down on a handful of bullets.
Also, rewatching Battle Tendency, I completely forgot how chummy the good guys are with Nazis. Like, they are the "frenemies" more or less but also Caesar says "Oh, yeah, I've been doing Hamon experiments for my government" and I totally missed that he was working for the fascists' before this rewatch. And I kind of remembered Von Strohiem as a Nazi ally but also a fuck up who always loses. But its not really how he comes across watching it again. Jojo keeps taking time to say "Man, that Nazi is really quite brave. What a man." Its a lot ookier than I remember in that regard,
Yeah, this was something I noticed when reading the original manga. It's especially weird since it starts out with Stroheim being portrayed as an awful villain who executes civillians, but by the end he's an admired ally, and the ending includes the heroes being rescued by the arrival of friendly nazi soldiers. And then in the epilogue it's stated that Stroheim died fighting heroically in Russia.
