天下制覇

Wah wah wah wah waaaaaaaaaaaah.

New Season Disclaimer:

I try to watch at least the first episode of every new show in a season. However, do not expect anything I say to be fair or balanced. I value my own entertainment above all else and there are some genres or methods of presentation that I just plain do not like and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’ll attempt to at least make a cursory explaination of what did and did not please me about each show, but it’s just a simple fact of life that my tastes are mine alone. Feel free to express your own opinions in the comments, just keep it under control. This is just television after all.

Impressions: 

Well, this beginning was almost exactly what I feared it would be. It did open with shots of the disaster, but then flashed back to a spoiled little brat wandering around, texting people, planting trees, texting people, whining about cake, harassing her brother about coloring birthday cards, texting people, whining about having to take her brother to the robot expo, texting people, you get the picture. I guess I should praise them for getting the daily lives of spoiled children down pretty well, but that doesn’t make it any more interesting. Or likeable. I think I could also chart the little antisocial brat’s growth through the entire series from this episode alone. In that way, I think if anything, they were a bit too heavy handed in making her bitch and whine about absolutely every single person, even the ones trying to be nice to her.

All that said, I cannot imagine that the rest of the series is going to be anything like this episode, so take it with a grain of salt. The earthquake didn’t even happen until the last 20 seconds of the episode, so this was pretty much just 18 minutes of watching Mirai wander around and complain about her life. Not the most enchanting of ways to start off a disaster flick. Your opinion on the production will probably depend on where exactly your personal uncanny valley lies. I’m willing to give the giant CG bridge and all the CG robots a pass, but the CG people wandering around through the background… creepy. Even the foregrounds characters really didn’t look that stellar. It was probably the tiny tiny noses that made their faces look like monkeys or that they came from the 1970s. And, of course, like most Noitamina shows, it’s two minutes shorter than normal episodes.

So, as expected, this really isn’t my bag, and if you’re looking for a disaster show, you may want to put it off until next week when the earthquake is actually part of the events. Or at least, the focus is on something other than watching a spoiled child complain about how everybody sucks. Hopefully somebody just dumps her in a hole and the story follows one of those tachikoma knockoffs scrambling over wreckage instead.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 OP