Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei Specials

I enjoyed the original and everything that it had to offer from the way it was conveyed, the art style, the voice acting, and to every bit of dialogue that it had.

Did you enjoy the original? Did you enjoy the stuff it had to offer with all it's set of characters? Yes? Then you are gonna love this one as well.

Ignore the other silly reviews. I felt my brain cells dying reading them.

Just go ahead and watch it. You'll enjoy it too.

The story is good. The dialogues are good. The characters are good. The art is good. And pretty much everything is good.

These specials are a strange, strange ride on a submarine that turns solid surroundings into liquid.

I was genuinely pretty flummoxed watching these specials. They're only 6 minutes apiece, so it's not like I was expecting anything amazing, though I can't say I was expecting three largely disconnected stories that function based on a kind of nonsense logic that I can't really get onboard with. They're interesting in that they give us some chances to see the odd character interaction that didn't appear in the main series, but honestly, the only scenes I really connected with narratively were the ones at the end where whoever was ... telling the story was chided for shoddy storytelling in some way, shape or form. That's kind of what these were: just an opportunity to try something zany and string it together with the throughline of involving a submarine that defies physics, a harpoon, and our cast of... heroes? Hard to say at times.

Really, what you come here to watch these for is the animation. It's definitely rougher than the series is known for, but that's kind of got its own appeal to it. The color palette is pared down, often to very basic extremes, and they definitely don't always go for fluid movement. I still dig it, even if I can't say this was reason enough to go through these episodes by itself. Might appeal to others more, hence the "Mixed Feelings."

Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei is one of the best anime series I have ever seen, thanks to its combination of a realistic story (for the most part), its original art and all the ideas it was trying to transmit. However, to my disappointment, the specials included with the DVD version were nothing like the 'main' series.

These 3 shorts episodes follow the main characters from the show telling some weird fantastic stories that feature themselves doing crazy stuff to solve an even crazier problem. It goes without saying that the stories they tell are neither realistic nor have anything to do with the plot of the ... TV series. To make things worse, most of the things in the stories aren't even explained and are resolved in a pretty stupid way wich leaves you with a ''What the hell did I just watch'' impression.

Overall, even if you're a fan of Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei I wouldn't recommend watching this, as these specials don't add anything at all to the series as there's no plot at all, and it won't leave you a good impression at all (something the ending of the TV series most likely did). To be honest, this just felt like a waste of time, but at least the episodes were short.

Scorings:

Story (1/10): the 'mini-stories' told in the episodes are pretty stupid and aren't even explained (if they were, they could had been at least somewhat interesting)

Art (7/10): the art is more or less the same as in the TV series, though there is much less symbolism, there are no 'real images' and it feels a bit duller in general.

Sound (4/10): while the voice acting is what we are used to, the conversations are pretty shallow and uninteresting, the sound effects less common (as in there aren't many), and the background music unimpressive. There are also no OP/ED themes.

Character (4/10): while the characters are the same as in the main series, there's no development and they do silly things just for the hell of it.

Enjoyment (4/10): the only thing that is enjoyable of the specials is that you can get some laughs because of the ridiculous stuff that happens, but other than that, the specials are forgettable.

Overall: 4/10