天下制覇

 Those…… EYEBROWS!

Impressions:

Is it just me or is there a boatload of bad CG this season? I don’t think I could swing a dead cat without bludgeoning at least one or two CG methods of transportation, be they car, plane, helicopter, train, motorcycle, elevator, and now we have a blimp. I feel like we could make our own CG version of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

I’m a little surprised by Chiko’s character. From what I had read, she was spirited away from a cruel family or something, and instead, she immediately comes off as basically a petulant little brat who hates the foster family taking care of her. After pouring tea all over the place and then spitting out their soup, they get pissed off at her, you know… like any normal family would. Not that an unsympathetic protagonist is neccessarily a bad thing and obviously mildly poisoning her so she’ll be less of a whiny little so-and-so is a bit far, but come on… she wasn’t exactly innocent here either.

As long as we’re talking about Chiko, I think Hirano Aya did a pretty decent job with her. She’s not her usual cloying self… far more subdued. The rest of the production was pretty well done. I was a bit surprised that the chase scene towards the end was done without CG after all the CG cars driving around at the start, but I’m not going to complain too strenuously about animators not being lazy, just about them being a little inconsistent. The animation otherwise was decent, but aside from the car chase, most of the episode was Chiko sitting around being a whiny little -expletive deleted-, so there wasn’t too much to animate there.

I am quite interested in the setting here. It reminds me a lot of Baccano. We’ve got some kind of monster guy with steel claws and fangs hunting the group of general ruffians. There’s no flying pussyfoot here though. I’m not sure entirely what the tone that they’re going for here is either. The opening sequence was straight out of Lupin or Mouse, but the rest of it was a bit more serious. Then the ED played starting off with "DETECTIVE GIRLS" and then fanservice shots of characters that mostly didn’t even show up in the first episode. Having Hirano Aya sing it though… ew… poor choice.

I liked it overall though, so I’ll probably stick with this for at least a while longer. Or at least until I can figure out how exactly this show is going to progress. There’s definitely some disconnect between the OP, the first episode and the ED, so… *shrug*

Chiko OP

Chiko ED