Roving Thoughts archives

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.

Checking in on the Winter 2015 anime season 'midway' through

Once again it's time for the traditional part way through update on my initial impressions, which I can't really call 'midway' any more. On the whole I have somewhat mixed feelings about this season; on the one hand there's a bunch of watchable shows but on the other hand there's relatively little that I feel really enthused about, especially among the new shows (as opposed to the ones continued from last season).

Enjoyable:

• The Rolling Girls: This has turned out to be more episodic stories about people the protagonists run into in their travels and less overall story and spectacular Best fights. The result is still enjoyable but it's far less impressive than the first two episodes, and the protagonists are not really good enough characters to carry the show. Still, the spectacular bits are pretty spectacular when they happen.

  (There's an overall story developing, but the whole thing has moved pretty slowly.)

Things I'm still watching:

• Durarara!! X2: In theory this ought to be exciting. In practice it doesn't feel particularly necessary and the actual goings on have not been all that engrossing much of the time. It's difficult to get really enthused about yet more peculiar, crazy, or violent people showing up in Ikebukuro, since the first season had plenty of those. Some episodes still wind up interesting and engrossing; others wind up flat (and some of the animation has been dire).

  (Things would be different if we were getting interesting answers about the new mysterious people, but we aren't. And some of them are over the top even for Durarara.)

• Yurikuma Arashi: In the other Ikuhara shows I've seen, it's been possible to feel that the characters were real people first and metaphors second. This is not the feeling that YKA gives me and the result robs the show of both investment and impact. If all of the characters are ultimately puppets dancing to the tune of symbolism, it's hard to really care about any of them even if they are interesting when taken in isolation. The show remains interesting for me to watch, but almost entirely at an intellectual level instead of an emotional one. It has managed some pretty nice episodes, though.

  (With that said, sometimes the characters click for me for a while. And I think that I would like them if things were less compressed and they had time to feel like people.)

• Aldnoah.Zero: The show knows how to throw a fun time even if what's going on is stupid, bad writing, or doesn't make any sense. I wholeheartedly applaud the show's decision to focus on Slaine and the action in space, because he's far more interesting than Inaho or anything going on on the Deucalion.

  (I even think Slaine's actions (still) make sense from a character perspective; see the short version.)

• Dog Days'' aka S3: This season has been delivering actual action and a running plotline, making it much more like the first season than the second one. That's enough to keep me watching and enjoying it. At this point I've watched enough that I'll probably finish it no matter what.

On the edge:

• Maria the Virgin Witch: Some jarring bits excepted, there's nothing that's really wrong about the show; I generally quite enjoy episodes when I watch them. But my gut spends a lot of time telling me that I'm not enthused about it and that I don't actively like it, I'm just passively watching it when I can get myself to do so.

  (Perhaps part of the problem is that I don't think I trust the show to give good answers to the serious questions and conflicts it's raising. It partly feels like it's trying to be serious and significant without the chops to carry it off.)

• Yatterman Night: The show oscillates back and forth between painful jokes, go-nowhere episodes, blatantly obvious foreshadowing, amusing developments and humour, and sharp-edged bleakness wrapped in a cute exterior. The good bits hurt in a good way, but there's a lot of bland ordinary things that I really wish weren't even there. The result is mixed and kind of weak overall.

Dropped:

• Soukyuu no Fafner Dead Aggressor - Exodus: In the end this simply had too little excitement mixed with far too many things I didn't care about. Part of the problem was that the show made basically no effort to catch people up on the background and the very large cast of characters, despite how long it's been since the last Fafner; this left me basically indifferent to the entire cast.

In shows that carried over from last season:

• Shirobako has remained excellent although not flawless; it's continued to deliver excellent drama and hard moments while being ultimately cheerful. One of the things the show is doing amazingly is creating characters that you love to hate while reluctantly coming to accept; it's managed at least three.

• Garo has really picked itself up lately from a string of genuinely painful episodes (some of which were just filler and others were Garo's usual awkward execution). See also. Garo has been in its 'on' phase a lot lately as it heads into the final plot arc.

• Log Horizon S2 has been variable; generally okay, sometimes a bit painful, but sometimes really good. We've just finished what's probably the last high point and so I expect we'll be winding down for the rest of the season; I'm just hoping for no goofy episodes that jump up and down on the show's weak point.

  (Apparently there's not enough of the light novels out to make a third season yet. After this season I find that I'm actually fine with that.)

On the whole this is a good season, even if I'm feeling disappointed that none of the new shows I'm watching even come close to Shirobako or even Garo (on its good days). After all, I'm still watching ten shows, which is very high for me (especially at this point in the season).