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- BirthdayMar 21, 2003
- LocationTokyo-3
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Sep 7, 2023
Oh.
That fell off quick.
I really wish that I could recommend The Witch From Mercury to newcomers of Gundam, as the franchise is somewhat of a need for something that draws in a new generation of Gundam fans. Unfortunately, TWFM is not that show.
The main appeal of Gundam are the high stakes mecha fights and the nuanced political clashes between opposing factions, and well constructed characters that often clash with each other based on their differing worldviews. TWFM brings none of these things to the table. Of the two people who wrote this iteration of Gundam, I get the feeling that Nakanishi must have really
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enjoyed his time working on Kaguya-sama and Ookouchi must have suffered a bout of amnesia and forgotten his past experiences working on good mecha series. I suppose that Sunrise came to the conclusion that young people just don’t like mechas, and the only way to usher in a new viewer base was with yuri bait.
My expectations were high after watching the prologue- sick 2D mecha animations, cool sound design, and a world and setup that seemed fairly promising. Right after that must have been when Ookouchi suffered his severe head injury and forgot how to write. We are torn from high intensity stakes and an interesting setting with rife with tragedy and loss, into a bog standard highschool romcom setting. Characters with their own backstories and aspirations are replaced with cookie cutter -dere characters. Different iterations of Gundam can be criticized for different reasons, but partaking in the incestuous writing style that comes from romcoms copying romcoms copying romcoms is not one that should ever be present. This marks the first time the tone and feel of the show are completely thrown off course, which is something you should get used to should you choose to watch this atrocity.
This show doesn’t want to know what it wants to convey. It wants to appeal to every audience and in the end appeals to no audience. It can’t commit to anything. It can’t even commit to it’s pseudo lesbian and pseudo feminist themes. It wants to appeal to old time fans, yuri fans, western and eastern fans, and in the end it appeals to nobody (except maybe the sakuga community who’s been starved of 2D mechs for far too long). The Witch From Mercury could have been the series that brought in an audience who would be interested in Gundam for what actually makes Gundam special.
I find it baffling that anyone could get attached to these characters. There is absolutely nothing compelling about them. Even within the bastardized romcom world, how am I supposed to care about the relationships of characters when I don’t care about the characters to begin with? (It’s not like this can’t be done, go watch Eureka Seven for a great mecha romance anime) If someone asked me about Amuro Ray or Char Aznable, I would have a lot to say about those characters- who they are, what the care about, what their worldviews are, etc. If someone asked me about Suletta or Miorine, it would be more like “Suletta is the one from Mercury and pilots the Gundam. Miorine is that white haired girl who likes tomatoes.” These aren’t the sort of characters that act and think in their own unique way. These are characters who will bend and break in order to act out whatever the script requires of them to do, character consistency be damned. It’s boring, tropey character writing, and there’s no amount of good animation or music that can save you from that.
Speaking of good animation and music, the mecha fights were pretty to look at and hear. I wonder why I didn’t care about what the outcome was going to be… might be because it didn’t matter either way, why would I give a fuck who Miorine marries? Most of the fights in this series are stupid practice battles with either no stakes, or ones that had been lazily shoehorned in about 20 minutes prior because the writers realized that they had gone too long without a mecha fight. It really would have been nice if all those awesome 2D mecha animations had been used over on Hathaway’s flash instead, but whatever.
I know it’s an overused word in today’s discourse about writing in fiction, but Suletta is a Mary Sue character, through and through. I don’t really care about that too much, but it’s a symptom of a larger disease: the infiltration of the modern western writing style. The final episode is a great example of this. A lot of people forgave the 11 episodes of slow tedious garbage because they got to see some blood and explosions in the final episode. I felt like I was watching a JJ Abrams movie, with lots of movement and flashy shit on screen to distract you from the fact that the story is a hot mess. Add in the shiny lighting effects and play the dramatic music and make the audience have a pavlovian response so they think that it’s a cool moment. “Oh, you see this gore? Bet you didn’t see that coming, did ya?” Gone are the days of substance, of the large scale space operas, spanning across the galaxy with nuanced politics and interesting military strategies. This is the era of meaningless spectacle.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jul 6, 2023
The day that I’m posting this onto MAL marks the 25th anniversary of the airing of Serial Experiments Lain’s first episode back in 1998. The passing of 25 years does not make this anime any less relevant or meaningful to modern audiences. As time has passed, Serial Experiments Lain has become more understandable and even more impactful. It remains at the top of the anime medium in its ability to deliver a purposeful, thought provoking story.
While it wasn’t nearly as significant as it is now, in 1998 the internet was obviously still very widespread. Lain observed the online culture existing at the time, and had
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some foresight as to the direction the internet was heading. This observation of the culture led to Lain’s creator and writers to make some pretty imaginative predictions about the internet’s future, most of which turned out to be true. However, the value of Lain does not lie solely in its ability to predict the batshit insane modern internet culture as well as it did, but also in the ways the characters (and the viewers) struggle with the different philosophical issues that arise with the existence of this new technological culture.
The world of Serial Experiments Lain is meant to feel different from the real world- not because of its setting, but because of the atmosphere that covers that setting. A concrete jungle of power lines, moody art direction and music, emotionally detached characters, and an almost complete lack of nature all lead to the world of Lain feeling unfamiliar and alienating. This feeling of unfamiliarity becomes frightening when about halfway through the series you start being able to associate the character’s feelings with your own. Suddenly being able to connect with these characters that had previously felt so inhuman can make the viewer question themselves on some levels.
Despite the detachment the characters have, the way the characters behave feel much more human than they do in almost any other anime. In a similar fashion to how character writing was done in Eva, the characters all have different worldviews, emotions, and motivations, but they aren’t just out on display for us to see. Serial Experiments Lain doesn’t treat its viewers like idiots. A character doesn’t need to scream for us to know that they’re scared, or cry for us to know that they’re sad- we are able to see little bits and pieces of these characters trying to stifle their emotions, and in doing so make the characters become more genuine and their emotions more impactful. (Note: Chiaki Konaka says that he didn’t even see Eva until after having finished writing Lain’s 4th episode.)
I apologize in advance for how many quotes I’m putting in these next few paragraphs.
In the year 2000, Anime Jump Magazine did an interview with the creator/ producer of Serial Experiments Lain, Yasuyuki Ueda, where they asked him about the reception of the show and a few other questions. Upon reading this interview, what really struck me as odd was Ueda’s view of technology and its impact on the youth population, mainly expressed through his answers to 2 questions. The first question was if the reason the main character was a 14 year old girl was because he thought that “the wave of new technology is hard on kids”. Ueda responds, “For me, I don't think that it's hard on them at all. Because, if you think about it, that particular age is when kids absorb the most, and it's not a burden. In fact, kids learn the most at that age. It's hard to understand what kids at that age are thinking at times, so I think 14 would be the perfect age. I wanted to depict the younger generation, a generation with a different set of values.”
The interviewer then asks Ueda if he thinks that kids should have phones/ computers, etc.
“Yes, I think it's a good thing! When you look at it from the perspective of when I was a kid and I used to play video games, I got yelled at by my mother, "Don't play video games when you could read a book or go out and earn some money, or go to college..." But that kind of value changes, since now I'm grown up-- in my late 20s/ early 30s. My values are such that I grew up playing games, so looking at these kids spending so much time on the net doesn't present too much of a problem with me. I think it's actually better because they get so much extra information. Kids today learn more, way more, than kids in previous generations did.”
What makes his stance on technology so strange to me is that he did in fact “depict the younger generation”, and that depiction was emotionally distant characters who relied on technology (and drugs in some cases) in order to feel anything. It’s interesting to me how perfectly well he was able to understand the effect of technology on the youth, and yet completely miss the mark in terms of whether it was a good thing. Part of me thinks that this was just Ueda observing how the world was, and choosing to view it through an optimistic lens, which if true, makes sense to me.
It’s true as time goes on, we have increasingly more access to information than we did in the past. It is also true that kids absorb information better at a younger age. But what Ueda doesn’t account for is the choices in information that kids choose to intake. Just because a kid has the ability to look at educational content on the computer, doesn’t mean that they’re going to, especially when that same computer has access to video games, billions of hours of youtube videos, and countless other cheap dopamine rushes yielding diminishing returns. Hindsight is 20/20, and 25 years later we are able to see the millions of braindead idiots who grew up with technology- grew up with unfettered access to all kinds of information- still have the intelligence and attention span of a desensitized 9 year old child.
It’s this hindsight that changes the way that I view Lain from the way the fans at the time did. To me, Serial Experiments Lain is an omen, a warning we did not heed. We keep blurring the lines between what is and isn’t real, and eventually we won’t be able to tell the difference. At the beginning, Lain’s interest in the Wired was a visibly good thing. She was able to connect with people in the wired despite being unable to do so in the real world, but because of this, she begins to prefer the world of the Wired over reality. Over the course of the series, the Lain in the real world and the Lain in the wired become increasingly different from each other. The Lain in the wired starts to want to gain influence and the Lain in the real world becomes even more detached and unfeeling.
Serial Experiments Lain artfully keeps its philosophical questions open ended. The show doesn’t jump to any conclusions, and it doesn’t want the viewer to, either. Ueda wanted Lain to be seen in a million different ways, and then discussed. In the aforementioned interview, he stated that he wanted a “war of ideas”, where fans are able to better understand other people through conflict, and learn more about themselves in the process. Through Serial Experiments Lain, Ueda is encouraging a deeper level of human connection.
“I'm glad that everyone likes Lain! But at the same time, I kind of wonder, do people over here really understand Lain? The way I perceive things, the way Japanese viewers perceived Lain would be different from how Americans viewed it. But when I was in L.A., the fans I met seemed so very Japanese in their perception... and that kind of isn't what I wanted, because like I said earlier, I wanted there to be a clash between cultures. I wanted American fans to see Lain and think, "No! That's screwed up! That's so wrong!"”
I’m not sure if it’s because I’m American or if it's just because of the generational differences in worldview, but from what I understand, the way that fans perceived Lain at the time (I need to read these reviews) is a feeling of (I can only find English reviews from back in the day, but since Ueda said that they were basically the same, I guess it's okay)
The appeal of the internet to an introvert= Lain’s ability to connect with people online despite her crippling aversion to human interaction.
For a world where everyone is connected, doesn’t it feel a bit lonely?
I’m a bit of a pessimist in my outlook on the future of humanity. I only see the human experience becoming increasingly muddled and confusing. In spite of this, I find solace in works like Lain that act as a sort of presage to this bleak future. When I hear some San Francisco tech nut or engineering grad student jabbering on about how the world is going to become a better place because of technology, my cynical self just feels tired. The world is becoming a less and less fulfilling place to be in, and part of me just wants to stop struggling and accept that. When every day feels like a step closer to becoming a sci-fi dystopian setting, at least I can listen to duvet as I watch the world crash down around me.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Dec 28, 2022
This review comes from the perspective of an individual who would not call themself a manga supremacist:
MAPPA’s adaptation of Chainsaw man was packed with all kinds of talented animators, layout artists and storyboarders, but none of that matters when the people in charge deliberately make the decision to prevent the show from becoming too “extreme or peculiar”. The show’s producer Keisuke Seshimo was the main one responsible for preventing the anime from becoming a faithful adaptation of the manga. Chainsaw Man is an extreme and peculiar manga, and that’s what the fans of the manga love about it, so to
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deliberately avoid adapting that aspect is a complete disregard to the fans of the manga and to the manga itself. Seshimo’s thought process was that if it looked too extreme, anime viewers would find it too jarring- A thought process that I both disagree with and fail to understand, seeing as how the manga already had a massive following who had fallen in love with Fujimoto’s weirdness.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is an example of a recent anime with an extreme style that hit the mainstream. Anime fans generally aren’t afraid of radical styles- they aren’t made uncomfortable by things that they are unfamiliar with, which is what makes anime such an incredible medium. While obviously there is a large number of fans who never venture beyond the genre of battle shonens, creators in the anime medium are able to produce some incredibly unique stories due to the openness of anime fans to new things. Seshimo's decision was to go against the fans who had taken an interest in Fujimoto’s unique style and fallen in love with it, and instead strip the manga bare of any unique characteristics it once had and turn it into a show where its defining traits were “Look how hot Makima is! Look how realistic this looks!”
The show’s director, Ryu Nakayama had his hands tied due to the producer essentially neutering the anime’s potential. He decided that the adaptation was going to be an incredibly grounded one- an approach which is completely incompatible with a manga like Chainsaw Man. The hyper-realistic adaptation that we have ended up with is both a misrepresentation of the manga and a misuse of animation as a medium. The anime is rampant with CGI and rotoscoping, with the goal seemingly being to make everything look as realistic as possible. What’s the point of using animation as a medium if the goal is simply to imitate live-action as much as possible? What is the point of making the layouts and color schemes as lifelike as possible when the art style for the manga is so extreme and rough, and the cover illustrations having such bright and intense color schemes? Decisions from the higher ups were what hindered what could have been an incredibly unique anime and handicapped it to become the overhyped battle shonen that we get every fucking season.
Other than pretty much every single fight scene and iconic moment from the manga, one time that this hyper-realistic look became incredibly clear that it just did not work with the story it was attempting to adapt was in episode 9. The scene I’m talking about is when Makima starts killing off the people who kidnapped Denji. In the stylized look and vibe of the manga, this scene was a super bizarre one, people were exploding and you’re not quite sure what’s going on- it’s a little shocking, but mainly it demonstrates how powerful Makima has. In the anime adaptation, however, this scene just feels like you’re rewatching Elfen Lied- trying absurdly hard to be edgy. I don’t feel like Fujimoto was aiming for an edgy scene that appeals to emo 14 year old boys, and that wasn’t what that scene felt like in the manga. The way it was translated into animation, however, definitely has 14 year old kids losing their minds.
It’s kind of frustrating to see little snippets of things that show more of an understanding of the source material than the actual show. The two examples I have in mind are the manga trailers, (especially the one for volume 9), and the third ed. The third ending with the Maximum the Hormone song (idk who the director for this was, but they definitely understood the source material better than Nakayama) was like a sneak peak to what this adaptation could have been. Maximum the Hormone’s ability to switch from deafening screamo to calm and quiet is akin to Fujimoto’s ability to switch back and forth from a comedic moment to a serious one so quickly. The colors and style match the essence of the manga incredibly well. This is what chainsaw man could and should have looked like.
While I have enjoyed most of the endings, I haven’t been a fan of the approach of having a different ending song for every episode- especially after having fallen in love with the third ending. What I like about opening and ending songs for anime is that over time, your brain starts building a connotation between the song and the vibe of the show. You’re unable to do this with the ending for Chainsaw Man though, as each song is only played once.
A problem that has been consistent with MAPPA has been their lazy line quality, an issue that continues to bug me a great deal. I remember watching Banana Fish a few years back, and while I was enjoying it, I was also confused as to why the characters all seemed so… lifeless. The problem, as I found out later, was the line quality. It was incredibly noticeable when MAPPA took over AOT from Studio WIT. The line quality in the first 3 seasons made the characters feel so unique and interesting to look at, and while I have enjoyed MAPPA’s adaptation of AOT a great deal, a lot of that magic was lost during the switch. The lines that had previously varied in line weight were all now just flat, boring, uniform lines, all the exact same size. It might just be a personal thing, but seeing this problem continue into Chainsaw Man (It’s gotten better since Banana Fish, but it’s still bland) really killed the appeal in the character designs.
Prior to the release of the first episode, I was excited to see all of the incredibly talented individuals who were going to be working on this project. Yuusuke Takeda was the art director on countless great shows, and Hiroshi Seko was a talented scriptwriter who had proven his talent on a ton of other anime. One name that I was particularly excited to see was Kensuke Ushio. Part of my excitement came from how incredibly well he was able to match the insanity that was the mood of Devilman Crybaby. But unfortunately, composers, art directors, and scriptwriters all have to work with the director and producer, and when the end goal of the director is to make a down to earth, realistic adaptation, it doesn’t allow for those to do very much, in spite of their phenomenal aptitude in their creative field. (Though Ushio has been one of the few rays of sunshine in the failure of this adaptation.)
I don’t usually get that worked up when I see a failed adaptation come out, but for me, Chainsaw Man is just another symptom of the larger sickness that is the current state of the anime industry. The industry has no shortage of people who want to put time and effort into making something special. They aren’t able to however, due to the producers keeping them on such an absurdly short creative leash, and forcing them to mass produce content- quality and humane work conditions be damned. Soulless, unimaginative producers should not be the ones in charge of what does and does not work in the animation art form. Producers are experts with money, and when they are given too much control in a production, money is going to become the main concern, not the quality of the work. Corners are cut, fans’ expectations are betrayed, and we get more of the garbage that we’ve been getting today.
In the current landscape of the anime industry, KyoAni is one of the few studios where the animators are able to put in the time and care into their work. KyoAni is a true artist’s animation studio. Everything is done in-house, they’re the producers for their own work, and don’t have to rely on an inconsistent lineup of freelance animators to create it. They are more concerned with the quality of their final product, not the monetary implications that might come with it. MAPPA, on the other hand, is a producer’s studio. Choices are made based on what is marketable and what is efficient. The animators, storyboarders, composers, and in this case even the director are all slaves to the choices of the producers who associate the success of an anime by how much money it makes.
I’ll end my tirade with a quote from the incredibly skilled animator Shingo Tamagawa: “There’s a discrepancy with the recent trends, where you’re asked how to generate profits, or when told the process is cumbersome as it cannot be streamlined. Those arguments tend to win too often. I understand they’re important, but I’m not making animation in order to be efficient. I make animation to create new things and generate new emotions that I haven’t felt before. I believe everybody has that joy inside of them. I think the whole industry could be happier if we could pivot in that direction, just a little more.”
If you enjoyed the anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man, I know this review will seem overdramatic and maybe a little unfair, and I know that it is. Most of my disapproval stems from the choices of the producer and the implications it has for the industry, so I don’t mean to kill anybody’s fun. Everyone’s taste is different, and if you liked the show, you liked the show. (And maybe you should check out the manga)
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Apr 25, 2021
Animation
God tier Ufotable animation with a few horrible cgi scenes- not enough to detract from the incredible animation though.
Sound
Yuki Kajiura is a goddess. In my opinion, the soundtrack in the movie is even better than the soundtrack for season one.
Characters
This is my main problem with this movie. I thought that coming out of the first season that the characters would develop in the upcoming movie. Nope. Every last character in this is tropey, bland, and just poorly made characters. Tanjiro has no drive to him, not even the stereotypical shonen "I fight for my friends". I think he’s best summed up when that person goes
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into Tanjiro’s mind and looked around and was like “whoa. there is literally nothing here.” Rengoku was an awful character with no personality. He was put up as the "blunt" kind of character, and then in a five minute flashback they tried to make him some deep character that you were emotionally involved in. His death was a joke. I thought that maybe Tanjiro would develop as a character when he saw the flashbacks with his family being all like "why would you leave us to die" but this opportunity for character growth was not taken at all, and was brushed off to the side with a "My family would never say that!" No character depth at all.
Story
This also comes back to the characters. Most of the situations that happen in this story aren't results of the character's choices driving the plot forward, they just kinda happen. I think the mangaka looked at what was popular with season 1, and just catered to the audience with that. "Oh, people liked Nezuko? Let's throw in some quirky cute Nezuko scenes. People liked Inosuke? Let's give an unreasonable amount of screentime to Inosuke doing goofy Inosuke things that contributes absolutely nothing to the plot. One last little thing that bugged the shit out of me was the tryhard edgy scenes in the flashbacks. Tanjiro slashing his neck to wake up out of the dream world and the family's death scene were just trying so damn hard to be edgy that it just came off as funny to me.
Enjoyment
I thought that after I saw the Tale of Princess Kaguya and the Heaven's Feel III movie in theaters (an actually good Ufotable movie) that audiences at anime showings in theaters were actually civilized. I was wrong. Except for maybe Endgame, this was the worse theater experience of my life. Some concepts seem so simple that they wouldn't need to be explained, but I guess that common theater etiquette isn't one of those concepts for anime fans. If you're in a theater, don't scream at the screen, don't have a fucking aneurism when a slightly funny scene happens, and don't try to sing the hinokami song incredibly loudly when it comes on. The combination of the theater experience with Mugen Train just being an overall disappointing movie just left a bad taste in my mouth.
I think that the appeal of Demonslayer towards mainstream audiences is the amazing animation, cool fights, and sick music (especially episode 19) I really think that if any other studio got this manga and adapted it, it wouldn't be known in mainstream audiences nearly as much. Without Ufotable, Demonslayer wouldn't be what it is. You can kinda see this if you look at the manga score in comparison to the anime score- and I think the only reason the manga score is even that high is because of the loyal anime fans. I've read up to the movie in the manga and it just was so incredibly boring that I have no idea why people would read ahead of the anime when the anime adaptation is the only worthwhile part of the franchise. Walking out of the theaters it just kinda made me sad that such incredible production values were wasted on such garbage source material. I'm just hoping for the last Fate route to be adapted by Ufotable- maybe that will make me feel better.
Of course, you're allowed to like what you like, and if you did like it I'm not telling you to change your opinion, but this is just why I didn't like this movie
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Apr 14, 2021
This show is probably one of the ones that I have changed my opinion on the most while I was watching it. For me, it wasn't until around episode 40 that I really liked the show. I think one of the reasons for this was that because this show has a lot of concepts in the world that (while kinda explained) aren't really explained all that well. I was lost in words like trapar waves and scrub coral, and didn't come to a full understanding of what those words actually meant until near the end.
The characters in Eureka Seven are for the most part
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very good. Most of the crew of the Gekkostate are characters that feel like real people. You hate them at times and you love them at others. The relationships between Renton and Eureka, Holland and Talho, Charles and Ray, and Anemone and Dominic were probably the best part of the show for me. I had the biggest flip from hating a character to loving them with Anemone, I literally wanted to strangle her until near the end there. My main complaints with characters are the Dewey, the Agehas, and the kids on the Gekkostate. Dewey I found to just be a bland and boring antagonist. The Agehas seemed to have been an attempt of the "oh my god look at me I'm incapable of feeling human emotions" character type but their existence just seemed so forced to me. And finally, my real problem, the kids on the Gekkostate. I fucking despised these little shits. I get that they're supposed to be annoying at times, but even after the point where their characters are supposed to get better, I still wanted to dropkick those kids.
On the animation side there really isn't anything to complain about at all. Bones is an amazing studio obviously, and they nailed it with Eureka Seven. Every time there was one of those falling from the sky scenes with Renton and Eureka, I felt like I was in the sky too. From my knowledge, this is one of the first mecha show Bones had done, and they killed it.
Overall this show was definitely worth watching even if sitting through the first half wasn't as enjoyable. By the time I reached the end, I loved the characters, the story, the beautiful light from the second summer of love, and the emotionally moving music that accompanied it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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