Roving Thoughts archives

The impact of good directing illustrated

It's not often that you get a master class in the importance of directing, and in about three minutes flat. But now we have one, courtesy of a competition between Studio Khara and game developer CyberConnect2. As ANN explains (via), both studios made shorts based on the same character designs (and maybe 3D models, it's not clear), basic situation, and maybe even scenario outline, and the contrast between them is really illuminating.

Let's start with CyberConnect2's version, which you can conveniently see on YouTube. My reaction is pretty much 'well, okay'. That's a perfectly decent exhibition short, with everything you'd expect here; there's some action, some graphics, and so on. But it's kind of unimaginative and pedestrian, and at least for me there were some confusing moments where I wasn't quite sure what was going on.

Now watch Studio Khara's version, again on YouTube.

Well, wow.

We have verve. We have dynamic situations, visuals, and action sequences, with clear back and forth moments, reversals of fortune, and even the injection of some character. What's going on is always clear and grounded (and it's set in a distinct physical place to help with that). I think Khara's short goes through exactly the same beats as CC2's short does (attacked, at a disadvantage, attempt to use ranged combat, near defeat, reversal of fortune, ultimate victory), but they are presented so much better. They're interesting. They're exciting.

There's little or nothing in the Khara short that couldn't have been in the CC2 short. The difference is not CG versus hand drawn (and it's not clear to me how much of Khara's is genuinely hand drawn; some sequences looked like they at least had a lot of CG assist). Almost all of the difference comes down to Khara doing a better job of designing and realizing what happens in the scenario, in other words to directing and storyboards.

(When we talk about the quality of directing in anime, it's usually hard to find such a direct comparison. If you're looking at two scenes in real shows, there's so many variables involved; the differences between the scenes, the shows (maybe), the subjects, their budgets, and even how people feel about the two different shows. This situation is free of almost all of those variables.)

(This elaborates on some tweets of mine.)

An example of telephoto perspective in anime, courtesy of Shirobako

Back in The perspectives of the anicamera I said that I didn't think I'd ever seen telephoto perspective used in anime. It turns out that I'm wrong about that, as a recent shot in Shirobako showed me. Let's start with the actual shot itself:

(full-sized)

What we're seeing here is a classic telephoto perspective, where everything is stacked up on top of each other and there's very little distinction between close objects and further away ones. Notice, for instance, how little the size of the traffic lights changes at each step backwards into the scene, yet we're given the cue that they're not all at the same distance from us because they partially occlude each other. Even the features of the buildings in the background are relatively large and so look relatively close to us. This use of a stacked, dense perspective is deliberate and conscious on the part of the show. Nothing that the scene needs to show forces this view; in fact this shot is present almost entirely for its emotional effect (the only thing that matters for the flow of the scene is that we know the lights are red, to show why Miyamori stopped for a bit).

I suspect that this shot will feel familiar to you even if you haven't watched Shirobako. I'm pretty sure that this kind of compressed view into an urban distance cluttered with signs and wires and other parts of the city is actually not an uncommon shot and may even be common enough to be cliched. Certainly now that I've seen it here I'm sure I've also seen it before, undoubtedly going back a long way. It just didn't come to mind when I wrote the initial entry, partly because this effect is somewhat more subtle than a clearly exaggerated ultra wide angle view.

(I'm pretty sure that Neon Genesis Evangelion has similar shots and I'm sure that NGE didn't originate it. In a way it's such an obvious way of doing things if you want this effect on viewers.)

Checking in on the Fall 2014 anime season sort of midway through

This is not exactly 'midway', but let's let that go; it's more than time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season. I'm actually glad I waited this much because the latest episode of one particular show has caused a drastic change in my attitudes to it.

Excellent:

• Mushishi second season: In contrast to the first half of this back in the spring, we're back to powerful stories that fully engage me. Since Ginko has still been a relatively oracular presence in a number of them, I think that part of it is that the stories have moved away from being horror stories and have become more about humanism and people being very human.

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: This has flowered into a full-throated, no holds barred adventure show. The characters have settled down a little bit (in particular Amira has quieted down, which makes me a bit sad) but they've kept developing in interesting ways, while the story beats and the directing continue to more than hit the mark. This show has verve and swashbuckling (and no pretensions of being deep literature).

• Shirobako: After throwing jargon-laden situations at us in the first few episodes, the show has slowed down and found conflicts and problems that are intricately tied to the anime business but that don't require deep technical understanding to really get. In the process it's given us powerful episodes that are painfully real and without easy answers.

Things I'm still watching:

• Garo - The Animation: I want to love this as much as Bahamut but with rare exceptions it simply doesn't have the verve of the former show and the potential depths and sophistication it hinted at in the beginning have yet to emerge. It doesn't help that it had a run of decidedly conventional episodes before deciding to finally do some interesting and powerful things.

  (It doesn't help that it's too fond of setting its action scenes in very dim surroundings where, well, you can barely make out the action.)

• Hitsugi no Chaika - Avenging Battle: This remains Chaika. There isn't much more I can say except that we're finally getting both answers and character development, which is really what you'd hope for at this point in the show.

  (Sadly it is doing a few irritatingly cliched things. Really, a straight amnesia plot? Hasn't that been done to death by now?)

• Log Horizon second season: This has continued onwards in the steady Log Horizon manner, putting one brick on top of the other and building up over time to nicely done climaxes. The show has also done a very good job of elaborating the world this season and doing interesting things with it that simply feel right.

• Fate/Stay Night - Unlimited Blade Works: On the good side it has a budget and some nice fight scenes and Rin and Archer. On the negative side, it's Fate/Stay Night, Shirou and Saber and all. There isn't really anything more I can say than that. Well, there is one more good thing; I'm pretty certain that the writers and the show are fully aware that Shirou is kind of a prat. They certainly do kick him a fair bit and I don't think it's particularly designed to make us sympathize with him.

Flamed out spectacularly:

• Psycho-Pass 2: The show was limping along with both potentially interesting things and eye-raising what the heck moments (including a bunch of bad directing), which made it okay but not as nice as the first season. Then episode 8 happened, with terrible writing and directing and much worse. This episode was simply bad on all fronts and I don't expect it to get any better.

  (See also eg The Cart Driver's overall reaction to the show these days.)

Probably dropped:

• Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu: It's funny but apparently not funny enough because I don't feel any real interest in watching the latest episode. I'm probably going to listen to my gut and not force things.

Dropped:

• Madan no Ou to Vanadis: I lost interest for various reasons. I will say that depicting battles through markers for the various units moving around on a map is less 'showing' and more 'telling', even if you pause periodically to show us bits of actual fights.

• Seven Deadly Sins: This wound up with too little fighting for me. The 'that's enough' moment was when one episode ended on a fight cliffhanger and the next episode ended the fight in about thirty seconds flat.

• Amagi Brilliant Park: I didn't wind up watching any more after my early impressions and nothing I've heard about it since has pushed me to change that.

Apart from the unpleasant surprise of Psycho-Pass 2 and the surprising excellence of Shirobako, this is pretty much what I expected to happen. I'm maybe a bit disappointed in Chaika and Log Horizon, although that may be because of overly rose-tinted memories of their first seasons. Three excellent shows, three good ones, and a decent one is actually pretty good for a season, especially after summer.

Brief sort of early impressions of the Fall 2014 anime season

It's time for another early impressions post, as before. I have to admit that these early impressions are actually rather late in the 'early' stage of things, for no particularly good reason (although Mushishi did only start airing last week). My overall view is that this is a really strong season with a major good surprise and I'm very happy with how things have come out. Any season where I worry that I'm watching too many shows to be sustainable is a good season.

Clear winners:

• Mushishi second season continued: There really isn't anything to say about Mushishi that I haven't already said, but the first two episodes of this resumption have been especially strong.

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: This is the surprise hit of the season for me and it came basically out of nowhere. The show is simply excellently done, with lovely directing, good animation, interesting characters, and an interesting series of change-up storylines.

  (This is the bit where I wave my hands because it's really hard to describe why Bahamut impresses me as much as it does. It has so many little touches.)

• Psycho-Pass 2: Before this continuation started I really wondered if the show would have anything more interesting to say after the first season, but after a weak first episode the show's picked itself up and staked out some interesting themes (well, as far as I'm guessing).

Things I'm enthused by:

• Hitsugi no Chaika - Avenging Battle: It's more Chaika and there's really nothing more to say than my description of its virtues at the end of the first half. I'm probably enjoying this more than Psycho-Pass 2, but it's more lightweight.

• Fate/Stay-Night - Unlimited Blade Works: The Fate-verse may be dead people all the way down but damn, this production has money and talent and it mostly shows (sometimes they fail). I'd much rather the show followed Rin and Archer rather than Shirou and Saber (cf), but the production (and the core story) is at least making the latter two tolerable right now, even if I sometimes feel like I'm watching in spite of myself.

  One of the interesting things about watching this iteration of F/SN is that I already know so many spoilers for it (including from the earlier UBW movie). On the one hand this drains a bunch of tension; on the other hand this means I can spot little details that might otherwise have passed me by and understand what they're signalling.

• Garo - The Animation: This is very nicely done and from the same studio as Bahamut, but it misses being an out of the park hit because it feels much more conventional than Bahamut. But it has set up a quite complex background and set of story lines, so I think it has potential to be quite powerful and really good. It's still good right now, it's just not great the way that Bahamut is.

  Garo has by far the best OP of the season of what I've seen. There isn't any contest.

  (See also 1, 2. I may be down on Garo right now because the third and fourth episodes were kind of conventional.)

• Log Horizon second season: The show feels slower and less exciting than before, but it's still Log Horizon. I'm on board for more evil Shiroe and so on, although I could do with less angst. I don't really have anything to say otherwise; at this point either you know you like Log Horizon or you know that it's not of interest.

Interesting:

• Shirobako: This is a show that I think is interesting without necessarily being good as such. I quite like the look inside an animation studio but at the same time it's chaotic and hard to follow and I have relatively little engagement with the characters. It badly needs a guide to what's going on and what all of the various people do, because if you aren't reasonably well informed about who does what and why various bits are important it's really hard to understand the problems the studio is facing. Even I'm getting confused and I've picked up a reasonable amount of the terminology and the anime production process.

  (For instance, in the first episode if you don't understand the crucial role of the sakkan it's not clear why the sakkan can take over animation for one sequence or why it's such a bad thing to lose the sakkan for a while.)

Entertaining but sitting on the edge:

• Madan no Ou to Vanadis: What I like about this is that almost all of the characters involved are functional and mature adults with heads on their shoulders (and the one character who isn't is the one that irritates me). Adults who act it are a decided novelty in anime and it's refreshing to have a whole cast of them. With that said, the charm may well wear off this at some point and it definitely has its awkward bits.

Marginal, where I'll be amazed if I watch them all season:

• Seven Deadly Sins (aka Nanatsu no Taizai): This is a kid's shonen fighting story and it makes no bones about it. What's kept my interest so far is how over the top the power levels are; for example, the climactic big fight in the first episode had them blow up the entire top of a hill. In other words, I'm watching for grand fights and I expect to keep watching only as long as it delivers that.

• Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu: People have very divergent reactions to this depending on whether its non-stop more or less single note jokes work for them. So far the jokes have been making me laugh; since that's pretty rare, I'm willing to keep watching. However I won't be surprised if the laughter wears off abruptly and because painful instead, at which point I'll drop this like a hot potato.

Probably not for me:

• Amagi Brilliant Park: This is well made but after watching two episodes it hasn't really grabbed me. I may watch more to see if clicks (especially since various people praise it and it keeps ranking high on APR) and in a slower season I'm pretty sure I'd be watching it, but this season is already really busy for me.

• Parasyte - the maxim: This is probably the best show of the season that I'm not watching (I saw the first episode and that was it). I think a large part of it is that a good part of Parasyte is some degree of horror and I'm just not a horror person. I can see how good the show is, my gut just signals the rest of me with 'nope nope nope not interested try again'. I think I might enjoy it better in manga form.

Definitely not for me:

• Gundam Build Fighters Try: There's nothing wrong with this show. It just has the misfortune of being a sports show about mecha, which are two things that almost never work for me. I gave the first episode a try and while I could see the quality and the appeal, it just didn't make me want to watch more.

  (Even my favorite Gundam works are my favorites for reasons other than the mecha, although it turns out the mecha are surprisingly integral to their stories.)

Misses:

• Inou Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de: Congratulations, show, you made the irritating chuuni guy so irritating that I can't stand him. Whatever else it is (and it may or may not be decent), this show is not for me at all.

• World Trigger: The first episode was a potentially interesting concept wrapped up in what was in retrospect a rather boring and lazy execution.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports or other reasons:

• Akatsuki no Yona: On the one hand I theoretically like this genre in general. On the other hand I seem to only really like shows in this genre when they're unusually well done and early reports are that Yona's execution is kind of pedestrian and ordinary. In a less busy season I might have looked at this anyways; in this season I have triaged it pending effusive praise (which so far has not been forthcoming).

• Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru: This had the misfortune of airing late in a very busy season and not generating massive praise, so I've triaged it just like I have Yona.

• Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso: On the one hand I really liked Nodame Cantabile. On the other hand this involves characters in high school instead of university (which I consider a general warning sign) and may have excessive amounts of melodrama and hammering the audience. So far what praise it's gotten has not been effusive enough to get me to take a look.

• Cross Ange: Nope. I actually find this a pity because I kind of would like to watch a Sunrise mecha action show, partly because we haven't had one of those for a while. I just have no interest in watching one with this one's reported sort of content.

• Trinity Seven: Apparently your generic fighting harem LN adaptation in a very busy season.

• Terra Formars: From all reports this falls into the 'over-censored carnography' bucket without very much interesting in its execution.

• Gundam Reconquista in G: Gundam? Tomino incoherence? In a busy season? Nope.

(There are others that I haven't looked at due to their genre not being my kind of thing. And there may be some that I've just plain overlooked.)

Since I'm currently following eleven shows (with at least Amagi whispering to me to watch more), something is clearly going to give in what I'm watching. Sadly one of the losers may well be Shirobako, despite its appeal.

The importance (or lack of it) of Gundams in my favorite Gundam works

I am generally not a mecha fan, Gundam included, but I've wound up seeing some Gundam works that have genuinely impressed me and stuck with me; right now I'd say that my two top works are The 08th MS Team and War in the Pocket. For reasons that don't fit in the margins of this entry I recently wound up thinking about how important the presence of Gundams is in those two shows. Could you take the mobile suits out and replace them with something else without fundamentally damaging or changing those shows?

(This question makes more sense for me than for a Gundam fan, because what I like about these shows has almost nothing to do with the Gundams in them.)

I think that The 08th MS Team is actually surprisingly dependent on mobile suits in specific, because to make the whole feel of the show work you need a specific combination of attributes in your military machinery. They have to be ground based, because it very much matters that the MS Team is down there slogging along in the mud instead of flying distantly over it all. They have to be single pilot, because the whole dynamics of the situation would change if the pilots (especially Shiro) were working in a close team with other people in their vehicle instead of being alone. And they have to be powerful because people react to this; things would feel very different if the team was using, say, armed motorcycles instead of something that dominates the battlefield.

(That they dominate the battlefield also gives the MS team's actions special weight and their position special importance.)

War in the Pocket is a more ambivalent case. A lot of the situation and impact are not particularly dependent on mobile suits in specific so it feels like you should be able to swap them out for something else, but at the same time it's hard to figure out any alternative that leads to the crucial final confrontation while keeping Al so involved in it. To keep him so involved in the confrontation you probably have to keep it on the ground, so once again you need ground-based military machinery that has a single pilot and is sufficiently scary to force the defenders to sortie expensive and rare experimental hardware instead of relying on standard military vehicles and forces.

(Of course the background and settings for both shows are completely entangled in the Gundam Universal Century mythos as it is. But I think you could contrive some relatively similar setting that removed the mobile suits. After all, mobile suits are arguably an analogy for aircraft in the first place, although if we take this too far we wind up saying that the Federation is the US and Zeon is Japan in World War II.)

Looking back at the Summer 2014 anime season

As before, it's time (and long past time) for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how well the final result matched up with my early impressions and my midway views. This has been delayed partly because the summer season turned out to be an almost total bust for me; I only managed to watch one show all the way through as it aired.

Watched and finished:

• Aldnoah.Zero: This was a reasonably entertaining show but I wouldn't call it particularly great; however, the show did manage to make watching it be enjoyable (for all of its absurdities). Following my usual rule that whoever gets the most character development is probably it, Slaine is the real protagonist; sadly, I suspect that the show disagrees with me. This is the only show I wound up following on a weekly basis through ths season.

  If I took this as a serious dramatic work, it would be a failure; it simply has far too many flaws. As popcorn entertainment I rather enjoyed it because I could laugh at all of the crazy and nonsensical bits and admire all of the ways the show found to make Slaine suffer. I agree with all of the people who say that it's impossible to believe that the show is serious about the events in its first-half climax.

  (Also, if this was a serious work it would be an extremely grim one given how large the show's onscreen and offscreen body count is.)

  I'm looking forward to the second half although it may well turn out like Valvrave, where the magic and charm wore off very fast.

  (Yes, this is a lot of words in an attempt to justify both sides of Author's collected impressions at once. As usual I see both the virtues and the flaws of the show but I weigh them in my own way.)

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: In the end I got bored enough (and desperate enough) to pick this up again after dropping it in the hopes that I would at least get some nice mindless action. I more or less got that, but it was competent instead of spectacularly stunning like I was kind of hoping for. I should really just resign myself to the fact that nothing in Prisma Illya will ever top the episode six fight from the first series and leave it permanently dropped. See also my Twitter capsule summary.

Dropped:

• Zankyou no Terror: I realized that I had essentially no interest in finding out what happened next to the characters or what was going on with the whole situation. So I stopped watching it.

Towards the end of the season I tried out two highly praised series that I had not previously given a chance to. My reactions:

• Barakamon: After three episodes my overall reaction is that I find the show charming and I can see why people like this a lot, but I don't find it compelling enough to drive me to watch more with any particular urgency (especially now that it's not a currently airing show). Part of it is certainly that the show is a bit too obvious and heavy-handed with its moral lessons for Handa. The segments when it wasn't concerned with that were much more enjoyable but unfortunately not all that frequent in the first three episodes.

• Sabagebu: The highest recommendation I can give this is that it makes me laugh on a regular basis (which is not common, most anime comedy fails for me). However in practice it's fallen into the same problem as Seitokai Yakuindomo, which is that plotless humor doesn't have much to strongly drive me to see the next episode. See also eg Evirus.

I expect to watch more of both of these shows, but in practice neither has grabbed me by the labels and demanded to be watched. Someday, when I feel like it or I want something to fill in a block of anime watching time.

I also tried out Strike The Blood for vague reasons, partly in the hopes that it would be another Tokyo Ravens. My capsule summary is that it hasn't proved to be anywhere near as compelling a watch as Tokyo Ravens was and is otherwise a perfectly ordinary shonen fighting show. I suspect that I'm not going to wind up watching much more of it; I just don't find it all that compelling.

Why I found Joshiraku an interesting series

I watch anime in translation (via subtitles), and almost all of the time I passively assume that the translation is essentially seamless and more or less transparent; what I'm reading on the screen is close enough to the original Japanese dialog that I'm missing at most minor nuances. Every so often there are stumbling blocks and near non-sequiturs and the rare moment where I can make out a Japanese word that I recognize and tell that the translated dialog is not quite what the characters actually said, but in those moments I assume that the translators have dropped the ball and done a bad job. I think this is an easy mindset to get into and to be honest I think that almost all of the time it's accurate; to put it one way, most shows likely don't have dialog that is all that complex.

(Most shows are not all that complex.)

Joshiraku demolishes this illusion. In Joshiraku the seams of the translation show frequently, not just in the puns but also in dialog that was clearly supposed to be funny and full of jokes but that went completely over my head. Watching Joshiraku was in part a continual process of being reminded that I was watching something in a foreign language and I very much was not getting all of the nuances. As a result, even (or especially) the jokes that I didn't get were interesting because they vividly show me those rarely-visible seams in the translations and my understanding of what was really going on. My puzzled silence when I was supposed to laugh made this gap quite visible.

I generally didn't find Joshiraku funny per se (although it had quite a lot of fun and enjoyable bits), but I always found it interesting to watch because of this and I'm very glad I saw it all. It's not often that I get such a useful and pointed reminder that yes, translation is happening and what I'm following is actually a simulacrum of the real thing (even if it's often probably a very close one).

(This is another aspect of the problem of interpretation, of course.)

PS: This is the reason I was talking about in my Summer 2012 midseason comments on Joshiraku. Yes, sometimes the wheels of blogging grind very slowly around here.

Checking in on the Summer 2014 anime season midway through

It's time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season. This 'midway' check has been delayed in large part because this season has turned out to be pretty much a bust for me, which has not left me with enthusiasm for writing this.

Things I'm still watching:

• Aldnoah.Zero: This has quietly turned into the one show that I actively look forward to watching this season. It's not great and the writing is periodically clumsy, but it's generally well done and interesting. The secondary characters really make the show for me; Inaho is so far mostly interesting as a cryptic mystery instead of a character to be engaged with.

• Zankyou no Terror: This has plenty of beautiful cinematography and animation, but the characters are and remain fairly much ciphers, the actual events are getting increasingly absurd, and I'm not entranced by the plotting. Still it's good enough that I keep watching, although often after some delay (I'm an episode behind right now, for example).

Dropped:

• Space Dandy second season: Theoretically this is just suspended, but I don't think I've ever continued a suspended series. I wrote an entire entry about why this failed for me, but I can boil it down to a tweet: pure artistry in a show isn't enough for me.

Misses:

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: As I thought I might, I got tired of this. I decided that the conclusion of the first story was far enough, especially as it apparently shifted to comedy hijinks for at least the episode after that. To put it one way, comedy hijinks is not what I was watching Prisma Illya for.

• Sword Art Online II: I came to my senses. SAO II has good production values and some ideas that could be really interesting stories if well handled, but it also has the usual generally terrible and overdone writing, a slavish adaptation process that hurts the anime-only part of the audience, and overhanging it all the long absurd shadow of Kirito poisoning everything he's involved with. I won't say that SAO II would be a good show if it starred someone other than Kirito, but at least it would have a chance.

So far I haven't used my free time to dig into my backlog of anime. I've just been taking it as downtime and fiddling around with other things (mostly other diversions on the Internet). It's been kind of nice as a break but I sure hope that the fall season is better than this.

What Space Dandy has just taught me about my tastes in anime

Despite what I said in my early impressions of this season, I've effectively suspended Space Dandy because I just felt no particular motivation to watch the fourth episode. As before, this has brought me around to a realization about my tastes.

Put simply, interesting animation turns out to not be enough by itself to get me to watch a show. Space Dandy is clearly a showcase (of both animation and storytelling) and this season it has been doing quite a good job of that, but as I mulled over it on Twitter the problem for me is that there is nothing more there than that. I clearly want my shows to be doing something and going somewhere, or at a minimum to be really funny (cf Seitokai Yakuindomo, and even that has ongoing developments that build on themselves).

(This may also be one of the reasons that the 'cute girls doing cute things' genre doesn't resonate with me. There's a part of me that watches and goes 'yes, and?'. There's also season 2 of Dog Days', where I articulated basically the same issue. Apparently things take a while to get through my skull.)

The short way of putting this is that Space Dandy is the anime equivalent of empty calories, even if they're pretty tasty empty calories. I've evidently had my fill of those and as a result Space Dandy is not for me.

(There's an irrational bit of me that regrets this and really wants to be able to fully enjoy the skilled artistry on display in Space Dandy, and an even more irrational bit that thinks it's necessary to that to be an anime fan with good taste. And it's not like I haven't enjoyed the episodes when I watch them. It's just that every time I think about watching episode four of S2 I decide that I have other things I'd rather do.)

Brief early impressions of the Summer 2014 anime season

It's time for another early impressions post, as before. This entry has been delayed mostly because I needed several episodes to make up my mind about some shows (and on top of that one important show aired a week later than everything else). I'm once again feeling like grading very harshly, so shows that might get passes in previous seasons are getting ejected this time around. Overall this is not a particularly great season; there is nothing that I'm feeling particularly deeply enthused about and a lot that is rather questionable.

Reasonably enthused by:

• Zankyou no Terror: After two episodes this is at least a promising start, although I have no idea where it's going. It also hasn't particularly done anything that makes me roll my eyes, which puts it significantly ahead of everything else this season. Because the show is playing almost everything mysteriously so far, there isn't very much to say about the content yet. It's well directed and can do action sequences, and at least some of the characters seem interesting. But this doesn't particularly seem like a character-based series so far and it's very early in the plot, so.

Entertaining for now:

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: I didn't wind up with a high opinion of the first season but the first episode of this was just entertaining enough by the end to get me to watch some more. I may tire of it rapidly, though.

• Space Dandy second season: It's almost exactly what the first season was, namely mostly an indulgent showcase for animation instead of anything more coherent or entertaining. But occasionally it pulls a rabbit out of the hat to manage an excellent episode, as was the case with the second episode. For now, a hope for more of these is enough to keep me watching.

  (Yes, yes, this may be optimistic, but Space Dandy has now demonstrated that it can be excellent in the right hands. Since the people involved pretty much change every episode, there's at least the potential of excellence striking again.)

• Aldnoah.Zero: This is well produced and mostly competently written so far, with some quite interesting characters and a fair amount of potential. The downside is that the writing is periodically clumsy, predictable, and crudely emotionally manipulative (such as the slaughter at the end of the first episode and in chunks of the second). I'm not sure how much further I'll last. The princess and the daughter of the <spoilers redacted> are the most interesting two characters so far, purely on promise and the little glimpses we've had of them; at the moment the protagonist is your basic bland spud.

  (The writing here feels quite like the writing in Gargantia in some ways, which also veered between quite clever and utterly clumsy.)

Barely entertaining by being absurd:

• Sword Art Online II: This is this season's JoJo's for me. I don't know how long I'll last, but it promises to be absurd in the best straight faced SAO manner. The problem with this (as compared to JoJo's) is that SAO is perfectly capable of terribly boring episodes because it takes itself seriously. JoJo's at least has Stand fights pretty much every episode.

  (If I'm being honest about this, a good part of why I'm bothering with SAO II is so that I can fully enjoy Bobduh's writeups over at Wrong Every Time. This motivation may not exactly sustain me over the long term.)

Not for me:

• Tokyo Ghoul: This is horror, which I'm almost never interested in, and nothing about the first episode hooked me in the face of that.

• Sailor Moon Crystal: What it boils down to is that I would be watching this out of something akin to a sense of loyalty or obligation instead of any expectation of seeing things that are new and interesting, given that reports so far are that the first episode is basically a complete remake of the original first episode. If it deviates significantly from the original show, maybe I'll tune in; otherwise, it's not for me.

  (There are also a number of reports that it is just not all that well executed in terms of animation, directing, and so on.)

Misses:

• Tokyo ESP: I found the second episode to be painfully boring and cliched. In retrospect the first episode was too, it was just playing with a different set of cliches. In the end an anitwitter conversation (1, 2) helped me figure out one of my big problems with the show: the characters and situations just don't seem real but instead seem calculated to aim at funny cliches.

  (I just may give this another try if I get bored and desperate, because the premise certainly could make an interesting show.)

• Argevollen: This has pretty much everything I don't like about mecha and basically nothing that's appealing. I was grinding my teeth and rolling my eyes basically continuously through the first episode. I haven't bothered to watch further episodes; if it becomes amazing, I'm sure anitwitter will let me know.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports or other reasons:

• Rail Wars!

• Akame ga Kill: Initial reports are not positive, to say the least, and apparently various unpleasant aspects get worse later on.

• Hanayamata: This is apparently mostly a 'cute girls doing cute things' show and I have historically not enjoyed them. I don't think the sprinkling of supernatural elements is enough to offset that.

Not my thing, whether or not they are good: Glasslip, Locodol, Free sequel, Barakamon, and in general anything not mentioned here.

I may give in to temptation and watch at least some of the second season of Yama no Susume, despite my eventual unenthused views of the first season. It's the kind of show that I want to like, even if I don't in practice.

Dropped from last season:

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventures - Stardust Crusaders: In the end this proved to be too much shonen fighting show for me, which is to say that it's dragging on and on and on. JoJo's has been vaguely entertaining in an absurdist way but I've realized that it's not so entertaining that I want to watch what is apparently going to be another 26 episodes of Stand fight after Stand fight before we even get to the main villain, and then another 13 episodes or so of fighting him.

  (I vacillated over this decision quite a lot but what really tells me that I'm making the right choice is the sense of relief I feel about not watching the next episode.)

Since I've dropped JoJo's, there's no ongoing shows that have carried over from the past season.

I suppose five shows is reasonably typical for me in a season, but this time around I'm not really enthused about almost any of them. At least I have something to watch.

(Although that's not all good. If this season had been a near-total bust I might have dug into my backlog and watched excellent series like Big O, Figure 17, or Banner of the Stars. That seems unlikely now unless I flame out on most of these shows.)