天下制覇

Nice arm, Stretch.

Impressions:

Aaaah, flashbacks. And this one had Teiichi narrating over most of it, repeating what was happening on screen in case anybody wasn’t paying attention. And to make sure that the story didn’t move too quickly, we kept cutting to a particularly bizarre shot of him as a child doing the same thing that she was doing as what she was seeing was playing on a projector behind him. Except about half the time, all that she was ‘doing’ was looking at something, so it was just a bunch of close up shots of him… looking at something. So… just to summarize, he’s seeing this through her eyes as he simultaneously acts it out as a child, while it’s being shown on a projector behind him which he mistakes for what he’s seeing. This is really what we’re going with?

The two minutes of EVIL MEN in the middle didn’t help either. Maybe if we wanted that moment to be dramatic, we should’ve animated it. Or lead up to it. Or just about anything other than two minutes of stills predicated on her just wandering into a bunch of crazy men ranting. The melodrama between her friends was also painful. It was like catching the middle of a Dynasty episode. They were alternatively fawning all over each other, heavy petting, bathing together, and slapping each other for not understanding. Maybe it’s because you’re a character that just popped out of nowhere. I guess they did supposedly explain her death, so they did go further than I expected, although tossed in a hole and left to die because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time is far from the most satisfying of reveals and could easily be later changed to just be the part of her grudge against throwaway character B. Death by starvation and cutting off before the end of it has a lot less finality to it than a knife (or pointy object of your choice) through the face.