天下制覇

Boy, am I ever ready for an Aquarion beach episode now.

Impressions:

Wow, they certainly went all-out to make this as bloody boring as possible, didn’t they? It wasn’t funny, the premise and setting aren’t interesting, it’s just 26 minutes of lull. Okay, so when Sidekick began telling a ghost story, they actually used the animation to do something purposeful for once and I perked up for the 45 or so seconds that lasted, but that’s about it. It’s not cheap by any means, far from it. It’s just that the content is so bland and mundane for 95% of the show that like Generic Self-Narrating Main Character, I was fighting not to nod off in the middle of it. There’s also a number of times when it’s clear that the director was just showing random things around the classroom because somebody on the production staff probably told them "You know, guys, I think we’ve run out of possible shots of the three of them standing around in a circle talking." Of which an intern boldly spoke up and said "What if we put up a picture of a coat rack?" And then congratulations were had and he was hailed as the new king of Narnia.

And yet despite the blandness, the show manages to also have all the subtlety of a Mack Truck. You can tell whenever there’s an important scene because it’s either excessively rotoscoped or the screen is suddenly literally choked in flowers. Well, there’s one point where the screen’s covered in a flood of CG letters too. It could work if it was actually part of the overall visual style and incorporated better; ie how Shaft and Silver Link generally operate, but here, they’re just jammed in and then immediately forgotten again as the whole show returns to its plodding, boring haze. I appreciate good character animation, probably more than most, but there has to be a point to it and this has all the visual direction and creativity of day old rice pudding and is starring a narrator who is clearly struggling to stay conscious through his own show. That’s not a great start.

Preview:

This was not an exciting preview.