Roving Thoughts archives

Two things on Psycho-Pass: The Movie

(There are some spoilers here.)

Here's two more or less unrelated natterings on the Psycho-Pass movie, untethered from any larger framework. In general the movie reruns a fair number of familiar themes from the first TV series, although this time it's somewhat more pointed about them; the question of whether Sybil is attractive to people is addressed directly, for example.

(Non-spoiler: the bargain Sybil offers people is pretty darn attractive when they're coming from a civil-war-torn environment. People will put up with a lot simply to get some of the benefits, because it beats the alternatives.)

One of the interesting questions the movie makes me ask is whether combat soldiers and former combat soldiers can ever have clean enough psycho-passes to live in a Sybil-controlled society. Based on things from both the TV series and the movie, my suspicion is that they can't, which leaves SEAUn with kind of a problem. How did Japan get away with it? The answer from the series seems to be that Japan mostly uses automated attack drones, and they probably forced their limited number of combat soldiers into roles as Enforcers.

(Now there are real spoilers, although things won't make sense unless you've seen the movie.)

The movie opens with some SEAUn terrorists showing up in Japan, equipped with the technology and knowledge necessary to get past the Sybil System (at least for a while); how the terrorists got the specialized gear and knowledge is never explained. Also, near the end of the movie, Mika shows up to snark at Akane about how Akane's expedition to SEAUn was basically pointless. It is my view that Mika is dead wrong here, as usual, and also that these two things are not unrelated.

The simple and obvious explanation is that Sybil engineered the whole terrorist situation as the trigger to get Akane to Shamballa Float, where it knew she would bring the corrupt system down more or less on the schedule that Sybil wanted. This is why Sybil went behind Akane's back in interrogating one terrorist; it needed to turn up the image of Kougami in order to push Akane into going to SEAUn. Mika's role in all of this was to be an ignorant tool for Sybil, which she is very good at.

('Smugly wrong and completely unaware of it' appears to be Mika's default state in life, or at least in the Bureau.)

This is probably pretty clear when watching the movie since Sybil is one of the very few parties with the necessary knowledge and gear, especially once you rule out Kougami. But I feel like writing it down for various reasons.

(As a side note, I suspect that Akane is smart enough to have worked this out for herself by the end of the movie.)

Checking in on the Winter 2016 anime season part way through

Once again it's time for a 'midway' (or much of the way through) update on my early impressions of the season. This one is kind of delayed, which is convenient because in the past week or so I've gotten more to talk about. Sadly it's in a bad way, as a couple of shows actively fumbled things and got me to drop them.

Great:

• ERASED aka Boku Dake ga Inai Machi: This has been somewhat erratic, with some unfortunate dips in the middle as the show returned to the modern age and dropped into cliched thriller territory, but it's back to the past and its strengths. This has led me to the straightforward realization that where the show's strength and power is in its depiction of Satoru in the past; in retrospect, even the first episode's modern era work was not all that compelling. I hope that we stay in the past from now onward to the end of the show.

• Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash: I did not expect this at all, but the show has turned into a great character piece; rather than being a fantasy adventure, it's become a drama. Our protagonists feel like fallible real people existing under fraught circumstances that put them under terrible pressure. It's not always pleasant to watch but it's often powerful, and while Grimgar has stumbled periodically its successes more than make up for that.

• Akagami no Shirayukihime: The show has recently done some things that I didn't like but it came through in the end and has now returned to form. I continue to enjoy it a lot in a low key but affecting way. The show doesn't do high-key, capital D drama, but it does excellent low key drama that works very well, where we simply see people having quiet conversations with each other that show real feelings.

Good:

• BBK/BRNK aka Bubuki Buranki: This has turned out to be better than I expected (there's a theme here). The plot remains relatively straightforward but the execution has been raising it up, and the show is doing some interesting things with its 3D CG (the characters are quite expressive, for example). We are probably not going to get anything deep in the end but it's solidly exciting and solidly well done in its genre.

Okay:

• Dimension W: In the end this just doesn't have the writing quality that it needs in order to really stand out. It's a decent implementation of its genre (and it's a genre we don't get too much of any more), so I'm enjoying it for that, but it's not much more than that and I've lowered my expectations as a result. I also believe that the show made a strategic mistake when it let coils basically cause anything. If the show did not have a collection of adults as its major characters, I might not still be watching it.

• Active Raid: The show is pretty erratic. At its lows it's kind of boring; at its highs it's genuinely affecting with things to say about its underlying themes of adult life, getting the job done, and so on. I continue to feel that the presence of Logos and their plotting mostly brings the show down, and that it would be better if the show fully committed to its Patlabor style 'slice of police life with Willwears' take on things.

It's hard to score AR against DW. AR's high points are much better than DW, but on the other hand I feel that DW is more consistent and doesn't feature anything quite as irritating and jarring as Logos. If I had to pick only one to still watch, I would probably stay with AR after debating about it a lot.

I'm still watching:

• Luck & Logic: The show is a perfectly competent execution of its fundamental genre, which is more or less 'LN teen action show' (yes, I know, it's not actually based on a LN). It doesn't have anything particularly spectacular there and it undershoots, say, Asterisk, but on the other hand it mostly doesn't fumble anything and the execution is competent. This leaves it as watchable but not particularly thrilling. To put it only somewhat unkindly, it passes the time while I have a cup of coffee.

• Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!: Some of the comedy works for me but often a lot of it doesn't really. The show has had only one episode that fully held my attention while I watched it, which is okay because it's generally split up into a bunch of little sections. Darkness is and continues to be the worst character; she does very little besides bring things down when the show bangs on its one-note jokes with her.

  On the other hand, sometimes the show is great. I'm not going to forget shell-shocked Aqua refusing to come out of her shark cage any time soon, for example. And the cabbages. And so on and so forth. The show can be funny and fun, sometimes very much so. I guess that's what keeps me watching.

Dropped:

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: The show recently took a plot turn that was already questionable but could have led to affecting drama and turned it into an action show plot about characters that I have little interest in. Also, it's apparently time for the show to start killing people off for drama. The show was always on the edge, kept watchable by charming derping around, but that charming derping is mostly gone and I find that I have no interest in following along for the rest of the ride.

  (When the only reason I can think of to watch more is 'but I'm so close to the end', I need to stuff my completist nature in a closet and drop the show.)

• Myriad Colors Phantom World aka Musaigen no Phantom World: This kind of fumbled along as a watchable and kind of entertaining show, and then episode 8 happened. Dropped.

  (Commentary I've seen on subsequent episodes suggests that I'm not missing anything. Even people who are fans seem down on it lately.)

• Koukaku no Pandora: As I put it on Twitter, this show has neither enough animation nor enough energy. The first episode turned out to be an anomaly in an otherwise relatively flat and plain show.

Not for me:

• Maho Girls Precure!: I gave this three episodes and while it's a perfectly good show with solid writing for its genre, there's basically nothing in it that hooks me and too much that quietly turns me off. The story beats are well crafted and perfectly competent, but you can also kind of see them coming from a mile off. This is (quite well) written for its target audience, and it shows. It's also a real magical girls show, complete with a basic enemy of the week, fight of the week, extended stock footage transformation scenes, and so on. It's charming, though; just not enough so to charm me.

  On a side note, I've periodically read praise of the whole Precure series as featuring good fights. All I can say to that is that in the first three episodes I was not particularly taken with the fights. This is probably not surprising, but it did come as kind of a letdown. Call it me coming into this with elevated expectations.

  (I may watch an episode or two more just because, but probably not.)

This is a pretty solid season for me. There's shows that are thrilling, shows that I actively look forwards to, and plenty of stuff to keep me entertained. I've been disappointed in a few shows, but that happens basically every season, and most of the letdown has been in shows that didn't start out strong in any case.

The best N anime that I saw in 2015

This is much like last year's best N, namely what I consider to be the best or most enjoyable things that I saw in calendar 2015 (regardless of when they were made or released). As is now standard, my general rule is that only shows that have actually ended count because you never know what eye-rolling things a show may finish up with. This specifically affects Concrete Revolutio, which would otherwise rate quite highly. Overall I feel that 2015 has been quite uneven; to put it one way, it has some superstars but its bench is not very deep.

(See also the winter, spring, summer, and fall retrospectives, and for that matter my year end APR vote.)

In order:

• Shirobako: This stands clearly above almost everything that finished in 2015. I've already written plenty in my winter retrospective and I really don't have more to add. I'm really glad both that we got a show like this and that it was about anime, because through it I both enjoyed and learned, and I think the passion of everyone involved in its creation shone through.

  (As odd as it sounds, I don't think we need a sequel although I sure wouldn't turn one down.)

• Sound! Euphonium: The only real competitor for Shirobako, this show is ultimately a tight observation of characters going through stresses and being themselves. It is grounded by KyoAni's grasp of small moments and small gestures and given flight by some excellent writing. I wrote more in my spring retrospective.

  (As a character drama where cruel things happen to some people, it will not be to everyone's tastes.)

• Gatchaman Crowds Insight: This took the easy answers that the original series gave us and turned them back on themselves to show us the flaws and weak points. This time around there was no clear evil, just good intentions going in various ways, and that made it all worse. Which was the show's point, really.

• Symphogear as a whole: I'll be honest; I'm cheating here. While I liked Symphogear GX, I'm not sure it was good enough on its own to rate this high in my list. As a collective whole (which is how I watched them), the three series do definitely qualify. I enjoyed them quite a lot, goofy cheese and all, and they were one of the best things I watched all year.

Things that I consider good but not necessarily memorable over the long term:

• Mushishi Zoku Shou - Suzu no Shizuku: This final bit of Mushishi was in many ways a classical story for the show, great but bittersweet, and it was executed with the show's typical excellence. There is no more to look forward to, but Mushishi went out on a high note. I meandered more on Twitter.

  (I rank this as 'not memorable over the long term' because in the large scale of things it is not the kind of Mushishi story that sticks in my mind. The really affecting stories involve something important about Ginko, and in this one he played his usual observer role.)

• Psycho-Pass: The Movie: This was an excellent distillation of the show at its best, simultaneously cynical and optimistic. Akane got to be awesome, Sybil got to be sleazy, and so on. Fortunately you don't need to know very much about the terrible second season in order to watch this. I suspect that some people feel that it has some plot holes by the end, although I disagree with them.

• One-Punch Man: This landed the comedy (for me) and the spectacular animated fights (although they sometimes lacked weight and impact). It mostly missed being any deeper than that, which is a pity because it did manage to have moments where it managed more. Still, what I watched was a fair amount of fun and wow, a lot of it was spectacular.

• Little Witch Academia The Enchanted Parade: Much like the original, this was straightforward fun. We don't get a lot of that, so I'm giving it recognition just as I did the original back in 2013.

Honorable mentions:

• Yurikuma Arashi: It was very Ikuhara. This matters, as does its various messages and sub-messages, but I cannot say that the show made its way into my heart. I am glad that it got made and got watched, so it earns a place here.

• Punchline: This had its goofy and less than successful parts, but on the whole I find myself looking back on it with increasing fondness. In retrospect it aimed fairly high and achieved a surprisingly large amount of what it aimed for, with some genuine twists and surprises. If you're not moved by the song from the end of the last episode (spoilers), you have a heart stonier than mine.

• Yozakura Quartet - Tsuki ni Naku: This little OVA delivered the whole Yozakura Quartet experience in a compact bundle of animation firepower. My overall fondness for Yozakura Quartet has only grown since Hana no Uta, so I'm giving this installment a place here for being plain solid fun.

• Garo - The Crimson Moon: As time has passed since the show ended, it's become easier to remember just the high parts (which could be very good) and gloss over the less successful parts. Call this a special merit award for aiming high, trying hard, and doing surprisingly well.

• Ghost in the Shell The New Movie: I would like to love this more than I do, but in the end I can't. We got more of all of the various things ARISE has been giving us through its run, it was reasonably spectacular, and it did end up giving us a reasonable amount of overall answers. But it did not cohere in the way it really needed to in order to have real impact.

• Rakuen Tsuihou - Expelled from Paradise: This is a perfectly solid action movie that wears its themes on its sleeve. It gains extra notability for having entirely 3D CG that I felt worked fairly well; consider it a glimpse of part of the future of anime.

• Strike the Blood: I watched this during one of my periods of boredom with currently airing shows. It was reasonably entertaining and decent for its genre, but it gets a special merit honorable mention for having that rarity in shows like this, namely a collection of strong and effective female characters.

  (StB is not as objectively good as some of the things that did not make even this section, but it was more enjoyable overall.)

Specifically excluded because they are continuing shows are Concrete Revolutio, Akagami no Shirayukihime, and Gakusen Toshi Asterisk. Evaluated only on what has aired so far, CR would be a top show (ahead of at least Symphogear), AnS a good show, and Asterisk at least an honorable mention (yes, really).

(I'm also not going to try to put forward opinions on the Animator Expo series of shorts. Some of them were very impressive, but they don't really fit on the same scale as actual shows; being so short, their merits and drawbacks are completely different. Anyways, I don't think they're watchable any more.)

Notable things that don't make my list for various reasons:

• Perfect Insider: This had some great aspects (ie, Moe), but in the end it's dragged down by how it ended and by how it took various annoying bits of character philosophy seriously. If I end the show rolling my eyes, it does not make the list.

• Blood Blockade Battlefront: On an episode to episode level this was well directed and often compelling. Where it fell down is on anything beyond that; it was essentially a series of stories from an ongoing manga, and so there was no overall story and nothing went anywhere. The attempt to add an overall original storyline unfortunately went down in flames in the end in a long-delayed last episode, ultimately for structural reasons.

• Maria the Virgin Witch: The show aimed high and was periodically great, but in the end I can't overlook its flaws (including its ending). For me, the root cause of the problems is that the show wanted to have its cake and eat it too; it wanted a setting where God was real without really thinking about the implications of this. The resulting rough edges rubbed me the wrong way all through the show. See also.

• Knights of Sidonia S2 - The Ninth Planet Crusade: I wish I could love this wholeheartedly, because the high points were just as good as the first season. Unfortunately as a whole it's dragged down by turning into an interminable harem show for the middle of the season. It started well, finished quite well, and was periodically good in the middle, but the harem hijinks just give the whole thing a sour taste that I can't get past.

I did get around to seeing Madoka: Rebellion this year but it does not otherwise make this entry for reasons covered here. The short version is that it in no way strikes me as an important thing to see either in terms of Madoka or simple overall quality.

My notes say that I finished 42 series, OVAs, and movies in 2015, which is way up from previous years. I have no idea how I managed it. I did watch a number of movies and short OVA series, which is a quick way to increase the count, but even with that I watched more than I thought. However, as you can tell from how short my lists here are, many of them were not that memorable, not that impressive, or simply not that good. I watched a lot of stuff out of inertia and because it was just good enough to keep me tuned in on a week to week basis.

Compared to last year, the highs from this year are amazing (I'm pretty convinced that Shirobako is a show for the ages), but there's not very much in the solid middle of the road. A number of things stumbled, some of them fairly badly. This was a very divided year.

(It's interesting how well this entry lines up with my year end APR votes (bearing in mind that APR is restricted to TV shows), even though I wrote them separately. Last year I flip-flopped, but not this time around. I have some theories about that, but they're for another entry.)

My views on Madoka: Rebellion

(There are some spoilers here.)

I finally got around to seeing the third Madoka movie last year. This is the controversial one, the one with an all-new story and various other things. You can read a lot of commentary about it around the net and I'm late to the party, but I feel like saying something.

On the one hand, what pretty much everyone says about the movie is true. It is basically fanfiction, which makes it essentially indulgent fanservice of the 'not naked people' kind; it's giving the fans the easy, comfortable thing that they (we) all wanted. All of the major characters have been changed around, smoothed over, neatened up, and turned into the popular fan views (and desires) of them. The movie even invents a relatively absurd partner for Mami. Everyone works together to fight things, we get some nice set-piece fights, and so on and so forth. The character fanservice continues even as the movie reveals more and more things and reaches its climax.

And yes, the movie has somewhat of an explanation for all of this. It doesn't really matter; a creator can always find some way to justify this sort of stuff if they want to.

On the other hand, the movie is also about the only genuinely interesting resolution to Homura's story arc that we could have had. I won't say that it redeems the movie, but it does make it interesting; a version that took the easy and obvious way out at the climax of the movie would be clearly worse. It's also a resolution that makes sense if you interpret Homura as fundamentally selfish and unable to let go, which is actually a running theme in the TV series from some angles.

(It is Homura's cycle of decisions, trying over and over again to save Madoka instead of letting her go, that wind up creating so much power in Walpurgisnacht. But for the ending of the TV series this would have been an utter disaster.)

But being intellectually interesting (in part for the fan reaction to its ending) does not make Madoka: Rebellion particularly important to see. The movie contributes essentially nothing to the TV series and is not good enough on its own to be particularly compelling. I mean, it's a movie, it looks pretty. But it doesn't have an edge and it's lazy and indulgent, with only a few scant moments of genuine emotional impact. It's more interesting as an artifact than as a movie to watch. Regardless of Rebellion's underlying motives, it's a movie that is only really for fans of Madoka (and it will enrage some of them).

(Part of this is that it's impossible to detach Rebellion from the rest of Madoka and consider it as a stand alone work. Its story is inextricably tied to the series and it can neither be watched nor considered in isolation.)

Some people consider this in part a meta-commentary on Madoka fandom (eg). I suspect that they are right, partly because I don't think the first part of the movie could have been written without an awareness of fan memes. However this doesn't make the film any more engaging to me; it remains an interesting intellectual exercise, not an affecting one. But then I hiss at End of Evangelion, so you can take my opinion with some salt if you want.

(See also Bobduh on, in part, Rebellion as fanservice.)

Brief early impressions of the Winter 2016 anime season so far

As before it's time for another set of my early impressions, this time supplementing my first episode takes after I've watched some more of these shows. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn't try out anything this season that was an outright miss; I'm not sure if this is because I'm getting better at avoiding loser shows or that I'm getting less willing to try things.

Clear winners:

• ERASED aka Boku Dake ga Inai Machi: This is basically doing everything right as a suspense show. It's interesting, compelling, well put together, and has been at points both genuinely unpleasant and genuinely beautiful. At times it's so successful as a show that it's hard to watch due to the tension and power.

• Dimension W: So far this is a well done adventure/action show featuring adult characters for once, instead of the usual collection of teens. That puts it firmly in the axis of shows like Cowboy Bebop and Darker Than Black, although it's so far not as good as either of them. The show is moving along at a very good pace; we got a big reveal about the situation in the second episode, for example.

• Akagami no Shirayukihime: This is back and so far pretty much the same as before, except that this time we seem to have an ongoing multi-episode plot. I'm fine with that, since it adds some additional interest and involvement to the whole thing.

I'm enjoying:

• BBK/BRNK aka Bubuki Buranki: I'm quite enjoying this for what it is, which is a (so far) uncomplicated shonen action story. It's well put together and moving right along, although it could yet slow down. Your tolerance for this will depend both on your interest in its fundamental genre (since it's not doing anything special there) and in your tolerance for CG characters. They don't bother me at all, but some people really hate them.

• Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash: This is a realism-inclined take on the whole 'people wind up in a fantasy world', where our protagonists are low level spuds who are not exactly having a good time. They are (not) enjoying it about as much as you'd expect, and the second episode was fairly blunt about this. The show is beautiful and well put together, with generally interesting characters, but it's not perfect; there was an jarringly unpleasant bit of extended 'fanservice' in the first episode, for example.

  So far I'm enjoying Grimgar on the whole but I'm concerned about where it's going to go. I am probably not going to enjoy an entire season of grinding brutality, for example, however realistic a depiction it is of people operating under those stresses and how they deal (or don't deal) with them. At the same time I don't see where else Grimgar can go with the setup so far; it would be equally jarring if it turned into something pleasant where the protagonists went on pretty high fantasy adventures.

• Active Raid: This is so far a generally enjoyable action show with some interesting things, but it's also periodically slid into some less enjoyable bits that I would preferred to live without, some of which show rather questionable judgement (like the fanservice at the start of the second episode). It's also got a bit more than its share of not so much cliched as troped characters. To the extent that the show has staked out where it's going, it's deeply silly; it features crazy supervillain hackers of questionable taste. But I'm willing to keep watching for now.

  (I called the show not as smart as it thinks it is, and I stand by that.)

It's okay for now:

• Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!: This is reasonably funny so far (which is rare for me), partly because it's willing to be subtle. I'm not sure if the show's premise can sustain enough humour and interest to keep me watching all season, though.

I'm still watching:

• Myriad Colors Phantom World aka Musaigen no Phantom World: Oh KyoAni, how you've come down in the world this time around. There are a few interesting things here but they are mostly drowned by the combined slather of your typical low-quality LN writing and KyoAni's inability to do good fight scenes (I wrote an entire rant about part of that).

• Koukaku no Pandora: This is written by Koshi Rikudo, the creator of Excel Saga, but unfortunately it lacks the latter's manic energy and thus much of its charm. It's okay and periodically funny, but it's not really 'good' as such.

  (The first episode actually did have that manic energy, but things slowed down after that.)

• Luck & Logic: It's yet another action shonen LN-based show and as a result it's going just as you expect and is just about as cliched as you'd expect, with periodic injections of stupid and annoying things. It has mostly not been actively bad so far, just bland. I think it managed to be funny once.

  (Watching this makes it clear just how much of a standout last season's Asterisk was.)

The only reason I'm still watching all three of these shows is that they're right there and I'm apparently kind of bored this season. If I was sensible I would drop them and use my time to watch better things from my copious backlog. In a stronger season they might all be misses on the grounds that they're too boring (as opposed to misses on the grounds that they're bad).

Not for me:

• Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu: Not my kind of show or setting and sadly its general excellence was unable to overcome that. Lots of people love this, for good reason.

• Dagashi Kashi: In practice, not sufficiently funny to overcome that it's a setting and setup that generally doesn't work for me.

Not considered for various reasons:

• Lupin III (2015): I bounced off the first episode after a few minutes and haven't tried it again, partly because I've heard that the actual content is not too compelling.

• Ajin: There was no way to watch this until very recently, and apparently it's a horror show anyways. Horror is not my thing.

• GATE second season: Apparently I can learn from experience, because I thought back to my generally unenthused reaction to the first season and decided not to continue it.

• Schwarzes Marken: Since this is part of the whole Muv-Luv Alternate setting, allow me to burst out in laughter. It's by all accounts terrible on top of that.

There's a bunch of LN-based action shows and romance shows and so on that I'm just skipping completely based on the premise and initial writeups alone. The ANN preview guide was very helpful, or to be more exact Nick Creamer's reviews specifically; he suffers so that we don't have to.

So far this is a reasonably solid season, although perhaps not a deep one; I can see situations where I wind up watching only four or five currently airing shows.

(Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen is still alternating between derping along and attempts at serious deep drama that it hasn't really earned; the latter come off as somewhat over the top and ridiculous.)

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Winter 2016 season

As before, I've decided to collect here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order I saw them).

• Myriad Colors Phantom World episode 1: Fanservice galore, which is a negative, and no KyoAni spark of life. But okay otherwise in an LN way. →.

• ERASED episode 1: I came in knowing something about the premise and with that, this was a great first episode. I want to see more. →

• Active Raid ep 1: A pretty good but also fairly stock start for this sort of thing. And wait, she's still a minor? That explains some bits. →

• Pandora ep 1: That was surprisingly fun and decent in a popcorn action way, although I could have lived without the big fanservice joke. →

• Dagashi Kashi episode 1: That was fairly good and I found it reasonably funny, but it's also clearly not my thing at all. So it goes. →

• BBK/BRNK episode 1: That was a pretty good version of an action shonen. Snappy, well done, good action sequences, doesn't waste time. Solid. →

• Luck & Logic episode 1: Perfectly competent and okay but bland, with nothing particular to distinguish it from the next action shonen show. ♯

• As I expected, Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu is not my kind of thing at all. I can see the appeal but in practice it leaves me totally cold. ♯

• Dimension W episode 1: That was plain good in a classical adult action show way. We have setup, characters, mysteries, everything done well. →

• Grimgar ep 1: Slow and I could have lived without the fanservice bit, but the setup et al is intriguing enough to earn it another episode. →

• Lupin III (2015): Well, that was an abject failure. The start of episode one irritates me too much to continue right now & probably at all. →

• KonoSuba ep 1: That was okay and periodically amusing, but the characters aren't really alive yet and it's kind of flat and limited so far. →

The one remaining new show is Ajin, but at this point I'm not at all sure if I'll be able to watch it any time soon. I've also become uncertain about its genre; if it's really a horror show about alienation from humanity and the horrible things that people do, I'm probably not interested in the first place.

Myriad Colors Phantom World illustrates bad fight staging for us

Let's start with my tweet:

I re-watched the big initial fight in Phantom World and no, KyoAni either (still) doesn't understand fight staging or doesn't care.

I feel sufficiently grump about Kyoto Animation failing once again on fight animation that I'm going to say more about this than fits on Twitter. What I mean by 'fight staging' here is blocking out the fight, ie establishing where all of the characters are in physical space and in relationship to each other, and thus how they move around over the course of the action. Good fight staging means that the fight actually makes physical sense and that you can follow who is where (and often that interesting things are happening).

We're going to look at a specific piece from the initial fight. Start by watching this clip from Phantom World (which was conveniently already on sakugabooru for me). Don't focus on the animation quality, ask yourself how you feel about it as just a piece in a fight (in fact, basically the climactic piece). Does it really work? Does something perhaps feel off? Because for me, even on first watching it felt somehow a little bit wrong or nonsensical.

Well, that would be because it is. Specifically, it has staging that doesn't actually work. Let's break down the flow of action and call out the staging inconsistencies, or at least the obvious ones:

1. Mai and the monster are fighting on the school sports field.
2. Mai sprints away from the monster and straight towards a clock tower (at the edge of the sports field) that has students watching from behind it, with the monster following her. How the shot is framed and how the people behind the clock tower immediately scatter implies that the monster is close behind her. We are certainly supposed to feel that, just from how it's presented.

3. Mai performs a gratuitous jump, dive, and complex pivot to come up standing right in front of the low front wall of the clock tower area. All of the cues in the shot say this, and say that she's stopped here because she can't move any further back (away from the monster).

   We don't see the monster during this bit of the clip, and there is clearly a bunch of empty space in front of Mai (between her and the monster). What happened to it following close behind her in #2?

4. The monster charges at her. However, the shot suddenly shows a vast distance between her and the monster and it takes the monster a significant time to charge up to her. This is again inconsistent with #2's close-behind monster.

   What's really happened is that the show has teleported the monster backwards so that it can do a big dramatic monster charge and have a 'Mai braces and readies herself' brief cut (and also have #3).

5. We switch to a view behind Mai. As the monster strikes at her, the camera pulls back. Say what? In #3, right behind Mai was the retaining wall; we have nowhere to pull back to.
6. Mai jumps up and significantly back to evade the monster's strike; after a flip in midair she lands right in front of our new, pulled back camera position. Say what again?

   Of course, what's really happened is that the show has teleported Mai (and the monster) forward from the clock tower area, because otherwise it would not be able to have the dramatic backwards jump evasion it wants here.

7. Mai jumps back again from the monster's strike, jumps back a third time from another strike, and finally we pull back through the pillars of the clock tower as the monster charges into it and gets tangled.

There are other staging inconsistencies in shot sequences just before and after this clip. For instance, immediately before the clip begins we had a shot sequence that established that the clock tower was more or less straight to Mai's right, yet in #2 she sprints straight back from the monster rather than having to cut to the side.

The individual actions of this fight are more or less okay and it has a certain amount of dramatic beats. What it does not have is consistent staging. As a result this is not actually a real fight; instead it's a clip show of dramatic moments. The whole fight has not been storyboarded by working out what happened and how it flows; instead the clear priority has been to have a sequence of dramatic shots happen, with some vague attempt to glue them together in a reasonably consistent manner. If two dramatic sequences are inconsistent with each other, either the show doesn't notice or it doesn't care.

In other words, the show prioritizes moment to moment dramatic cuts over a fight that is dramatic when taken as a whole. The result is subtly unsatisfying and weightless, as the inconsistency and the resulting unreality rob the overall scene of some of its impact. You may not consciously think of this as you watch the clip, but it's quite likely that a part of your mind is trying to keep track of stuff like where everyone is and as a result is raising warning flags that something feels off.

(Bad fight staging can happen in live action if you do not plan out your shot to shot continuity, but you at least have a higher chance of noticing it when you have actual people standing in places and moving around. Given how anime seems to be put together, I sometimes marvel that it ever has good fight staging. I assume that there are directors who are amazingly good at keeping track of the overall scene in their heads as they storyboard out each individual angle, sequence, and cut.)

Looking back at the Fall 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for my usual look back at the shows I watched this season in order to see how my early impressions and my midway views have held up. While I do these writeups partly to be honest about how things came out, I've also found them useful for looking back at what my past views were, to see what I thought about shows more or less at the time.

Fully enjoyable:

• Concrete Revolutio: In some ways this was not subtle and in others it was hard to follow (to get the most of it you had to keep track of what had happened when in the timeline, which GuyShalev's Concrete Revolutio episodes posts help with). But as the show went on, I became more and more taken with all of the various things it was doing and the story it was telling and, yes, the characters involved. The whole thing has wound up as a quite enjoyable show and I'm looking forward to the continuation in the spring.

  Concrete Revolutio has a relatively distinctive animation style and aesthetic, which I enjoyed but other people may not. I think that it fit the story it was telling and it was probably chosen for that reason.

• One-Punch Man: This is here not because it's a great show but because I consistently found it funny and enjoyable. I'm aware that finding OPM funny is a minority position (at least in the Twitter anime circles I follow), but then anime humour rarely works for me in the first place. In addition to being funny, OPM also had some decent storytelling in spots; it pulled off one reasonably dramatic storyline involving Mumen Rider and a few other nice dramatic moments. I did some OPM takes on Twitter.

  A lot of people love OPM for its fight animation, but I'm more ambivalent. A fair number of its fights were visually spectacular without being what I consider good fights, including the climactic fight in the last episode.

• Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: This remained a well constructed and well made show all the way through to the resolution of the first cour's plotline (it continues in the spring season). It's not exactly deep, since this is a LN action show, but it's well done with surprisingly good writing and a good couple. I'm really looking forward to the next season.

  (Apparently some people think that Asterisk is a harem show. I disagree with that; Ayato and Julis are a clear couple and almost no one else is particularly trying to horn in on that.)

Okay:

• Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: The great thing about the show was Moe and her interactions with everyone, especially Saikawa. The mystery was okay and the process of revealing it was interesting and often very tense, atmospheric, and quietly horrific. Where the show falls down badly is that it fails to challenge the absurd character positions and philosophy that get espoused throughout and especially at the ending. Since all of them are basically garbage, this lack of challenge makes much of the ending into an eye-rolling experience where I had no investment in any of the events and characters.

  (See also, which has some spoilers.)

  In short, when the show was good it was great, with Moe sparking off people, things about her history and Saikawa being revealed, and so on. But when it was not good it was pretty much a disappointing more or less stinker, and the ending was a serious letdown; the last episode was basically worthless apart from a few bits with Moe.

• K - Return of Kings: I have a great deal of affection for K as a result of the first season but this season tried my patience by being kind of slow. In the end it came through with some great final episodes, character bits, and a definite resolution (even if it was a bit hokey). I enjoyed the whole thing but mostly not anywhere near as much as the first season. In my view, Fushimi really stole the season from everyone else by being clearly the best and most interesting character.

  The conclusion to this season basically rules out any further K, and I find that I'm perfectly okay with that. K has had its run and told its stories, and I'm content to stop there (although I might be a bit sad if this season had been stronger; this season and the movie make it look like the first season was pretty much a fluke where everything clicked just right).

I finished it:

• Owarimonogatari: As I put it on Twitter, people who are into Monogatari probably loved the resolution to the Shinobu Mail storyline. I liked some aspects of it and some moments in it, but on the whole I wasn't really set on fire by anything in this season the way I loved, say, Hanamonogatari.

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: The show has spent almost all of this season derping around. Its only saving grace is that it manages to be very, very charming during this derping around, charming enough that I've kept watching when I would have dropped any other show that pulled this stuff off.

  (Every so often the show made legitimate dramatic points, but they were undercut by the derping.)

Dropped:

• Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: For various reasons I wound up dropping this shortly after I wrote up my midway views. Ultimately I just didn't really care about the characters and their struggles and I felt the show was going in directions I generally dislike.

I fully enjoyed three shows this season and was reasonably fond of everything else I watched, even if Perfect Insider wound up letting me down after a very strong start (and really, it was pretty strong for most of its run; only the ending was a real nose dive).

Checking in on the Fall 2015 anime season part way through

Once again it's time for one of these now-traditional midway updates on my early impressions of the season. While there have been some surprises so far, things have broadly turned out the way that I expected.

Great:

• One-Punch Man: I didn't expect this to become basically my favorite show of the season, but it has. The humour has been working for me (partly because the show is willing to be understated and just let the funny bits sit there without comment) and I like the overall developments. It even recently managed an episode that was mostly drama and that still worked for me. The presence of Genos is very important for making everything work; Saitama is mostly a force of nature, but Genos is someone we can connect to.

• Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: I go hot and cool on this show as it oscillates around, but I can't deny that at its best it is really good. It has a great grasp of understated atmosphere and how to be horrifying, even if sometimes it spends time ambling around in ways that make me kind of roll my eyes. It understands that it's just as important to explore the characters we're interested in as to explore the mystery, and both Moe and Saikawa are great for this (Moe more so than Saikawa).

• Concrete Revolutio: This isn't as spectacularly great as Perfect Insider sometimes is but I think it has more consistency and it's doing a bunch of increasingly interesting things. Its stories can lack subtlety in both themes and execution, but it still winds up making them be interesting and periodically (visually) spectacular. And I quite like what its doing with its structure as it circles around both a central revelation that we know is coming and a whole series of reveals about the characters and the history of the show.

  This is a show that you absolutely have to pay attention to in order to get everything. @GuyShalev maintains a very handy accumulated timeline in his Concrete Revolutio episode posts on his blog.

Okay:

• Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: This is not a great show, as you'd expect, but it's been a consistently enjoyable watch for me. The show is simply well constructed and well made, and the characters are nicely drawn and interesting. It's also mostly been free of what I'll call 'LN anime bullshit'; I barely roll my eyes when watching.

  This is one of the two shows I watch the fastest once it becomes available (the other one being One-Punch Man).

• K - Return of Kings: I like these characters and this setting, but gosh the story is moving slowly. One of the things that made the first series work is that there was always something relatively crazy happening (whether it was action, happenings, or revelations about what was going on); this series has mostly lacked that.

• Owarimonogatari: I'm too invested in the Monogatari series to stop watching, but I still don't feel any real investment in the characters here because they feel less like people and more like cardboard cutouts spouting dialog. That could change (Monogatari has been able to get me to care) or the show could become visually interesting to watch, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hanging on on the edge:

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: Kuon and Haku are great characters but the show itself has mostly been going in circles recently as it dragged in more and more other characters. This might be okay if the new people were interesting too, but mostly they aren't and they don't really contribute much to the interesting core characters that we do have.

• Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: Apart from the issue of looming doom, the problem here is that nothing here has really made me get emotionally invested. The characters and story arcs are certainly interesting, but so far they haven't got me on a gut level. It's nice seeing everyone maneuver around and have problems and grow and so on, but it doesn't leave me with any sort of burning desire to see the next episode. I almost dropped the show before episode 7 (after a twitter ramble), but reconsidered. I suspect I'm simply not up for two cours of this and will drop it at some point, although I don't know exactly when.

  (As I found out with Space Dandy, mere animation firepower and so on is not enough to keep me watching if I don't actually care.)

Dropped:

• Heavy Object: To be impolite, the bullshit involved with this show got to me, including the character dialog. I decided that the uninspiring conclusion of the uninspiring second arc was a good place to stop watching, because it was never going to offer me anything more interesting than what I'd already seen.

My top three shows this season are great and Asterisk is enjoyable popcorn, so I'm happy overall with this season; from my perspective, it's quite a good season. Certainly I haven't been tempted to pick up or watch anything else to fill in the time, and in fact I have pending stuff that I'd like to get to but I haven't found the time for.

Looming doom generally hurts my enjoyment of a show

Here's something that I've not so much discovered as realized recently: I generally don't really enjoy a show where there's doom looming over the characters. This was a factor in my initial reaction to Symphogear and it's come up again this season in Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans.

It's not that I'm opposed to character death (although certain forms of it turn me off) or that I require happy endings from my shows. I think it's perfectly okay to kill characters, even in casual ways, provided that it fits the show and the mood. What's different about a show with doom looming over things is exactly that there is doom looming over things. If I know some of the characters are going to die, I can't watch the show without wondering who it is and when it's going to happen. Is it going to be this episode, this next scene? When is the knife going to be jammed in and twisted? One of the common effects of this for me is to devalue much of the work the show is doing to develop characters. Actually caring about doomed characters feels somewhere between wasted effort and falling for the show's emotional manipulation, which irritates me. And when I don't know who's doomed when, well, pretty much all of the characters get affected.

So on the whole, a show with looming doom winds up being kind of a strain to watch. There is a constant tension and worry in the background that I don't like; it's simply wearying.

Despite this I think that shows can have looming doom and still work. While I don't have fully formed thoughts on how yet, my incomplete thoughts are that an important ingredient is for the show itself to acknowledge the looming doom by having it affect the shape of the story and the characters. In this I contrast Sidonia and Iron-Blooded Orphans. IBO is has relatively consistently ignored the doom looming over the cast, with essentially no sign of it in the story, while Sidonia embraced it in the atmosphere of the show and even the character reactions from relatively early. As a result this aspect of Sidonia worked for me and did not get me down, whereas watching IBO remains partly wearying and tense in an unpleasant way.

(An interesting question is whether I'd be enjoying IBO if I didn't know the outside-the-show information that Mari Okada (the show's writer) both quite likes melodrama and has said that there's going to be suffering in the show.)