天下制覇

Whoever told you that was a good idea should be thrown to the sharks, White Fox.

I’ll do my usual week 1(ish) wrapup on Friday after the last 4 Thursday shows premiere. There’ll still be a couple shows left to air, but they won’t be for another week or two after that, at which point it’d get rather silly.

Impressions:

Good lord is this one cheap show. Looking back at the 15 second PV, I notice that it contained around 50% of the non-talking animation for the episode. Stellar. If you remove the stills, slow pans, and CG cars/missiles/guns/bridges/floors/city/helicopters, then you’d be left with only a few minutes of actual content left. On the upside, it was almost terribly directed enough to be amusing. "I’m bored of stills of the characters talking, here’s a CG bridge. Or an overhead shot of their godawful CG car. Eh, have a skyline. Oh, conversation’s wrapping up? Okay, time for another pan." Koko rolling around on the table was the most animated thing in the entire episode. Everything else could not have been less visually interesting if they had tried, which I unfortunately suspect may have been the case. I’m starting to suspect that Initial D somehow managed to buy out Japan’s animation industry and force them all to use their 1998 CG cars. Can’t you at least just go record some footage from a PS3 racing game and then clumsily paste the character art over that? Or GTA4. At least then there’s a chance a pedestrian will clip through a building and there’d be something visually interesting going on.

There were a couple moments when it seemed slightly better, mostly thanks to above average direction of the music, but as I’ve said before, the average for anime is pretty goddamned terrible. Well… or so I wrote before watching the next episode preview (see bottom). That was unpleasant. It is thankfully light on the character exposition, which is nice just because of how rare it is, but they still spend far too much time discussing their ‘missions’ which end up just being ugly CG car chases. That’s about all I have that’s good to say though. The art may be consistent at least, but everything else about the visuals in this visual medium are utterly crap, which is particularly damning for a show that tries to sell itself on action and tension.

Preview:

A special video for a special preview.