Back to dgw's Profile dgw's Profile

[This is based on watching the official copy on 22/7's YouTube channel.]

CGI animation not quite synced with the music. Many dance moves seemed to occur noticeably early or late compared to the audio rhythm.

Poor audio mix. The (likely MIDI) instrumentals were okay, not great. Vocal mix had quite a bit of distortion or clipping, especially when multiple voices sang together. Additionally, the balance between instrumental and vocals was off—especially for solo vocals, which were far too soft.

The song itself is pretty standard J-pop, neither amazing nor awful. It just isn't presented in its best light by this PV.

This review is based on the version screened in American cinemas during July, 2018. I may revise this review if I get a chance to see it again in the future and take proper notes. Slight spoilers for the first 10-15 minutes, maybe.

Uchiage Hanabi was simultaneously engrossing, cringe-worthy, beautiful, and shallow. It's quite the accomplishment in its own way.

The art is gorgeous… with the unfortunate exception of some truly awful CGI scenes. (One of these, showing a staircase at the school, is used repeatedly throughout the film). When SHAFT puts in the effort to deliver a properly animated shot, it shows. Unfortunately, it also shows ... when they don't. I didn't really notice the character stiffness mentioned in other reviews I've read on MyAnimeList or Trakt, but I definitely felt that CGI was overused. With that in mind, I decided to award the art 8/10 based mostly on the non-CG segments, so as not to let the CGI drag the traditional animation down too much.

I have no doubt that the soundtrack contributed immensely to my enjoyment of the visuals. DAOKO is now on my radar solely because of this film. (Kosaki Satoru was already familiar from his work on the Suzumiya Haruhi franchise, OreImo, and others.) With no aural equivalent of CGI to detract from its score, the music earns a solid 9/10. Foley and environments sounded above average to me, so that doesn't hurt either.

However, I'm afraid that's where my praise must end. The story and characters were beyond shallow, earning just 3/10 and a pathetic 1/10, respectively.

I couldn't keep track of any of the school boys at all. Even Narimichi blended in with the group for the first third or so until the plot ramped up, and without him around the other four guys were just interchangeable cutouts to me. Nazuna was just a generic moeblob with no personality to speak of. Her desire to run away from home seems unmotivated by anything in particular. It's just there to kick off the journey, much as the boys' conversations about whether fireworks are flat or round merely give them a reason to walk to the lighthouse.

Sadly, it's also not much of a story at all. I would go even further than other reviewers and say that the whole film can be summed up in two words: "What if…?" That's the only character motivation I saw, and the only thing driving the story (if one can call it that) forward. I was planning to watch the live-action film at some point after this, and I probably still will—but I'm not excited to do so any more. Without stunning anime visuals to lean on, I guess the soundtrack is all I can hope for.¹

The most disappointing thing about the story is something all too common in the anime world, and in cinema generally: wasted potential. What could have been an existential, philosophical reflection on the nature of reality turned out to be just another shallow teen romance. Steins;Gate, this is not.

Hell, I'm not even sure if he got the girl or not. That ending could spawn an entire review of its own, but I've prattled on enough already.

Despite the story and characters, I did find the ride worthy of an 8/10 Enjoyment score, borne on the backs of the art² and sound departments alone.

Overall score: 5.8 (arithmetic mean of the ratings given to each element)

1. And maybe a super-cute lead actress…
2. DIGITAL@SHAFT cuts excluded

A lightly edited (and formatted) version of this review is on Trakt: https://trakt.tv/comments/181674

I don't care what my average episode rating was (not that I was rating episodes waaaaaaaay back when I started watching this show…three years ago). Captain Earth is just meh.

The pacing is screwy. Almost every episode has at least one head-scratcher. There's wasted potential all over the place. But instead of using its potential, the show screwed around with teen angst and spent a ton of time showing mechs "expanding" in an overly complicated space-based linear assembly line…because what we need in mecha anime is definitely mechs that don't make sense.

Feels like I can't write a review without tripping over plot holes every five words. ... I said it in a single-episode comment, but I'll say it again in general: the environment in this show is far too accommodating to the protagonists. Everything always works out just so and they succeed at fixing whatever the problem of the week is. There's always a new prototype Impacter that's not done being tested yet but is available for Teppei or whoever to launch at a moment's notice and use to save the day. I guess you might like (parts of) this show if you're a fan of deus ex machina writing, since there are an awful lot of cases where the perfect gadget (or Akari's hacking skills) just so happen to address the problem at hand.

And again, pacing… ugh. This show spends so much time on nonsense, slice-of-life filler that barely even advances the plot. There are tons of long, dialogue-heavy expository scenes that, well… if you know about screenwriting, you know about "show, don't tell". This show tells. A lot.

So yeah. Meh.

On the plus side, MAL says it took me precisely 1111 days to watch this show, so that's cool I guess.

Ordinarily I don't feel the need to review anime. If something is great, chances are someone else has already discovered it and published that fact. But Glasslip drove me to join the crowd warning against watching this pathetic excuse for a romance/slice-of-life show with a touch of fantasy/supernatural.

The reasons why this show was terrible have been well covered by other reviewers, but in short:
* The characters are annoying, flat, and/or unmemorable.
* There is essentially zero character development.
* Again and again, plot elements are introduced only to have exactly zero effect on the plot or characters.
* Oh, wait, there is no plot. Or at least, the ... "plot" is simply a series of scenes stitched together with no particular ordering to them.
* At random points, the animation (when there is animation, and not just heads with moving mouths) goes into an overly artistic freeze-frame mode for no good reason. Pretty? Yes, but it's not even relevant to the story (see previous point).

The list goes on. Which is pathetic. P.A. Works is perfectly capable of turning out well-written, well-animated, enjoyable anime that can also stand as meritorious works of storytelling. They did it with Nagi no Asukara last year, certainly. This time, though, they went with an original story, and they seem to have skimped on the writing budget.

Glasslip was just…disappointing, for a number of reasons. It could have been good. It could have been great. But at this point, the only reason I can think of for watching it is the beautiful animation. With no characters to speak of and a plot that spends the entire season spinning its wheels, there's nothing else going for it.

Log Horizon… There's something about this show that just made me want to watch it. I'm a sucker for the whole "trapped in a video game" scenario, and I guess after the disappointment I felt in Sword Art Online I was hoping for something like that, but better.

It's been a long journey following Shiroe and company around Akihabara, Eastal, and so on. At the end, where I now stand, the only thing that really sticks out is the last episode, and how a certain character's actions (no spoilers!) undid a lot of my enjoyment right there. It was enough to drag several of my sub-ratings ... down, and pulled my planned rating from a 9 to an 8.

Fortunately there's a second season on the horizon (sorry), so maybe that will restore my faith in the writers.