2016-12-21
One nice thing Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! did
KonoSuba was not a particularly good show, but it was just funny enough to keep me watching in the winter season (apart from episode 9, which falls into the 'burn it with fire now' category). Part of what made it funny was some of its cast of characters and how they bounced off each other; they weren't great people, but they were generally flawed in interesting ways. In the process of this, KonoSuba did something that I have to grudgingly admire it for.
It would have been very easy for the show to make Aqua and Megumin into basically useless characters, people who could talk the talk but definitely not back it up when the time came to do things. They're both already overblown characters and somewhat puffed-up, so it would have been funny and more than that, it would have been entirely typical of the genre. But KonoSuba doesn't do that.
Megumin may be a chuunibyo, but she's also perfectly competent. She can only cast one spell once a day, but it's a very good spell, one of the most destructive spells going; if you can get Megumin pointed in the right direction, nasty things are going to happen to your enemies. As I put it on Twitter once, Megumin is basically a version of Lina Inverse who skipped straight to Dragon Slave and loves it so much that she refuses to learn or use Fireball.
And Aqua, well, Aqua may be petty and flawed and arrogant and foolish, but she's also (still) a goddess. Literally, as the show makes clear. She can and does cast high level magic basically on demand (sometimes foolishly, of course) and do things like purify an entire lake all by herself. Within her sphere of magic there seems to be very little that she can't do if she wants to, and more than once she saves the day when she acts.
KonoSuba could have fully embraced Megumin and Aqua as laughingstock. It didn't; instead it made them competent and powerful, albeit with limitations, blind spots, and flaws. I have to reluctantly give it points for this decision.
(The less said about Darkness the better, and the main character is relatively noxious and unimportant. To my vague surprise the Wikipedia summary claims that Darkness is actually pretty powerful, but in the show she's basically completely ineffective so I maintain my stance here.)
(This is a 12-days post.)
2016-12-20
Bubuki Buranki shows that CG anime has a bright future
Let me admit something that I didn't really say at the time: neither Arpeggio of Blue Steel nor even Knights of Sidonia looked particularly great as anime shows. Arpeggio was serviceable; Sidonia did better, partly because it leaned into its particular gritty SF aesthetics, but that trick only works for a certain sort of show. Based on these shows, you would not be particularly enthused about the future of CG-based general anime.
The good news is that we don't have to worry about that now, because Bubuki Buranki shows that the future of CG anime today is actually pretty bright. I say this due to three things that Bubuki Buranki demonstrated over the course of its run.
First, it simply looks good. Sure, CG anime is not 2D anime so the two look somewhat different, but Bubuki Buranki's visuals go a lot beyond the merely serviceable. They are perfectly good and occasionally great, both in static screenshots and in motion (although the show undeniably improves over its run, with earlier episodes more clunky and less attractive than later ones). But merely looking good is just the minimum requirement in a visual medium like anime; it's table stakes. CG needs more than just that alone.
(You can see examples in, say, Evirus's Bubuki Buranki category and here. The latter shows some first-episode moments where the CG is, well, at least a bit obvious.)
Second, the show consistently exploited being in CG to do things that normal 2D shows either can't pull off at all or can only do sparingly. While the show went in for intricate character and costume designs that wouldn't have worked in 2D anime (cf), for me what really stands out is how expressive it made its characters. Even in ordinary situations, people were often making various sorts of faces at each other; over and over they actually had expressions (sometimes exaggerated ones because hey, this is anime).
(And more subtly all of this carried through into background characters, long shots, and other low-resolution situations. 2D anime often collapses into wacky faces when the animators have to draw characters at even moderate scales, much less small ones; Bubuki Buranki never did that I noticed. This is obviously much easier when you have CG models for everything and just have to make sure that nothing bad happens when you render them smaller.)
To be clear, this doesn't make Bubuki Buranki's CG better than normal 2D anime. It just means that the medium of CG has its own advantages for anime shows, which is nice; if we have to have CG shows (and all the evidence is that we're only going to see more of them), it's good that we're getting something for giving up 2D.
Third and perhaps most important, the show has convincingly demonstrated that it can combine traditional 2D exaggerations and other animation tricks with its CG. I'm not sure if these were actually CG renders styled differently or occasional moments of 2D drawings (or a combination of both), but however it was done the result was both seamless and anime. Here, have some screen shots to show what I mean.