The Case Study of Vanitas #01 — Shiny Silly Goth Boys

July 2nd, 2021

 

Make another stupid face, I dare you.

Impressions:

I think the big problems with this episode can be summed up by the conflict/problem being resolved just past halfway into the episode. So how would they spend the remaining third of the episode? Milking the hell out of the sparklies that are magical boy problem solving glow for a few minutes, and then a few more minutes of exposition and general padding. This was on top of it beginning with your more typical just straight up power point presentation exposition explaining the setting, because organic storytelling is haaaaaard. It's both an incredibly generic opening episode as well as an extremely padded and slow one, without any surprises or hooks. There are vampires. There's good vampires. Here's a few tidbits of specific lore regarding them.

If you're hoping for some slick animation because it's Bones, I'll have to disappoint you there too. While if pressed, I'd probably say the fight animtaion was better than Peach Boy Riverside's, there was also only about 10 seconds of it, and it wasn't that much better, and if you're being compared to that terribleness, you're already not in a good place. The artistic direction tries a little bit to pick up the difference, but it's very much trying to be quite anime, with all manner of random chibi gag reaction faces and goofy sound effects and such, so I can't say that it works, or even provides the jarring contrast that unsettles like something like Hellsing does at least somewhat more successfully because the horror side is barely pushing PG.

 

Posted in Vanitas | 1 Comment »

One Lonely Comment

  • Frank says:

    I disagree fundamentally with the notion that something has to be “going on” throughout the episode. If that’s the case, slice of life and character-driven drama wouldn’t have existed as a genre. Dialogues play an equally important role in fleshing out characters in addition to worldbuilding, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with dedicating a good half of an episode to doing so as long as it’s done in a way that is interesting— which is in turn subjective and wholly dependent on the general reception of this episode. Maybe you didn’t expect it to be a dialogue-heavy show, but there’s nothing stopping this series from embracing heavy dialogues as a narrative device. I think it’s rather disingenuous to dismiss meticulous visual direction as “padding” simply because it doesn’t have the physical conflict to go with. It’s fairly evident that they hired a Monogatari director for good reason.