Reviews

Prompted by a pretty positive review in http://animeyearbyyear.wordpress.com/2014/07/24/2001-2/ , I decided to check out a very early Akiyuki Shinbo work I hadn't heard of before. One could tell from the first few seconds that it was definitely a Shinbo work, as his visual tricks and cuts are unmistakable, and the characters even are eerily like _Bakemonogatari_ (main character = main character, Shiro=Meme Oshino, Maya=Senjougahara, Hospital defector Komugi Nakahara = Mayoi Hachikuji), possibly due to character designer Akio Watanabe. Indeed, it made me wonder how much Shinbo could've grown as a director since 2001 if it was so instantly recognizable. But anyway, I wound up being disappointed. The visual effects are jerky, action disjointed and impossible to follow, layouts of settings nonexistent, and clearly half the stylistic stuff is there to cover up the cheap budget, with every scene set at night, in fog, or other murkiness to save on animation & background labor; a number seem loosely borrowed from _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ (not the only borrowings: there's also the shallow Christian allusions/iconography; the techno-buildings; the underground city in ep5; soul lyrics in ep4; a character named 'Yui' who looks like Ritsuko Akagi; the protagonist's father transforms into Unit-01 etc). The characters are deeply unmemorable and flat, to the point where calling these characters cardboard would be an insult to everyone who's ever painted a sign on cardboard. The plot hardly makes a lick of sense or even tries (if one were feeling very charitable, one might call it 'surreal' or 'dreamlike'), and the powers, far from being imaginative or curious, are dull: oh hey, a bunch of people shoot lasers, and another shoots sound waves, how pedestrian and formulaic... (I feel this dullness particularly acutely since I just finished the novel/series _Worm_, whose overwhelming virtue is that almost every superpower is interesting and used in diverse ways.) In short, there's nothing here but for the Shinbo scholar, or completionist who has already watched the -gataris, _Le Portrait de Petit Cossette_, _Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase_, _Nanoha_, _Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei_, _Arakawa Under the Bridge_, etc.