As mentioned yesterday this last weekend was hugely productive and every spare minute was basically crammed with me scanning animedias and watching fansubs. Indeed, I've now managed to sample all of the shows available via fansub from the 2009/10 season, which is a very good thing.
I also managed to do this without completely ignoring normal telly or not doing other stuff I needed to do. So it probably points to a flaw in my character that I was slightly disappointed I didn't get to watch any anime on DVD.
Anyway, as mentioned yesterday, here's the roundup of all the fansubs I watched and my brief opinions on them:
Tatakau Shisho - The Book of Bantorra
If I was to summarise my feelings on all the fansubs I watched I could basically use one word - surprising. I think just about every show was a surprise - sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad.
With Book of Bantorra I wasn't expecting much, but I was rather surprised to find it seemed quite interesting.
One of the reasons for my surprise was that the first couple of episodes did a lot of info dumping. This is one of those shows with a made-up, mumbo-jumbo setting that throws mystical and other powers around like they're bouncy balls.
Now usually I don't like this sort of thing, but was surprised to find two things of interest. First off the main character is not a heroic character or even, based on initial impressions either one of the good guys or particularly special.
The other thing of interest was the head of the hero characters was actually something of a bitch. She was unpleasant to her subordinates and seemed to revel in the violence she dished out, yet she's presented as being the head of the forces of good. She'd actually have slotted right into Black Lagoon.
So yeah, not necessarily a sophisticated premise, but some surprisingly interesting characters.
Natsu no Arashi!
The surprise with Natsu No Arashi was that I didn't really like the first episode, but I quite enjoyed the second.
The problem was that the second episodes was set well after the second and involves time travelling and people walking through walls and all sorts of random stuff. It did have some funny moments and the time travel was quite cleverly done, but it also felt like you were being dumped into the middle of a bunch of storylines and no-one was helping you understand them, which made it really frustrating.
However, the second episode jumped back to the beginning of the story and made a lot more sense, so I enjoyed it a lot more.
Which isn't to say I thought it was great. I didn't particularly take to the character designs, for example, and it didn't really give any impression of having an overarching plot. But still, I'd probably buy it and it was made by SHAFT whose stuff is always worth a look.
Katanagatari
Now Katanagatari was the first of two shows where the surprise was not a pleasant one. I'd fully expected going into this that I'd enjoy it.
It seemed to have some quirky character designs and artwork and I'm all up for a bit of that. It seemed to have some sort of feudal Japan thing going on and I wouldn't be a bit of a Japanophile if that didn't appeal. There was even a hint that it was basically a love story from what I'd heard and I'm a sucker for a bit of a love story.
The big surprise was how tedious it turned out to be.
The first episode was about 50 minutes long (presumably an hour when broadcast), but it didn't seem like they'd given them twice as much money to animate it. Indeed, it looked more like they'd give them half the normal amount of money, because there were huge stretches of people just talking.
And while they were talking it often didn't even show faces - there were loads of slow panning shots across random static things like tea pots. What made this worse was that the dialogue was often kinda dull - there was a bucket load of info dumping and even when the bad guy turned up I thought they were going to try and talk each other to death, rather than fight.
And then they did fight you got very little actual action.
It was terminally dull. Perhaps the second episode is shorter and more action-oriented. The file size would suggested not and I just couldn't be bothered to find out.
Winter Sonata
And it's a similar story with Winter Sonata.
Now to be fair, this one didn't have any suggestion that it was going to have action so the fact it didn't wasn't any sort of a let down. Also, this one definitely was intended to be a straight up romance.
My problem with it was that it was that it was so melodramatic it was almost comical. Except it wasn't comical, it was annoying.
It was like a soap opera, only one of those Mexican soap operas where everything is stupidly high drama. Only where those have a wide range of emotional over-exaggerations, Winter Sonata was entirely fixated on maudlin and melancholy.
Blimey, this is eating through words - I'll continue tomorrow.
Actually, no, tomorrow is movie rental review day, so make that Thursday!
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