For those who do know this is an adaptation of a Japanese fantasy novel which from what I can tell from quick googling is considered good modern fiction over there, but something to point out is that this is an actual high school English-type book, not some light novel or manga, a full-on high concept piece of genre fiction. All of this led me to be excited, I loved last year's Hike-Monogatari which is in the same vein being a classical Japanese novel translated into animation, I hoped this would be similar to animation bringing out the book's imagery and adapting it to animation.
I was dead wrong. This became a mess quickly because of the quality of the animation. Don't get me wrong, I am the type of pretentious hipster who loves avant grade techniques but the choices here were clearly made for budgetary reasons, not artistic ones. This is most seen with all action animation being replaced with Berserk '97 style action stills, without the interesting watercolors nor the unique compositions, and a lot of emotional scenes aping the style of Ang Lee's Hulk for some reason with different characters being cut out into comic book style panels and placed next to each other in reused animation.
All of this pales in comparison to this show's main sin which is a little thing I like to call the Fate/Extra problem which goes as follows: A show can either tell a complex story with simple artistic decisions or a simple story with complext artistic decisions. I feel this can be viewed on a matrix, and because weebs reading this are not likely to want to hear my pretentious ramblings on why I call this the pre soviet russian literature scale and why Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy prove this without the shadow of a doubt, I will use anime to prove my point in a nice matrix to show examples of this:
Complex Story Simple Story
Simple Medium: Fate/Zero Naruto
Complex Medium: Fate/ Extra Monogatari Series
What this schizophrenic meltdown is trying to show is that trying to portray complex information in a complex way is confusing and often leads to people losing track of the plot in the medium of the show. This show commits that sin and the really interesting story of the novel is buried under baffling artistic choices that only hurt the adaption.
The reason why I said what I said in the first sentence is that this reminds me of a showing of the glass menagerie put on an old CRTV in my high school English class about half a decade ago so we could analyze it with the works we actually read and watching it I felt like this was the worst way to experience the text cause I was looking at a shitty recording of a community theater production of great work, which I feel is the best way to describe this show.
