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Not sure if anyone else has been watching season two of My Dress-Up Darling, but the level of animation in the show has been goddamn insane so far! CloverWorks has been introducing finely-drawn touches to bits of character movement that make everything feel amazingly real. Even the backgrounds and camera angle choices have an added touch of realism which enhances the character animation.
This week's episode featured a couple of shots where they actually animated parallax shift for a panning shot as well as a simple crane up from a low close-up angle into an eye-level close-up. These are things I'd only expect in a film which a significant budget and lead-time, not in a weekly TV series. Not sure what's gotten into CloverWorks to be flexing their talents this hard, but bless 'em for doing it!
IIRC, the team animating this season also did the first season of Bocchi the Rock and should be coming back for season two.
This week's episode featured a couple of shots where they actually animated parallax shift for a panning shot as well as a simple crane up from a low close-up angle into an eye-level close-up. These are things I'd only expect in a film which a significant budget and lead-time, not in a weekly TV series. Not sure what's gotten into CloverWorks to be flexing their talents this hard, but bless 'em for doing it!
Not sure if anyone else has been watching season two of My Dress-Up Darling, but the level of animation in the show has been goddamn insane so far! CloverWorks has been introducing finely-drawn touches to bits of character movement that make everything feel amazingly real. Even the backgrounds and camera angle choices have an added touch of realism which enhances the character animation.
This week's episode featured a couple of shots where they actually animated parallax shift for a panning shot as well as a simple crane up from a low close-up angle into an eye-level close-up. These are things I'd only expect in a film which a significant budget and lead-time, not in a weekly TV series. Not sure what's gotten into CloverWorks to be flexing their talents this hard, but bless 'em for doing it!
IIRC, the team animating this season also did the first season of Bocchi the Rock and should be coming back for season two.
I thought I was reading an Onion article for a second when I saw Channing Tatum is joining the English dub cast for the new Demon Slayer movie. 2025 continues to be a bizarre year with unexpected twists and turns.
I was just looking at the English dub credits for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, and I never realized how many ties it's got back to Star Trek:
Beau Billingslea (Jet Black) - Captain Frank Abbott in Into Darkness
Jennifer Hale (Elektra Ovirowa) - The Dog and Lt. Durga from Lower Decks
Nicholas Guest (Rasheed) - A Cadet in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Also the brother of Christopher Guest.
Lia Sargent (Judy) - Daughter of TOS director Joseph Sargent ("The Corbomite Maneuver")
Mary Elizabeth McGlynn (Chris Riley) - Daelen from Voyager
John Snyder (Bob) - Bochra and Aaron Conor from The Next Generation
Michael Reisz (Murata) - William Telfer on Voyager
Mirron E. Willis (Harris) - Rettik on Voyager and a Klingon guard on TNG
Michael Forest (additional voices) - Apollo from Star Trek
And this doesn't count the various Star Trek video game work others in the voice cast have done. Forest was the most surprising of the group - I had no idea he'd done so much dubbing work in anime, including well-known series like Gundam, Trigun, and Haruhi Suzumiya.
Finished watching Planetes today. Like Patlabor, it can shift from a goofy comedy episode to a relationship/character development story to a serious political/terrorism story. Its two comic relief characters are annoying but rarely the centre of attention. Overall, a believable near future science fiction series well worth the cost of the blu ray.
I've been curious about Planetes for years; I had it in my Netflix DVD queue way back when they still mailed out DVDs, but they were missing one disc, so I never got around to watching it then. I finally watched it a couple months ago on Crunchyroll. It wasn't at all what I expected, basically a workplace comedy, though it got more dramatic as it went. And I was lukewarm on the characters and their storylines, mostly. But I absolutely loved the realistic depiction of space technology and how people would live in microgravity, without any of the usual mucking about with artificial gravity or magnetic boots, or the kind of shoddily researched depictions of free fall you usually see in animation. The one thing they got wrong was Lunar gravity in the first episode set there -- it was depicted as way too low -- but they seemed to fix it later. And everything else was just so beautifully well-researched and accurate.
One thing puzzles me. There's an episode where the characters trying out for the Jupiter ship are locked in a room and taking an endurance test, and
their air system breaks down and they debate whether to give up or sacrifice one of the team so the others can make it, and they end up using ice packs to lower their metabolisms and use less oxygen so they all survive.
I could swear I've seen that same story told somewhere before, with the same outcome -- maybe an Asimov or Clarke story, but I can't remember where. Does it sound familiar to anyone?
I thought it was beautifully animated, and I liked the characters well enough, but the story was a little basic and repetitive, and the resolution kind of underwhelming.
After it ended, I decided to try out Watanabe's post-Cowboy Bebop series Samurai Champloo, also on Crunchyroll. It was pretty good -- basically a period drama/comedy set after the Sengoku era, but playing pointedly fast and loose with historical accuracy, having the cast meet historical figures whose lifespans didn't overlap and introducing anachronisms like breakdancing and beatboxing. It was pretty wild and pretty good.
One show I rather liked was The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer on Another World (Sentai Reddo Isekai de Boukensha ni Naru), aka Red Ranger Isekai, which follows the protagonist of an imaginary Sentai series who gets transported into a fantasy world and teams up with a sorceress, a princess, and a swordsman. It's actually quite well-done and well-written, often surprisingly deep and dramatic for what's basically a parody concept, and Kizuna Five feels like an authentic Sentai, with lots of in-jokes for Sentai fans like the use of familiar locations and cameos by Sentai actors/characters. It's got some of the standard sophomoric, male-gazey elements of anime, like how the mage heroine has enormous breasts and always wears plunging necklines and keeps getting accidentally seen naked by the hero, but she's still a good character aside from that. I find it interesting how the writing treats the fantasy world as normal and the Sentai tropes Red brings with him from "our" world as the bizarre mysteries that the characters are taken aback by. But I love the way Red's Sentai-based values and experiences make him effective at inspiring and uniting the other characters.
Lately I've been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, which is really, really good. Frieren is a fantastic character, an elf who's far longer-lived than the humans around her and has trouble adjusting to their timescale, but who's making an effort to connect to them more. It's very much a series about how people and their actions are remembered or forgotten over time. I love how nerdy and autistic-coded Frieren is, just this quiet, endearing oddball who only wants to read books and collect weird spells and sleep a lot, and who makes an effort to figure out how to relate to other people but still has her own weird ways (though of course it turns out she's the most powerful mage ever when she has to be). She's a delightful character, well-played and well-animated, and it's refreshing to see an anime where the female leads aren't sexualized. (The one time she tries to get flirtatious, she's really awkward at it.) I also like how low-key most of the series is, with so much of it just being character-driven, low-stakes cozy fantasy with the characters just going about their lives and doing small-scale magic like helping people gather crops and restore statues and clear landslides. You see so many anime and tokusatsu shows about heroes fighting to create a world of peace, but this is the show that lets you see what that world actually looks like long after the fighting's over. I like those quiet, cozy parts more than the parts involving big life-or-death conflicts and magic battles.
I'm struck by how similar Frieren and Red Ranger Isekai are in a number of ways, despite being very different. They both start at the end of a conventional heroic narrative and follow the title character on a new journey after their defeat of their Big Bad, yet they both have regular flashbacks as the title character reminisces about their past adventures. They're both set in fantasy worlds based on D&D tropes and European settings (though the characters' attitudes and cultural values are very Japanese). Both universes' magic systems are based on the concept of mana as a magical energy source, though I guess that's part of the larger "based on D&D tropes" point (though D&D got it from Larry Niven, who appropriated it from Polynesian spirituality). Both their female leads are staff-wielding mages interested in the study of magic, though Yihldra is basically an experimental scientist trying to advance the understanding of magic while Frieren is more of a hobbyist who just likes collecting weird spells. For that matter, both series treat magic, not as an ancient body of immutable lore, but as an active science whose practitioners are constantly experimenting and studying to advance the art and innovate new methods. I love that. I hate stories that treat science and magic as mutually incompatible, assuming science is some rigid body of knowledge that can't accept magic. Science is literally about expanding itself to encompass new ideas, so in a universe where magic was real, there would be a science of magic, studying it and figuring out how it works and how to use it better. So I love it that both shows feature discussions of the theory and mechanics of magic and how people have striven to devise new techniques and new understandings.
The trailer for Trigun: Stargaze finally dropped, coming this January. Visuals look fucking amazing, once again. Gotta say, studio Orange did some incredible work in season one to win me over on the 3D animation.
Something like eight years after I watched the first episode and read the first Inspector Shinya Kogami manga, I finally got properly into watching the first season of Psycho-Pass. I went with the original 22 minute episodes and not the special edition versions, which I figure I'll get to in a few years. I quite enjoyed it. I understand that the second season was less well received, but I bought it, so I'll watch it. I might switch to something else for a change of pace rather than going through the various seasons and movies in a big marathon, but we'll see.
