Dance in the Vampire Bund #01 — Come On Down!
January 6th, 2010
You’re the next contestant of "Who Wants to Be A Vampire?"
First Episode Disclaimer:
LO SHALL YOU LOOK UPON MY OPINION AND DESPAIR, FOR IT IS THE ONE TRUE OPINION IN THE LANDS.
Fifth episode of the day. Don’t ya love premiere weeks?
Impressions:
Well… this went off in an unexpected direction. The entire first episode was an ‘episode’ of a Japanese gameshow debating about whether vampires exist. Considering the premise… and TITLE, that made the whole episode feel juuuuust a tad trivial and insignificant for the first 17 minutes of the show. It picked up a lot when one of the ‘contestants’ went all lizardpire, ate a girl, and then wrecked the place, but that should have come two or three minutes in… not 75% through the episode. Things were made even worse by them ‘cutting off’ the broadcast of the episode when interesting things finally got under way. This leads into kind of a weird juxtaposition. I rather enjoyed the last five minutes of the show, and was bored to tears by the other 17. The first chunk went nowhere, did it slowly, and was poorly made, while the latter chunk was action packed, done in a wholly different style, and was actually entertaining.
Shinbo actually seems like he’s laying low for this one, which is a blessing in my book. He’s still doing his usual minor tricks, like shaking the camera and blurring the focus for added DRAMA, but at least he’s not throwing up random images or photographs because their artists got tired of working. Unfortunately, the show is also to Shaft’s relatively recent low production until closer to the end. The art’s mostly pretty good, but there are a lot of really ugly still shots, especially of the show’s crowd. There was also pretty much no motion whatsoever for the initial chunk, so it’s not like there was a ton to animate to begin with for the lion’s share of the episode.
I think it’s got potential, but the whole gameshow thing was a pretty poor way to start the show. If Shaft sticks to the latter segment, then I think this will turn out well, but I’m not sure how it’ll end up if you average the quality of the two disparate parts. Since it airs some 8 hours away from every other show, I’ll probably give it another week or two to see how it’ll develop, but I really don’t feel like I’ve got a particularly strong opinion on this one yet. Fifteen minutes in and I was ready to write it off, but the last five minutes were enough to make me want to give it another look. Take that as you see fit.
No OP this week, ED was just a single boring still.
Posted in Anime | 25 Comments »
remembering Umineko….