Summer Time Render #01 — Eyeful

April 14th, 2022

 

Yeesh, that glowing eye looks so obnoxious in every shot.

I did glance at the two idol shows and Skeleton Knight, but they're firmly still idol shows, and the other subbed out rapists for a giant lizard, then did the exact same episode a second time. I'll probably post on Dawn of the Witch, even if it sucks, but again, it airs super, super late. I also have no idea what Disney+ is doing with this one as far as global distribution. They locked down all rights to it as their 'our first anime exclusive!' and… uh… forgot it exists outside of Japan, seemingly.

Impressions:

Yes, I know (at the risk of minor spoilers) that the eye thing's because it's some kind of wacky magical shadow eye giving him timeloop powers, but good lord, are they going out of their way to make it obtrusive every time they zoom in on one eye glowing light a lighthouse. It was distracting, which is pretty bad when there's so little else going on in the episode. The outbreak of head pops at the end was a good enough way to end the episode as a hook into the second, but there wasn't enough going on in the rest of the episode for that to be a sudden jolt in the same way that shows like Ga-Rei or even Shigofumi accomplished. Get people sucked in and then take a left turn into visceral gore to shock. It doesn't work so well when you're still puttering about the runway. You can still tell a decent dramatic story in ten minutes and then make everything go pear shaped for happy headpops time after that. 

It is a very quiet show, which is definitely at contrast to most of the rest of the season, and does help at least a little bit to create an unsettling, forboding atmosphere which could be built off of, or it could be that the little music it did have was sinister. Still though, there was not much of anything really going on. Dude comes back for funeral. The tan girl flashed her underwear. People said things like "Wow, it's been a long time since I ate your curry." There was one weird phonecall with a frantic dude, weird mostly because everything began glowing bright red for some reason. The lighter touch is better than having him flat out narrate an introduction to each main character, mind you, but we're still doing faceplants into boobs and pratfalls to flash underwear, so I don't think we have the intellectual, dramatic, or tonal high ground well established.

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