2015-05-03
Brief 'early' impressions of the Spring 2015 anime season so far
It's time for my usual early impressions post for this season (as before). Every season I seem to be optimistic (I called last season 'strong' in my early impressions post, for example), but this time I think I might really be right. Which would be nice, because I'm enjoying everything I'm still watching (okay, almost everything).
Clear winners:
- Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: This is more of the
same thing as we got a year ago and it's just as good as before (cf). Things from
the manga are definitely getting chopped up and shuffled around, which
is great to see; anime is not manga. Sidonia continues to nail real
tension.
- Sound! Euphonium (aka Hibike! Euphonium): I didn't expect to
enjoy this and in fact only picked it up late after it got
a lot of praise. Now it's neck and neck with Sidonia
in my regard this season. I called it well observed
and I'll stand by that. KyoAni is really on their game
here, including showing us things in piles of little
moments and gestures (see also my APR comment here).
- Blood Blockade Battlefront aka Kekkai Sensen: This is pretty
great for a big action show. Everyone is fun to watch, the whole show
is fun to watch (it's directed by the director of Kyousougiga), and it's just plain enjoyable.
- Punchline: This is a polarizing show but I'm enjoying it, partly
because of its continual mania and wild ride. The
fanservice is becoming more and more perfunctory every week, the
jokes are still funny, and I'm interested in what's going on. It's
not particularly deep but I am finding it to be quite good simple
entertainment.
- Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: This is what it is. If I was smart I would drop it, but it's just pretty enough and I'm just invested enough in the characters to follow it through to the bitter end. It doesn't help that I know too much about what's going on, in part from having seen the movie version of UBW.
Cannot rate:
- Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: My overall reaction to Arise is somewhere between liking it and loving it depending on the OVA episode, so the problem with this is that so far none of it is actually new. I'm seeing some of it for the third time and some for the second, and that inevitably robs it of excitement (and it's not so good that it's massively thrilling to rewatch it so soon). It is more than interesting enough to get me to rewatch it, but it's not something I'm on the edge of my seat to see the next episode.
Misses:
- Show By Rock!!: It's okay but it's not anything particularly special,
and I feel that I'm watching enough really good stuff this season that
I don't need padding.
- Arslan Senki aka The Heroic Legend of Arslan: After three episodes
this was slow moving, bland, and relatively generic fantasy. There's
nothing wrong with this as such, but I've already read a lot of
relatively generic fantasy novels (much of them better written than
Arslan). It doesn't help that the Arslan books still aren't
finished yet, so the odds of this show having an actual conclusion
are basically nil.
- Gunslinger Stratos: This is your typical light novel anime and as
such I decided I had better things to do with my time.
- Etotama: This show is neither as funny nor as interesting as it thinks it is. The fourth wall humour didn't help; a show has to be much better than Etotama is in order for that to come off as funny instead of desperate and sad. (From twitter.)
Special down in flames award:
- Plastic Memories: The first episode was impressive, barring
one little bit. The second episode was less so and then
the third episode went down in flames. Evirus called it 'hot garbage' and I'm not
going to disagree, although officially I have no opinion since I
didn't even finish the episode.
Since the show has flushed all of my goodwill down the drain, I am completely uninterested in what it does next even if that turns out to be great (which seems unlikely, to be honest). Episode 3 forever stains Plastic Memories beyond recovery for me.
Nothing else this season has seemed attractive enough to be worth checking out (at least among non-sequel series), and frankly I'm satisfied with my top five (I count Arise AA as one of them). All of them are at least solidly enjoyable shows, with some being excellent ones. It's nice not to be following a massive lot of shows this season, even if it leaves me permuting my top five for APR votes.
On a side note, Knights of Sidonia has clearly the best OP of the season based on my standard metric.
2015-04-13
Looking back at the Winter 2015 anime season
Once again it's time for me to look back at the recently finished season to see how the shows I watched wound up, following on my early impressions and my midway views. The short version is that not much changed from my midway views, and especially nothing that was new this season pulled itself up.
Excellent:
- Shirobako: What a show and what a finish. The second last episode
was amazing all the way through (especially at the end) and then the
last episode brought us home with everything I could have asked for. I laughed
helplessly one last time; I got sentimental with everyone. It was great.
The whole show is many things, including a love letter to anime itself
and an honest but ultimately cheerful
look at work and adult life. How much do I love the show? Let me put
it this way: it's guaranteed a spot on my 'best N in 2015' list and
it may well take #1 (and if it doesn't, this will have been another
very good year).
See also: Author, NovaJinx, Bobduh's ending summary, The Cart Driver.
(At this point I'm going to plug the Shirobako glossary at A&V if you're interested in the mechanics of animation production.)
Divided opinions:
- Yurikuma Arashi: This was interesting to watch right through
the end but I never fully connected with it and with the
characters. I feel as if I'm not qualified to really render a verdict
on the show, but to the extent that I am I'd say that the symbolism
and message overwhelmed the human story theoretically being told.
Scamp's description of watching it in pleasant bemusement
is basically my experience. It was pretty Ikuhara.
(Part of it is that the entire setting never felt real; instead it felt overwhelmed by the needs of the symbolism involved.)
Good but falls a bit short:
- Garo - The Animation: Sometimes the show was amazing but all too
often it wasn't (sadly including the final episode). I'm
not sure how I feel about the whole mixture in the end; part of me
wants to call it ordinary but then I remember how excellently it did
some bits and I think it deserves bonus credit for that.
- Log Horizon S2 finished off relatively well, with a good final episode that set us up for more if the novels get far enough along and there's still funding for more. The ride this season was ultimately fun but somewhat bumpy, and for me wasn't quite up to the standard set by the first season (partly because the first season packed in so much big stuff about the setting and so on).
Okay:
- Aldnoah.Zero: I expected laughable craziness and spectacle and
that's exactly what I got. The show knew how to throw a fun time
all the way through right to the end, despite all of the stupidity
involved in what was actually happening. AZ is a show where you'll
get enraged if you actually think about what's going on, so it's best
not to. On the whole this makes it not a particular good show, but
it was entertaining for me to watch.
- Durarara!! X2: There was some nice stuff every so often but once the
dust settled not very much in it felt terribly necessary and too many
of the interesting new characters got sidelined almost immediately.
If the whole thing really is going somewhere, it's moving too slowly
and feels padded.
(To be blunt, it feels like the show is spinning out a smash hit in order to milk it for all its worth.)
- Dog Days'' aka S3: I got what I expected and wanted from this,
which was actual action and a reasonable running plotline. There
was nothing particularly deep, but I wasn't expecting that; this
was comfortable, reasonably charming watching.
- The Rolling Girls: This kind of collapsed at the end, promising
more than it could deliver. It was enjoyable but far more for the
periodic spectacle than the main cast (and some bits were kind of
painful in retrospect). At its peak it was very anime in a good way
and that gets me to feel reasonably fondly about the whole thing.
- Maria the Virgin Witch: Sometimes the show was sharp and great,
but in the end it was just as I was afraid of in my midway
views; the show couldn't come through with good answers for
its big issues. Maria really dropped the ball in its ending and so
undid basically all of its work in raising interesting questions and
challenging things and so on.
- Yatterman Night: In the end the show took the easy way out and never recovered the sharp-edged bleakness that made it unusually interesting early on. It didn't help that it suffered a drastic production failure on the last episode, although even without that I'm not sure the ending really makes sense.
As you can see, I didn't wind up thinking all that highly of the shows that started in this season. Aldnoah.Zero was entertaining but not good, and most everything else wound up being relatively ordinary (at best). Yurikuma Arashi is just, well, Ikuhara.
PS: While Death Parade did not quite turn out to be what I was afraid of in my early impressions, it's still not something that I would have enjoyed watching (based on other people's summaries et al). Still, quite a number of people loved it quite a lot and I've seen some amazing clips from it. Call it probably the best show from the winter season that I didn't watch.