天下制覇

The road to hell is paved with CGI apparently.

Impressions:

This began with 38 seconds of looking at the CGI road. That wouldn't be the first time that there would be nonsensical, imbecilic shots of the ugly CGI bus or ugly CGI road. The direction in general is godawful, and the way that faces already contort Higurashi-esque grotesquely from the regular day to day activity of blowing chunks are right at home for traditional overblown Okada melodrama. The pacing is also fairly glacial. This episode was little more than characters introducing themselves and the 'foreshadowing' that everyone and everything is going to go totes crazy, and by foreshadowing, I mean dreams of being murdered, being told how creepy things are, and chunks of the cast already acting like psychopaths which everyone's just letting slide for some reason, so the 'shadow' in this 'foreshadowing' is more like a three foot thick blanket woven from the hides of elephants. And personally, I'd think they'd want to avoid calling attention to the ridiculously diverse Burger King Kid's Club cast of characters. Well, diverse for Japan.

Even if you are in it for the nightmare of especially poor animation, awfuler CGI, ghost girls declaring death, and exploding basketballs, that only came some 17 minutes into the episode. The rest was meandering drivel, particularly the goddamned five minute parade of characters introducing themselves at the start. Laying out the characters for the sake of laying out the characters and nothing more, half of it by having them stand up and announce their salient qualities under the excuse that it's a bus/camp activity, so it's 'organic' despite taking fifteen times longer than it should have. For a moment, I thought to myself that it'd be greatly improved if it just started from the no-doubt prophetic nightmare, but even the bus driver going crazy and getting vomitted on also had Emo-Kid doing his own Higurashi facial distortions as he strode unaffected by the swerving bus (because his angst is too much to be affected by a bus, man) to elbow the driver in the face. And I had to ask myself, would that really have been an improvement? Well, yes. It would've meant at least a minute less time spent staring at the ugly CGI road.

Next Episode:

Gee, I wonder if they're all going to start dying.