天下制覇

…But why does that kid have no mouth?

I did glance quickly at the second episodes of Leadale, Orient, and Police in a Pod, but I have nothing new to say about any of them. Just add exclamation points to the original post and/or more complaints about their terrible animation. The AT-X broadcast of Miss Kuromitsu also showed up this morning, but oddly, the censoring is still there. What are you even doing with yourself, AT-X?

Impressions:

This is a baffling show. The direction especially is utterly incoherent. Whoever's doing the music clearly thought it was a light hearted silly romantic comedy. The writer thinks that just having someone say that the woman is a femme fatale is enough while the director and artists spend the entire episode showing how completely incompetent she is and how much of a blushing delicate flower she is against an assertive man. A real man who spends the episode stalking and harassing her. And then there's the one kid who literally has no mouth. Of all the bizarre artistic choices in this show, that may be the most bizarre. He still talks. His chin vibrates. They just don't draw a mouth. For, uh, some reason. Maybe they just plain ran out of animation budget. It wouldn't surprise me. We are… not a well animated show, to put it mildly.

Maybe the out of place music and atmosphere is supposed to be the joke here, but it's not an episode with anything else in the episode that would indicate that. Despite them both supposedly being badasses, it's nowhere near Mr. and Mrs. Smith and more like one of those few obnoxious romanitizations of a stalker 'comedies' from a couple seasons back, just with a couple random shots of a corpse here and there. He's an oppressive ass, she doesn't like it but-oh-but-actually-she-loves-being-smothered-and-physically-dominated-it's-so-cyyyuuuuuuutttttteeeeeee! Play it straight. Creepy forbidden romance between genuine badasses… but that would probably require a lot more budget into the action or letting a woman be on par with a man, and some kind of acknowledgement that one or both of them are creepy psychopaths. Or go full slapstick ridiculousness… but that might require writing some jokes. Splitting the difference here does not work at all.

Next Episode:

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