|
|
![]()
Jan 13, 2025
‘Greed’ is an obscure OVA directed, storyboarded, created, and designed by the somewhat legendary animation director and designer Tomonori Kogawa, famous for his character designs and animation direction on the classic Yoshiyuki Tomino anime Densetsu Kyojin Ideon, Sentou Mecha Xabungle, and Seisenshi Dunbine. Kogawa has an impressively large catalog of work spanning decades but the 80’s were his era, and Greed, being released in January of 1985, is one of the very first products of the new OVA format.
Greed is a fantasy adventure featuring a cast with Kogawa’s typical eccentric characters with odd hair styles and colors. The protagonist Kyle Lid has an adventurously voluminous
...
and windswept greyish purple mass atop his head. Curiously, this anime takes after Tomino by using similar strange naming conventions, while it is in high fantasy tradition to create exotic and original names, ones that appear in Greed like Karlten Mimau and L'arp Lip would seem to have being deliberately silly near the heart of their intention.
Kyle’s possibly futuristic looking headband is an early tell that Greed is a fantasy-tech anime. In a later sequence, Kyle fights again some mechanical giant chicken shaped creature with thin legs and a blocky frame, head, and tail that make it look like it’s made of old Macintosh computers. This fight sequence and others are impressive such as the long chase from a massive pink orc man. Beautiful moments of animetic abstraction are used such as harsh white backlighting, sliding shoujo bubbles, and even sliding particle backgrounds over a characters unpainted face, a trademark of Tomino’s. The music also features classical dramatic anime ballads and epic mecha fight music, and the characters have personalities that are mostly serious with some atsui flare and occasional dopey moments of expression for comic relief.
Greed is a fine fantasy romp and most of its strength is on part of its unique character of animation and design. It can be found in lofi quality with fansubs.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
What did you think of this review?
Nice
 0
Love it
 0
Funny
 0
Confusing
 0
Well-written
 0
Creative
 0Show all
![]()
Dec 7, 2024
An ambitious, perilous space opera full of emotional and unstable teenagers. The oft repeated “Lord of the Flies in space” is apt.
Infinite Ryvius takes place in the distant future where man has colonized space, it follows a group of about six hundred youths who board a large space vessel by the name of Ryvius to be trained in becoming cadets, technicians, and various other starship positions. Things go awry, and the ship is stranded with its communications disabled. It's up to the inexperienced trainees on the vessel to make the journey back to Earth while conducting politics, forming a makeshift society with its own economics,
...
and trying to maintain governance and order, but really ends up chronicling a prolonged procession of failings and social collapse. On the largest scale of the conflict, the young commanders of the Ryvius use their one mecha to defend themselves from the military campaign of an Earth government's bureau's conspiracy to have the Ryvius eliminated. A lot of the anime’s space battles serve to spur internal conflict in the Ryvius, aside from this reason these fights take up a lot for the anime are only so necessary. Inside the ship, political strife and power struggle emerges between the head operators of the Ryvius with the relatively technically inept masses on the ship, this paired with the increasing resource scarcity over the few months of the Ryvius’ stranding leads to unrest and violence. On the private level, character drama plays out between friends, lovers, and enemies, rivals, etc. and on the internal level characters face introspection toward maturity, social role, and inadequacy. Considering the juvenile subjects, there's much deliberate naivety to the dialogue and actions. Dramatic points are often focused on emotional outbursts, lashing out at others, tearfully breaking down in fear, or wallowing in a pathetic state. This is all expected given their ages and the perilous situation, but it nonetheless is a dramatic style that perhaps achieves a mean of Uchuu Senkan Yamato and 90’s Shounen manga.
Ryvius, being a Sunrise anime of the late 90’s, is done mostly in cel with lots of digitization. The animation is kept reserved and economical, story and content are a tad stretched thin for 26 episodes as there’s notable recap but with thoughtful integration. However, it is wrong to say Ryvius isn’t intensive as often episodes directly follow each other, the cast is large and some important characters are absent for whole stretches of the anime, and the last episode creatively calls back to the first. As for setting, rarely is Earth shown in the anime outside the first episode, most of the anime is set on the Ryvius which has a dull metallic grey and black look to it. Locations on the Ryvius like the deck, barracks, and dining hall are realized well in terms of fidelity and spacing but aren’t terribly memorable.
Ryvius is the precise sort of original, ambitious, and relatively dark type of anime to be expected from Studio Sunrise during creative boom of TV anime following Evangelion. It’s of interest as an anime detailing a long and slow social collapse and political emergence as well as the new 90’s approach to space operas but is not stunningly iconic in images, design, or character.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
![]()
Nov 10, 2024
Working through the angst of a lone young artist and reshaping ambition through the relation to another creative, one of a vulnerable and sensitive nature. Look Back is the grounded story of the meeting of two young manga artists, Fujino and Kyomoto, and the dramatic turns of their lives together.
The story is believable to the point of an creating an impression of autobiographical. The anime follows at a blitzing pace, years of the two’s lives are truncated into a few scenes of only a few minutes each. Sometimes montage feels like the ordinary state of the film. The boarding is at times overbearing and cuts
...
too rapidly for the sake of its own weight. Take the scene of Fujino and Kyomoto having their talk at the paddy at dusk, thoughtful yet overdone images communicating disconnect are paired with rapid cutting in a way reminiscent of the style of Naoko Yamada’s sentimental film Koe no Katachi. Continuing with the overbearing sentimentality is the score, every song has the same high pitched reverberating sounds and sad piano. It’s the sort of music that plays in inspirational commercials and what I’d imagine a basic teenage girl would write poetry to. The music is monotonous and used often, it personally greatly brought down every scene where it played. What may have been assumed to be a strong character or relationship study, surprisingly doesn’t feature much intimate interaction between its only two characters. Thoughtful moments of emotional subtext and symbolism in its composition help but the film rushes past these images almost indifferently. Even during its most dramatic moment, it doesn’t carry a sense of stillness. As for the general directing style, while not breaking reality much outside of the expressionistic manga-come-to-life segments which are used for punctuation and juxtaposition, the film has a bit of a sense of cinematic realism but nothing doggedly consistent. Regularly are short moments of showy ballistic background animation and full animation character acting used but largely it’s not submerged in cinematism thanks to its refreshing avoidance of plaguelike digital effects and CG, although the film is not free of the depictions of ugly technologies such as smartphones, photoshop, and drawing tablets. The art direction sometimes has a look of painterly impressionism but with mixed looking penciling effects added. While the art direction was inconsistent, falling into a cheap looking digitality at times, it overall has a unique look, much better than average for 2024.
Look Back is imaginably anime of the year with its brief, grounded story and relatively high-quality art and animation. However, it’s almost too truncated to make a point, nearly unrelenting in sentimentality, and light on impactful dramatic images.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
![]()
Sep 7, 2024
Kono Oto Tomare follows a club of koto players focused on making their way to the nationals. It follows the tried-and-true sports anime formula fit with the standard friendship and teamwork bells and whistles topped off with melodrama.
The story begins with the koto club not yet formed, the president and lone member, Takezou Kurata, has a problem with a group of bully delinquents occupying the clubroom. Kurata later has an encounter with the scary delinquent Chika Kudou, who shows interest in joining the club to the surprise of Kurata. To prove this, Kudou kicks the other delinquents out. Kudou, jarringly, doesn’t have the look
...
of a delinquent, he’s got the look of a blonde pretty boy, and this is sold by the shoujo style of the designs. With no knowledge of the series and some genre savviness, he could be mistaken for the playboy archetype. It may be objected that this appearance was taken up as Kudou was looking to clear up his image, to this, Kudou’s maintained delinquent manner of speech and rudeness stand in opposition. If the blonde hair is supposed to be dyed then why hasn’t he stopped dying it, it could’ve led to a visual detail that sells believability. Anyhow, Kudou’s strife with the delinquent trio comes to a head when the three scheme a plot to attack Kurata when he is turned, framing Kudou as the perpetrator as he arrives at the scene in the hopes that he’ll be expelled. This is a foolish plan that shouldn’t initially work but does and causes Kurata to vouch for Kudou’s innocence before an understanding principal and an unfair assistant zealously in favor of expulsion in what is a scene that is all too wrote.
Previously, Kudou was framed for destroying the koto’s of his grandfather, this doesn’t make sense for him to be considered a suspect as he was eagerly being taught the koto by his grandfather. Two officers brought to the crime scene get into an argument, one officer takes hold of Kudou’s arms behind him, and to Kudou’s excuses, says, “even if it wasn’t you, you caused this to happen, didn’t you”. The question of how the nameless, faceless officer knows enough about Kudou to know that he didn’t commit the crime may be charitably dismissed, but it’s unclear how it would still be his fault when he was supposedly trying to turn his life around.
One of the greatest draws of Kono Oto Tomare is that, in contrast to other popular modern musical anime, focuses on a refined classical art, as opposed to pop idols or pop rock or whatever other contemporary form of music. The anime brings attention to the disconnect young high school students feel concerning the historied art form. How many anime with even so much as tangentially mentioned koto clubs even exist out there? Strange then is to focus the conflict of the first episode so centrally around an archetype as anachronistic as the violent delinquent punk. This opener is exemplary of the remainder of the series, particularly its bluntness and contrivance.
Over the course of the series, the members of the club gather up and overcome their personal struggles with empathy and the power of their kizuna. As an example, in one touching resolution, Kurata sternly yet caringly reaches out to a scornful bully girl, knowing she is distressed. Later, a prodigy girl receives an episode of heavy melodrama detailing a backstory. The prodigy’s mother was cold and unaffectionate to her and only prioritized her practicing the koto. It’s basic, archetypal, and functional.
One thing the first episode doesn’t establish is the performance scenes. They’re kept short and have the Shigatsu no Uso effect, that is, the offensive tendency of a musical anime to distract from the performance and deviate from optimal visual storytelling by excessively expositing obvious information. Not only does this practice express in words what could be expressed by character emotion, acting, framing, silent images of anything, and perhaps most importantly, the uncompromised composition and how it is played, but it’s almost disrespectful to the artform the anime sought to give the spotlight.
As for the production, Kono Oto Tomare is, as to be expected for a 2019 seasonal by a no name studio, visually ugly. Art direction is cheap and unappealing, animation and detail are kept low, however the boarding/ directing is usually adequate, bringing forth dramatic moments by using negative space to draw focus, sometimes light amounts of impressionism, or the occasional modern looking postcard memory. The general look of the character designs is generic shoujo with low discernibility. To conclude, Kono Oto Tomare is a wholesome, juvenile story, lacking in subtlety or creativity but plentiful in “protect your nakama” moments and melodramatic gestures.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
|
