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**Episode 1 spoilers** Bocchi the rock is your everyday run of the mill slice of life with some tricky, quirky animation work andgeneric cast of characters designed for your insecure lonely ass to self insert into. The story is about as cliche as it gets for most anime, as the main character “Bocchi”, an extremely talented, attractive girl with terrible insecurities caused by seemingly nothing, meets people who force their way into her life through lazy writing and breaks her out of her shell to become a brand new person.

A great example of this is in the first episode, when the yellow-haired girl who no ... one can remember the name of, is wondering around looking for someone to harass and seeks out the main protagonist, bocchi, sitting on a swing with a guitar. She immediately drags her to the studio to begin playing without hesitation! You can only imagine how many people this girl would have harassed during her entire life if a guitar was all that was necessary to force a conversation. But of course this isn’t the case and the story had to begin somewhere by this unrealistic girl forcing it. It’s also very convenient that this girl somehow knows about her small Youtube channel and is a huge fan, even though she has 0 interest in playing guitar. As I mentioned before, this seems to be a big theme throughout the show. Bocchi seemingly does nothing but let everyone else improve her character for her, either through force, severe encouragement, insane coincidences or patience.

While bocchi’s friends do plenty for her, the writers also seem to force a lot of situations by giving bocchi huge personality changes, but only when it matters the most. Given the context of bocchi being totally unable to talk or socialise with people for 3 entire years, it's strange to think she suddenly opened up to the people she met for the first time an hour prior about her feelings towards playing in a band. Other animes that touch upon the subject of isolation and social anxiety handle scenes like this a lot better, such as NHK.
The anime uses social anxiety to be relatable to the target audience, but they can turn this off to progress the plot at any time, which feels inconsistent.

The animation, however, is where the show shines. A lot of other anime can be extremely lazy with things that the viewer doesn’t pay much attention to, such as the background and side characters. You can usually tell instantly if this character on the screen is going to be important to the story or not just because of how much effort the studio put into the character. However, even the characters that are only on the screen for a few seconds are given careful attention and design, which makes the entire world feel a bit more lived in and full. This is also true with the deep and vivid backgrounds in almost every shot, helping the viewer become immersed in the world they have created.

Comedy in the show is confusing. Almost all attempts at humour boil down to bocchi doing something weird, which is then followed up by a one liner from another character, further leading to weird bocchi behaviour which is supposed to make me laugh. Another attempt at humour is when characters freak out with bombastic animation sequences. If loud =/= funny to you, you won’t find it funny either. The most annoying part of the humour is how focused on Japan a great deal of the jokes are, how are we supposed to know what a tsuchinoko is? Yet they make an entire sequence of each joke like this, leaving most people outside Japan entirely confused.

"Bocchi the rock"’s main pitfall is simply being boring and inconsistent with its message and themes. All while being confusingly unfunny, with a plot and characters that force the story along. It is not recommended by me!

5/10

- thatsprettygood/agony218

Imagine those absolutely trashy animes that have 0 substance or any real interest and then you have some crazy idea to try to make them more interesting by dubbing the entire show with inappropriate jokes and some of the funniest voice acting ever.

Well that's where Ghost Stories comes in. I'll keep it short, this show is definitely worth a watch because there is simply nothing I've seen like it, while a lot of the show is pretty lacking such as the story and the art; the dub brings it back to something totally worth your time! I really enjoyed the series and I couldn't ... stop laughing.

I think this anime is best enjoyed as rather a different franchise altogether from the original anime, The way the show ended with "End of Evangelion" in 1997 was the best way to end the show in my opinion. But, I actually did enjoy watching these movies as it was quite interesting to see how another line of events would unfold.

I think the most major flaw however was how embarrassing most of those CG animations felt, I had myself questioning weather this was actually made in 2021 and not 2012! A lot of unnecessary fight scenes such as the opening 10 minutes which could ... have been used to give further detail on the missing points from the 3rd movie or even slightly more character development. Aside from the CG the animation was quite consistent and clean to watch. I don't really know why the trend of crappy CG made it into pretty much every action anime of recent years but that's a topic for another time.

I did find a lot of the characters charming and I was happy to see how Shinji developed his character and grew up into an adult. I was also pleased to learn a little bit more about Gendo. The character development was lacking in most areas but for Gendo and Shinji I think they did quite well.

I still would highly recommend the movies to any Evangelion fan but I wouldn't advise taking them too seriously or you will be disappointed.