…And you screwed it up.
I highly doubt that that five-girls-in-a-tea-club-SOL-comedy will end up
being good (and I know that nobody else has any expectations for it), so this
really was Gainax’s last chance. Think
about it. When did they last make anything
good? Panty & Stocking was fairly well-received, but it was an
extremely love-it-or-hate-it affair.
That was three and a half years ago.
What have they done since then, in terms of TV series? Nothing.
Three and a half years is a long time to not make anything notable.
Several new studios have already formed since then (like
Trigger), and three and a half years basically covers the fall (and recent
resurgence, with stuff like Space Dandy
and Noragami) of Bones. I mean, even the painfully dull Zexcs at least
managed to make Aku no Hana a little
while ago. Meanwhile, Gainax has been
stewing, riding on the fumes of stuff it made long ago like Evangelion, FLCL, and (slightly more recently but still long enough ago) Gurren Lagann. So, I guess that this basically means that I
now give up on Gainax. Even an ambitious
multimedia project created with the help of tons of (quite skilled) pixiv
artists as character designers cannot save Gainax. I hope the other stuff (like the video games)
made by this project aren’t as painfully lazy as this.
I actually feel bad for those pixiv artists, as the
character designs are (by miles) the high point of this anime. Everything else is… well… um… I actually kind
of feel embarrassed for Gainax, releasing a show that looks… this terrible. You’d think that, with an anime that’s
basically three minute shorts (it was originally four, but the immensely boring
OP that basically was just a bunch of stills took up another minute), it would
be pretty easy to make it look decent, because shows like Stella Women’s Academy show that Gainax at least has some money. However, I can say pretty easily that this
takes the cake for one of the cheapest-looking shows I’ve ever seen, beating
out even stuff like Acchi Kocchi and
settling somewhere in the same ballpark as Hetalia
(which was made around five years ago, didn’t even have a TV release, and was
made by Studio DEEN, while this is a currently airing TV anime by a studio that
some people still have expectations for).
All of the backgrounds are hastily drawn, unoriginal, and lazy. Everyone except the main character are
basically gray scribbles, even when the character is interacting with them. Movement is limited, and they even managed to
throw in some dodgy CG in the three-minute running time.
Personally, I already have a sort of bias against shorts,
but they can work when done
correctly. Basically the only way I can
see a show based on 47 Japanese towns is to actually do something like Hetalia, which also has the short episode
format and tons of characters based on geographical locations. When I say the Hetalia format, I don’t mean a bunch of bishies acting cute in an
attempt to solicit fangirl support, I mean that Magica Wars needs a bunch of brief, silly, mostly comedic scenes
spliced together instead of anything approaching a larger plot. Hetalia
worked because the gags were quick and funny enough that they could fit several
laughs in a single episode, and that the characters were such ridiculous caricatures
that they were easily memorable and often funny on their own.
However, this
doesn’t have the same sort of foresight.
Not only does this episode show us only one character, it only has one
scene and no jokes to make this scene tolerable. Several of the episode comments said that
they thought this episode was really funny, but I guess I’m just really dense
because I couldn't even find a point where humor was even really
attempted. I know that I don’t
necessarily have the best sense of humor (heck, I love Nerima Daikon Brothers), but I can usually at least tell when they’re
trying. If this show is supposed to be a gag comedy
(which the genre listings say it is), it should probably at least try to have
some gags. Here, it just looks like they’re
not even trying. The animation’s bad,
there is no plot, it’s not funny… I’d say, if you’re thinking of checking this
anime out, just go online and look up pictures of the character designs. That would probably be a much better use of
your time.
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