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- JoinedJul 31, 2015
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Mar 28, 2021
In a word, disappointing. Idoly Pride had a fantastic opening episode that soon degenerated into a very by-the-numbers, predictable storyline. The principal issue with the show is that the characters are never meaningfully challenged and overcome every test without any difficulty. Our protagonists are going to be up against the biggest veteran idols in the industry? I can't wait to see how they'll work to prepare for this! Oh, they just did more of their usual barely coached training routines and won in their first face-off, okay. There is no reason to be invested in their struggles, because, aside from paying some minor lip service
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to a potential scandal or family conflict, the characters don't seem to have any they aren't able to immediately shrug off. No one has to grow because they're already perfect at what they do.
The majority of the cast is also severely underutilized. If you're not the ghost or directly related to the ghost, good luck getting more than a few lines each episode. For purportedly "main" characters, it's next to impossible to remember their names from week to week. The rival groups don't fare much better. They get very little screen time until it's their day to perform, at which point they get five or so minutes of a flashback for the audience to maybe feel sorry for them when they're summarily beaten. But it's okay; somehow, losing still won them the approval of their dad/producer or whatever, so we can count their character arcs as complete and realized.
The performances themselves are incredibly bland. The CG animation noticeably stutters when trying to render more than two people at a time on stage, and the 2D animation is few and far between, compensated heavily by stills. Every group that performs does little more than sing and dance, which might be fine for a small-time gig, but the competition at the center of Idoly Pride is advertised in-universe as one of the biggest events of the year. And yet, the performances at the finals are no different from the performances in the early rounds. I realize asking for a few explosions or fancy fireworks might be outside the realm of feasibility for the animation studio, but at least attempt some more inspired lighting effects. Is the audience happy to pay presumably over 10k yen a ticket and travel across the country just to see the occasional little puff of fire at the end of a song?
Though Idoly Pride might have enough cute girls to distract the less attentive viewer from its excessively formulaic storytelling, its problems will be readily apparent to anyone who has already seen their fair share of media. If you're interested in this show, by all means start watching it. I still enjoy the first episode as a stand-alone tale of a girl with big dreams that ended up getting cut short. But if you find yourself losing interest afterwards, go ahead and drop it. It won't get better from there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Dec 29, 2019
Is it possible to write about Actors without spoiling its core conceit? I don't think so, but I'll do my best.
There's a certain type of anime I love watching for the thrill of never being able to guess what happens next. Usually, these are soap opera-esque melodramas, but I'd put Actors in this category too. And Actors is very different.
Disregard any summaries you may find about this show; they're all wrong. By all appearances, Actors is a slice-of-life about boys who like to sing, but even early on, there are signs that something weird is going on. The town is encompassed by a towering white
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wall that no one questions. People occasionally spot mysterious white ghosts hanging around. There are an increasingly number of suspicious stray cats. Sometimes, a guy opens a door in an underground secret lab and finds himself immediately back on the beach.
Skip this next paragraph if you don't want me to spoil episode 5:
A couple of kids find out about an MMO that takes place in an exact replica of their school, and every student is included as an NPC. Paying members have a customizable cat avatar to navigate the MMO in, while free players only get a formless white shadow that is unable to interact with the world and can only communicate with other players. But as you might have guessed, this MMO and the school are in fact one and the same. Actors is about an MMO, but entirely from the perspective of the NPCs. Over time, a few of these NPCs learn their world is not all that it appears to be. (Some of them are just dumb though.)
Actors is overall pretty uneven. Its animation often looks cheap and uninspired. The acting is not especially noteworthy. The episodes that focus on the boys just hanging out can run dull easily. But its core premise is perhaps one of the most unique I've seen in anime recently, and there's enough runtime spent on it to keep me engaged and engrossed all the way to the end.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Dec 21, 2017
This review will contain minor spoilers.
Digimon Universe Appli Monsters is pretty atypical of a Digimon series. The protagonist isn’t a brash hothead and the monsters in the show aren’t even Digimon. They’re called Appmon, and Digimon exists only as some random game in-universe. There’s one episode featuring an Agumon as a special guest star and it’s better fanservice for Adventure fans than all of Tri but I digress. The show leans more heavily into the episodic kids show format more than any other Digimon series before it, with all the bells and whistles that entails. The episodic format is much in the vein of a
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Precure (big surprise, the director also directed Doki Doki Precure), and it keeps to it even late into the show’s run. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the plot does take about nine eps before there’s any real forward momentum in the story. There are also often times you wish the show would go into moving the plot forward more consistently instead of diving back into episodic eps.
The format as is though provides great characterization for its cast of characters, who all have their own worries that kids can relate to, however silly the context may be at times. Like there’s one kid who has to balance his role in inheriting the family’s traditional tea house while also being a mega successful Youtube personality; doing what your family wants you to do versus doing what you want to do. That characterization also helps build the foundation of several genuinely touching and emotionally resonant moments in the show. This also lets the show have a lot of opportunities to show off its brand of humor, like having a running gag playing on the common palette swap Digimon designs (“Are you guys related? Nah, we just happen to look alike.”) I’m especially a fan of one monster of the week, Musclemon in episode 28, who might as well be a Bobobo character transported in.
The show doesn’t hold back from demonstrating how sinister the big villain is either. The story centers around stopping Leviathan, which was part of an AI designed to help people before but it went rogue and broke out when it determined the rules it had to obey were hindering its programmed goals. It then decides to remove the biggest obstacle to its goals: its original creator. They don’t back off from showing how vicious it is either. We see its attempts to do this in the form of hijacking self driving cars to crash into him and eventually succeeding by hacking into the medical equipment when he’s hospitalized. And while it was at it, it kept close tabs on its creators remaining family for years after he was dead. Leviathan isn’t really evil though. It’s a lot like a spin off the D-Reaper in Tamers, though growing to be far more advanced. It’s still trying to achieve that original goal set in its programming. And it so happened to determined the best way to do it is... very machine-like, to say the least.
The heroes go through the typical arc of gradually collecting power ups and beating all the obstacles Leviathan sends their way. The viewer will understand this as narrative convenience, but surprisingly the show does go out of the way to justify it, the justification for it makes a lot of sense and references something that happens in real-life machine learning algorithms. The show has a lot of neat references for computer nerds, including one hidden in each of the main cast’s names. My personal favorite is the brother pair whose parents named Rei and Hajime, aka 0 and 1. I’d be curious about how a localized dub could capture the same spirit with similarly normal sounding names.
With all its focus on technology and its prevalence in modern everyday life, Appli Monsters exists in the space where it could have only been made in the mid 2010s, but I’m really glad it was.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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