天下制覇

The Kyoto Animation battlecry.

Impressions:

I think I’ve been conditioned at this point to have an almost visceral reaction to shows that open with a milquetoast teenage protagonist self-narrating the introduction. But let’s judge it by the same standards that we did Coppelion. It’s a show about pans over CGI cityscapes and dull teenagers. Brilliant beginning. Admittedly, he does get stabbed a few minutes in for being too boring, but that just made me want to try to think up a joke about how "In Japan, the light novel protagonist gets stabbed like this." You probably need to hear the voices in my mind to fully see the humor. Regardless, being stabbed, cut, torn, eaten, etc is about the third highest occurring introduction for protagonists in LNs that aren’t about having sex with their sister(s) anyway, so I can’t even give it points for anything but Clicheness regardless. It certainly didn’t win any by going straight from there to characters being bored either. Thanks for the OP! Now let’s zzzzzzzzzz…

Oh sorry. The twangy guitar put me to sleep for a moment. If it was any other studio, I’d say they’re trying too hard with the mawkish cutesy nonsense, but since it’s KyoAni, I have the feeling that they’re really not trying at all, or maybe don’t even know any other way. See. She can perform insane acrobatic feats, somersaulting effortlessly through the air and slicing up stuff, but she’s also really clumsy and trips over things! And blushes over her blossoming maidenly feelings! And gets buckets stuck on her head! And her tummy makes noises! PLEEEEEEEEASE LOOOOOOOOVE HEEEEEERRRRRRR. 

Yeah, yeah. The animation remains top notch even if the musical direction is a bit… sedative, shall we say? Not entirely certain what this moment was though, it’s so obtrusive that it had to be intentional, but there was nothing else stylistically like it in the episode. Maybe an intern fell asleep and forgot two seconds of animation. Like many a KyoAni show of recent years though, the characters are either too boring or too obviously cloying for to inspire anything in me but the desire to strangle them, and the lion’s share of the episode is spent not on fighting with blood swords or stabbing them for their boringness, but on seemingly celebrating it. Next episode does seem better, but as I said before, this is a road I’ve been down with KyoAni before and I’m not terribly eager to do it again. If they can keep the action up, maybe, but it’s going to have to be a whole lot more than what this episode showed.  

Next Episode:

Night means serious.