Ranking of Kings #01 — Old School

October 15th, 2021

 

I'm a little concerned about the proportions in this show.

The hotel internet here is pretty godawful, which I would think is impossible in this day and age, but alas. Unless things drastically improve, most catch up will end up on Monday, but I'll poke at it again later.

Impressions:

It's certainly going for that dated Ghibli-esque art and animation style, and while certainly not theatrical quality, is very expressive and animated, though in the way where you really don't want to be looking at too many in-between frames because people tend to go all stretchy and blobby. Which is still a far cry more visually enjoyable than not bothering to animate at all, or using speedlines and shouting, but it's definitely an unusual stylistic choice these days. Same with the music. It badly wants to be thought of as coming from the 80s, and I'm honestly not really sure why, except to be different.

Where I think it struggles a lot more is that there's not any kind of overall narrative or plot thread that binds things together. It's more of a few different random vignettes, which you would think means that it wants you to think about things to put the supposed threads together into a tapestry, but at the same time, I don't feel like you're supposed to be thinking hard about any of this at all because most of it doesn't make any real sense. Does the blob seriously just not see or want the golden crown while mugging a kid? Why does the royal instructor have no idea the talent or capabilities of literally anybody around him? Why does the entire town come out to gawk at the prince if he wanders around naked all the time? Why can this supposedly weak and helpless child scale sheer walls like a gazelle? There are a hundred things like this that would be easy to just coast past if the story as actually going anywhere or the characters themselves didn't go out of their way to gawk and announce them. It's a weird story space to try to stake out that I don't feel works.

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One Lonely Comment

  • oh_yeahman@hotmail.com says:

    “Why can this supposedly weak and helpless child scale sheer walls like a gazelle?” Perhaps because he’s really not all that weak or hopeless? I get the impression that he’s had to make his own fun for much of his few years, and I suppose that meant taking up parkour while the woefully negligent adults at the castle continue to ignore him. This is clearly going for the whole “don’t judge a book by it’s cover”, or “everyone can be strong in there own way” angle of theming.