天下制覇

And delicious Cola, with American Taste USA.

Impressions:

Poor production and noitaminA go hand in hand, but the direction and animation here were past poor and into almost completely nonexistent. I hope you enjoyed that bloom and annoying filters at the start, because that's all you're getting. Period. It takes talking heads to an absurd level, even so far as to simply reuse the same shots over and over and over and over and over. It takes a special lack of effort to make me hope that they start panning over a ceiling or random street corner because they apparently decided to use a single image to fill up around 10% of the episode. And when they got tired of that one shot, moved the camera slightly closer in and pretended like it had changed. Congratulations. You've taken Young Black Jack's crappy make-believe that it was showing something by talking about it, and decided even that was too much effort.

Which would lead into our second issue here of goddamned nothing at all happening and nobody giving half a crap about anything. Well, obviously nothing happened. It's 20 straight minutes of people sitting around like gargoyles chatting. The closest thing to an 'event' in this episode was when a random person or two popped in the room to say hi. About 65% of the episode was spent sitting in a room talking, with 20% more sitting at WcDonalds talking and 10% on flashbacks to another time when she was talking. And characterization? They talk. And talk and talk and talk. Emotion, nada. Investment, nada. They talk. They are talkers. That is all. There is nothing more. Is this a goddamned audiobook or a piece of animation? And even if it was an audiobook, it'd be dry and boring.