Animation Revelation's Animation Blog

Knights of Sidonia: Battle for Planet Nine

People say I am prone to hyperbole. That I tend to get more angry or enthusiastic about certain things more than others. And you know what? They’re probably right. I do to get a little carried with myself, not so much occasionally but frequently, but let me tell you something. What I’m about to say, I stand by completely, and you can take it to the bank with you…

Knights of Sidonia is, without a doubt, the single greatest mecha show of the last 20 years (if not ever).

Season 1 did every single thing a post-Gundam Seed era giant robot series seems to have forgotten how to do. Instead of pretty boys yelling at each other while firing candy colored lasers everywhere, we had considerably unattractive characters just trying to survive an endless onslaught from a completely unrecognizable alien enemy. We had a sense of futility brought on by this show’s terrific production design. Everything was tattered, grimy, and dirty, suggesting it had been lived if for years, if not centuries. And the writing… oh man… can you say “CHARACTERS THAT ARE ACTUALLY DEVELOPED AND WE CARE ABOUT!!!” Where the hell was that in Aldnoah.Zero?

Therefore it is with great pleasure to watch War for Planet Nine as, despite being away for a whole year, Sidonia hasn’t skipped a beat. There may have been a change in directors (intenal Polygon AD Hiroyuki Seshita takes over from freelancer Kobun Shizuno) but everybody who worked on the first series has returned and so has that signature cold, disonant tone this show gives. I can’t really talk about the plot that much considering watching this is heavily dependent on seeing season 1 but I will say that a really big change is imminent for a popular character. You can guess which one.

Yeah… just watch Sidonia already… it’s fricken god tier. — Lord Dalek

The Labyrinth of Grisaia

You know, when I first watched The Fruit of Grisaia, I thought it had one of the worst premiere episodes I’d ever seen, but the seeds (lol) planted near the end of it gave me hope. “Maybe this will eventually become a good show!” I naively wrote in my review.

I was wrong. Each installment somehow managed to be more painful than the last, until something magical happened in episode 5: Grisaia got so incredibly dumb that, from that point forward, it (d)evolved into a laugh riot. Whether by virtue of 8-Bit’s adaptation being absurdly incompetent, or because the source material itself was already bad (I suspect both are true), the last 2/3 of the first season were a hilarious train wreck that consistently upped the ante in terms of goofy awfulness each week. But now the hour-long interquel special is out, and I’m not laughing anymore.

The Labyrinth of Grisaia AKA Le Labyrinthe de la Grisaia AKA Yasuomi Umetsu’s Grisaia tells us the backstory of protagonist Yuuji Kazami via flashbacks framed by a discussion he has with the blonde lady whose name I forgot. Despite the tales of his past being rather… harrowing (to say the least), she just sits there looking bored the whole time while he drones on about his experiences. Basic human empathy is apparently not one of her strong points – of which she apparently has none. Seriously, after 14 episodes, I have yet to find a reason to care about or like her character. But I digress.

The Maze Runner of Grisaia is a lovingly-crafted pulp adventure filled with exquisite depictions of rape, child abuse, rape, murder, rape, incest, rape, and more rape. Yuuji first recounts his blissful formative years in which he was physically abused by his parents and emotionally abused by his sister. Once he turns 11 or so, said sister – who 185 different people on MyAnimeList consider among their favorite anime/manga characters of all time – then manipulates him into having sex with her in the bathtub. After she dies during the events of season 1 (whoops! spoilers!!!!), his parents fall into a deep depression, which mainly seems to consist of him watching his dad simultaneously beat and rape his mom. Yuuji kills his dad and then his mom offs herself, so he gets adopted by the blonde brother of Tokiomi from Fate/Zero.

Blonde Tokiomi unsurprisingly makes for an excellent father, treating our hero to such fun activities as being forcefully dressed in women’s clothing and then raped by him and his friends. Afterwards, he turns into a sort of mentor figure for the ever-affable Yuuji, training him to become a killing machine capable of carrying out top secret assassination missions, while also raping him some more. He is eventually saved from captivity by a mysterious blue-haired woman, who thankfully does not rape him… in the anime adaptation. They probably just ran out of time to include that scene from the original VN, which will hopefully be reinserted for the Blu-ray release. I mean, it was either remove that, or the completely necessary scene where the main girls from Fruit sit around watching TV for no reason, and something just had to give.

This show fucking sucks. The narrative is abysmal “let’s see how dark we can make this without losing all our viewers” edgy trash, the production values are terrible, and the original work attempts to sexualize at least one of the child rape scenes. It’s disgusting, juvenile, uninteresting, and potentially offensive, feeling exactly like a 15-year-old’s first attempt at writing something grimdark. And, for the most part, it’s not even funny-bad like the first season was; it’s just bad-bad. Do not watch it. — Foggle

Ninja Slayer

……………..

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh dear.

Trigger! The makers of fine anime like Little Witch Academia, Kill La Kill, and…. uhhhhhhhh…. You know what? Trigger’s blown a lot of my goodwill lately. No thanks largely to their follow up to Kill La Kill, the agonizingly pedestrian and inane Inou-Battle In Everyday Life which dashed our hopes that a studio made entirely out of ex-Gainax people would refrain form making…sigh…modern Gainax anime. But there was hope on the horizon! Ninja Slayer! An over-the-top action comedy parody anime based off a “novel” written by some “Americans” and sporting some sweet looking fight scenes (all of which only appear in the opening credits). Things were looking up, up, up!

…then it was announced that this was an ONA

…then it was announced that the episodes were only 15 (well actually 12) minutes long.

…then it aired.

……………………

Let me start by saying that I absolutely despise being trolled and “Based Trigger” has done it again. The title is Ninja Slayer From Animation but the amount of animation in it probably lasts all of 30 seconds with the rest being .gifs of the main cast dragged across the screen using the pan crop tool in Vegas. Now they’ve done this before with Inferno Cop, but that was two minutes max. This is 12 and after 10 seconds it gets really tiresome. There is a plot of sorts (salaryman comes back from the dead and hunts ninjas because why not?) but its pretty meaningless.

To be fair though, I kinda saw it coming. As of last weekend, I was dreading another Inferno Cop situation and the same team behind that was also making this so you could put two and two together (not to insult Inferno Cop in anyway though, that shit’s great). But this… This is a disaster. Its too damn long, its not particularly funny, and its unbleeding ugly in a Frank Miller kind of way. Actually you know what? This IS Frank Miller the Anime. Hell it already kinda looks like The Dark Knight Strikes Again with its gaudy digital color pallet and sharp angular character designs. And everybody knows Frank Miller loves his ninja and samurai wannabes. Oh god it actually makes sense.

So yeah we all know where this is going. Next week Ninja Slayer kidnaps some orphan, forces him to eat rats, and yells “I’M THE GODDAMN NINJA SLAYER!” all the time. Now THAT’S a far more accurate depiction of Frank Miller’s psyche online than Daredevil ever will be! (Theron Martin out of Fuck it I’m Done) — Lord Dalek

Nisekoi:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Nisekoi… the anime that puts the bank back in creatively bankrupt. I have no idea why people like this show, for me its just one long series of ancient Rumiko Takahashi cliches with 5x the tsundere power. I suspect that, akin to some guy who was waiting for it to turn into a mafia war battle shonen so it would get picked up for Toonami (Hur hur hur), most shobros just buy this because those magical words “Shonen Jump” are on the cover of every tb. People, just because there’s a badly drawn stencil of a pirate on the cover, doesn’t mean everyone’s gonna go Super Saiyajin at some point.  In fact that would make Nisekoi arguably worse than it already is.

Well…no use beating around the bush. Lets get onto thi–actually no.

00:00 — Ok Shinbo, you’ve made your money already, how far do you sell out this season?

00:12 — ten seconds in and we already have a fairy tale castle. Yeah this is so Shinbo it hurts.

00:41 — Oh Chitoge and Raku are an item now?!? HOW COULD I HAVE EVER GUESSED??? <– never finished season 1, who the hell could???

01:24 — UH OH WACKY HAREM ANTICS APPROACHING! AHAHAHAHAHAHAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.

01:35 — I gotta say this is one of the better LiSA ops I’ve heard and one of the best ops over all this season. She really needs to dump the SAO/Mahouka guy and stick with the Kagerou Daze guy.

02:32 — How DID the American Yakuza afford Buckingham Palace anyway?

03:21 — Well that was rando-h wait that’s what Naoshi Komi considers “humor”.

03:28 — Oh just die already Chitoge.

03:58 — THE BORING ONE

04:02 — THE BLAND ONE

04:06 — THE YANDERE

04:20 — THE LESBIAN (bingo!)

05:26 — Do we honestly need to do this? I mean there was a recap episode last week reintroducing these awful characters.

06:50 — Yeah Chitoge, speak up so we can stretch this out for another 26 weeks… JUST LIKE LAST SEASON!

07:56 — Oh the locket is still broken. Yup… 20 more weeks of this shit incoming!

08:09 — No no no Tachibana. That’s not how you castrate a man!

09:32 — Hey remember when Kosaki was like the only girl with a key and therefore the only one Raku could have confessed his love to? …good times.

10:54 — Bad harem comedy joke writing 101, people.

11:24 — …meanwhile in an anime from 1995.

12:05 — wait… ANOTHER EPISODE??? oh wait this is Nisekoi, episodes of the first season had like 5 strips crammed into one show.

13:12 — Where is this going!?!?!

13:23 — DAT CGI STREAM.

13:32 — First Shaft tilt.

14:13 — This is the worst Chap Stick ad I’ve ever seen.

14:55 — My god, this is going to be about nothing but whether or not Raku notices Chitoge’s lip gloss isn’t it?

15:35 — Hey remember when Homura did that? Well Chitoge can’t do it right.

15:50 — And now its shampoo. WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS?!?!??

16:36 — Push on nails… well this isn’t going to end well.

17:03 — …as predicted.

17:18 — I never imagined I’d see an anime with even less happening in it than Lucky Star. Somehow Nisekoi found a way.

17:24 — JUST 7 MORE MINUTES… @_@

17:43 — Uh oh, this must be an emergency. Shinbo’s brought out the unmoving plaid already.

19:16 — You know… I’d normally say “Dump that zero and get with a hero!” right now, but Chitoge’s too worthless even for that.

20:07 — Shaft tilt.

21:48 — Shaft tilt.

22:30 — Oh just fuck already.

22:43 — MY GOD… CREDITS!!! Never before have I been most happy to hear effing ClariS.

23:38 — Oh wait its just the VAs…yeah fuck that.

24:21 — Excuse me while I go hang myself.

Well that was dreadfully pointless. Now to get flamed by every single creeper online! — Lord Dalek

Saint Seiya – Soul of Gold

An indeterminate time after the events of the middle arc of the old Saint Seiya anime (AKA the filler one nobody likes), Leo Aiolia suddenly finds himself in the frosty north of Asgard with no memory of either how he got there or why he isn’t six feet under. Wandering around aimlessly, he eventually gets tossed in a cell along with Saori Kido-lookalike Lyfia. Turns out the representative of Odin on Earth is using the power of Yggdrasil to control the minds of the population and the gold saints have been resurrected to go kill him and his own set of evil Saints. Also the experience of resurrection has changed Aiolia’s gold cloth into something far more powerful and perhaps far more difficult to control. Aiolia sets out to find the other resurrected Gold Saints while Lyfia plots something from behind the scenes. In other words, more of the same hair metal stupidity and pseudo-mythological bullshit we’ve come to expect from Saint Seiya.

Saint Seiya is a franchise that’s been rather impenetrable for anyone living on this side of the Rio Grande (by comparison, its bigger than DBZ way down in Tijuana) for many a moon. Not for lack of trying though, Toei’s made much of the series available for online streaming on Crunchyroll (unfortunately the subs are pretty terrible) and there was not only one but two dubs (both sadly incomplete) made of the first arc over a decade ago. So even though its highly unlikely you’ll have any clue what the plot of this show is (and even less of one if your only experience with the franchise is the recent Saint Seiya Omega), its nice to know they still care. Anyhoo this series is basically just fan fiction filller. Clearly some writer saw Episode of Bardock and said to himself, “Hey! If they can bring Bardock back from the dead for no reason, I can do the same with Saint Seiya!”, and series creator Musashi Kurumada was all like: “Hey whatever man, as long as it doesn’t fuck up my plot. Where’s my paycheck?” This is all fine and dandy, but there’s one drawback…

The writer forgot to make the show…somewhat entertaining.

Oh god is this boring. While a lot of the standard Saint Seiya tropes (quasi-Shakespearean acting, internal intrigue and counter-plotting, themes of the end of the world, etc.) are present, they’re done with a sort of listlessness that sucks all the energy out of this venerable cheesy hot-blooded shonen franchise. Considering this series started with a tournament arc, that’s saying quite a lot. I hate tournament arcs. The only reason why Saint Seiya’s isn’t as bad as some others is that its pretty damn short and the Saints are mostly doing other things at the same time.  That being said, it is only the first episode, but this is an ONA and Toei will have to do a hell of a lot more to keep me coming back. Otherwise its back to air guitaring to Pegasus Fantasy for the 1,000,000th time — Lord Dalek