Katanagatari #01 — Brought to You By Flash
January 25th, 2010
Oh boy, 44 minutes of talking heads! My favorite thing ever!
Impressions:
Outside of the art style, which is its own little rant, this episode has absolutely nothing interesting going on visually at all. The first 30 minutes are just one long parade of talking heads. At that point, I had all but checked out. The second half is a little bit better, but still 98% talking heads to 2% action. If you strung together all the action over the 45 minutes of the episode, it might crack 30 seconds, but I’m not going to place money on that. There was more excitement in the OP than the rest of the episode combined. About 40% of the rest of the episode is close-ups of giant poorly drawn faces. Speaking of that, I’ve said I don’t like this kind of art style before, and it still holds. The backgrounds are lush, the characters are flat, ugly blobs. It looked bad when the PSX used its ugly sprites against pre-rendered backgrounds and it looks bad now. They’re definitely going for an older Japanese brush style, but they’re still spending the majority of their efforts on making pretty static backgrounds instead of characters that actually feel alive.
Don’t get me wrong, the music is pretty stunning and easily the best part of the episode. The problem is that everything else is presented in possibly the most dull way possible. Even the action suffers from them breaking it up by throwing up the attack names in the middle of attacks… and in the big finale, doing it about 5 times in a row before then showing the exact same attack from a different angle. I’m not sure if White Fox is just hoping that Nisiwhatsit’s name will make this another instant blockbuster or what, but it’s really disappointing to see that despite taking a month on every episode, the only thing really notable about this is the soundtrack.
So, in the end, I’ve got a lot of the same things to say about this as I do about Nisiblahblah’s last adapted show, but while Bakemonogatari’s visual direction was often incomprehensible, this time around, it just feels nonexistent. At least Yasuri is slightly more standable than Arararararararwhoever, but he’s not going to win any awards for his personality either. He’s up there with Layfon for his ability to show any kind of emotion. I’m more inclined to listen to this as an audio book in my car than watch it. At least I wouldn’t be missing much either.
Preview:
The villains get weirder.
Posted in Anime | 10 Comments »
This is the kind of anime where the graphics are good, yet the plot isn’t.