Allison & Lillia #01 — Fly High, Naruto
April 3rd, 2008
Man Will… I hope your testicles drop sometime soon.
Edit:
HA! The internal reference for this post is 747. Yes, I’m easily amused.
Impressions:
To be perfectly honest, this was a pretty disappointing first episode. Production values were pretty middling, and the character design felt a bit off. It felt like they were going for a throwback style to older 1980s or so anime… perhaps even Ghibli, but the character eyes and foreheads were so disproportionate from one to the next that is was disturbing. There were also some really wacky shots on occasion that brought out the art weirdness. Watch the noses in profile shots for example. Allison and Will’s noses are done in completely different styles entirely. I don’t mind one or the other, but they’re both humans, they shouldn’t be that different. There are numerous other small things like that that also annoyed me, mostly revolving around Allison’s morphing face. No other character was expressive like that, it was kind of disturbing to have just one character in a ‘realistic’ world be morphing into a marshmallow chibi at random.
It did do a really good job with the music. I’m not a big fan of the OP, but it was still a decent song. The vocals could use some work though. Will’s voice doesn’t match him at all. The Naruto crowd will recognize him instantly, but he still sounds about as feminine as his girlfriend, so… you know… it just feels wrong. Or at the very least, it sounds like one of them is committing statuatory rape by being with the other.
As for the content… very very very slow. Will starts teaching a class until Allison shows up, then lots of exposition, then they go on a bike ride and then have tea for most of the rest of the episode. Stuff sort of happens at the end, but it’s mostly speedlines and zooming scenary. On the other hand, the promo for next episode has a dogfight. While the art is very good, it still manages to be very visually boring for the most part. There’s just usually very very little movement in any of the shots, instead panning over scenes at every turn.
Depending on your stomach for slower shows, you may be able to enjoy it more than me, but at least as far as this first episode goes, I’m pretty underimpressed.
Allison & Lillia OP
Preview:
Pew pew! Dog fights and heterosexual bed funtimes!
Posted in Anime | 12 Comments »
“Preview text goes here”
I only notice that because you probably do the same thing as I do for these things and have a massive template saved in a word/notepad document somewhere~