天下制覇

Is he even trying anymore?

Impressions:

Let’s see, another show about magical girls where 3 minutes is spent in some trippy stylized world and 20 minutes is spent on mundane, boring as snot talking heads chattering about nothing with some obvious moral lesson about friends hinted at with all the subtlety and grace of King Hippo in a g-string. Where have we seen this before? I wish they had kept the magic world to the initial monochromatic/post-apocalyptic dreamland too, because Shinbo just throwing together all his neglected Zetsubou Sensei OP cutouts was moronic. And have some of Bakemonogatari’s flying scissors too. It’s been a year since we dragged those out. I can already hear the weak-minded clapping their hands in delight and squealing like morons. Don’t get me wrong, I did really like the initial magic/dream world segment, but that just made the following 18 minutes of mind-numbing insipid nonsense even worse.

The music was easily the best part of this episode and the only show thus far that has actually done a solid job with its score. Production, however, is already showing plenty of cracks. Aside from the second magic world sequence being made up of 95% material recycled from old Shaft shows, all the usual Shaft directorial garbage is in full effect. They try to hide the lack of budget with continuous distance shots, off-screen talking, random zoom-ins on CG objects (escalator steps being my favorite), but after almost half a decade of dealing with this from them, I’m really just plain sick of it. It’s not clever. It’s not interesting. It’s just a directing trick to avoid visual focus. This is a visual medium. Make the visuals meaningful. I’m already sick of seeing that exact same shot of Madoka’s face over and over and over again. Besides, filling 2/3rds of the episode with budget saving tricks is never a good sign.

Ahem.

Anyway, I’m underimpressed. It’s Shinbo being Shinbo… yet again. It’s not horrible by any means, but he does absolutely nothing here that he hasn’t done six or seven times a year for the past half decade. I was tired of it years ago and I’m tired of it now. If you’ve seen any one of his shows from that time period, you’ve pretty much already seen this one. Somebody needs to reign him in already and explain that his moldy directing gimmicks are not a substitute for substance. The cast is cookie-cutter to the extreme and the plot is very obviously being opaque for the sake of opaqueness. I guess you could call that ‘mystery’ a hook, but I’m so tired of seeing the same show from Shaft season in and season out that I don’t even know if I want to brave it next week to find out if they’re going to actually do anything with the magical side of it.