天下制覇

Man, remember when Shaft put effort into their shows?

Impressions:

If you remove the OP, the ED, the minute of story time at the start, the minute of letting the VAs draw Itoshiki, and the mailbag segment at the end of this episode consisting of about 6 frames, this episode comes to a grand total of 17 minutes. Oh, and they reused a little bit from last week too in order to lead into the second part of the golf segment. So let’s just call it 16.5 minutes worth of animation that couldn’t have been done by a single intern in an afternoon.

What the bloody hell, Shaft?

I like my animated picture shows to have animated pictures. It’s one thing to be consistently mediocere or poor, it’s another altogether to just completely stop trying for 25% of the episode.

That revelation has a way of instantly souring my mood, which is kind of sad because the first part was passable and I mostly enjoyed the second. Part 1 was various chicken or egg questions, typically defaulting back to prehistoric cavemen being given one of the objects and then trying to figure out what to do with it. There were other humorous things brought up too, like which was first, sadists or masochists. It ended pretty weakly though, asking which of despair or hope came first and then stringing it out to all hell.

The second part was a little more down to earth, and about sudden complications that muck up everything, such as forgetting your money when you go shopping and then bringing the entire queue to a horrible stop, or your rail card not reading and creating a human pileup behind you. It reminded me a lot of those terrible Visa check card advertisements, only without the added benefit of getting to hear the Bugs Bunny factory theme. A lot of focus on the people involved in such as well, be they observers or with darker motives.

Part 3 was just more of the golf metaphor, which ends up being significantly less amusing a week after the joke has been introduced. At least Komori destroyed the school. If you’re wondering what happened to the remaining time, after drawing Itoshiki, we got to read fanmail. Not do anything interesting with it, just go through it. Happy Seven did a better job with its fanmail sequences. Hell, Galaxy Angel’s "We had an extra 45 seconds to fill, so we’re going to answer some mail. Or discuss the secret of the corned beef can. You see, it’s actually about… oh, we’re out of time," segments were more amusing than this, not to mention 50 seconds shorter, although I’m pretty sure that’s directly related.

Oh yeah, and there was what appeared to be a production error in the "draw Itoshiki" part where it flipped to another picture for about five frames at the very end. *Sigh.*

ED #2