天下制覇

Son!?

Oh, look, something new to watch. I did mean to make a post yesterday about various things, including my plans for the rest of the season, but four paragraphs got eaten by the internet gods while I went looking for filler images. We'll try to rewrite all that again tomorrow, this time with random pictures of witches.

Impressions:

I mentioned this about five months ago during a similar time of doldrums, and the pilot episode actually did manifest itself today. Unfortunately, I don't know that I have much to to add besides that. Yeah, there were only about 15 minutes of content that hadn't already been released, but tons of short-form shows recently from Adventure Time (returning on Netflix, somehow) to Steven Universe have been able to cover a lot of ground in less. The full episode mostly just connected the dots between the promos, plus a concluding bit and a rather melodramatic introductory bit. The introduction especially felt a bit unneeded, but it also wasn't much animated either, so I think they had the song done and weren't quite sure how to fit it in to the rest of the script.

The strengths remained strong though, even if it didn't do much more than introduce the premise (which given the recent anime season promos, I can still count as an accomplishment). The animation is expressive. The characters manic. The Parry Gripp soundtrack infectious. The back-and-forth on point, especially where Angel was concerned, as he has close to all of the great lines of the episode. That said, I feel like Alastor steals the episode at the end. That could just be that he dominates the heretofore unseen parts of the episode. One major change from the promos though were the sound effects and music. They were… a bit excessive. Nothing, absolutely nothing at all, from a head turn to a blink did not have some kind of corny 1940s Looney Tunes sound effect attached to it. It works with Alastor's radio-broadcast schtick, but it distracts some from other characters. A turkey warble is… certainly attention catching, but it really felt like they were trying to go through an entire catalogue just to say they did.

There's no more episodes yet known to be coming after this, but I do hope someone picks this up. Lord knows Amazon and Netflix seem to have no shortage of money to burn.