Saturday, October 11, 2014

Dawnleaf Watches Karen Senki: Episode 1 – Cue Slow Motion


AAAAAH GET IT AWAY FROM ME



This anime is an amazing horror, one of the cleverest I’ve ever seen.  Everyone’s face is awkward, movements creepy (like someone murdered someone and strung up their lifeless corpse on puppet strings).  It truly does convey a subtly… off atmosphere.
*picks up phone*
Wait, this is a sci-fi action anime?
Not a horror?
Well, then, the animation unintentionally looks terrifying.  Good job, I guess?

Hmph, this is awkward.  *looks at cue cards*  Well, let’s talk about the plot, then.  The… plot.


So, life’s all happy, our main character has an “adorable” almost pantyshot little sister (as there always is a little sister).  They meet a robot who wants to be their friend.
AND THEN


Smashcut, life’s gone to shit, the robots are evil and taking over the world, little sister’s dead, main character now wears a ridiculous outfit.  Nothing fits these two scenes together.  A good anime would have explored what happened between scene one and scene two, giving us time to meet our mains and understand the heartwarming relationship between the girl and her little sister.  We would have seen why the robots went evil, when they went evil, and how they destroyed the world.  We would have seen her sister be killed.  Then we would cut to the main character being a robot-fighting badass leading a resistance group meant to take the evil robots down. That would have made a very strong first episode, and would both set up why we should care and why we should keep caring.  However, this anime decided to just cut from scene one to scene two, with the main character narrating in her head that robots are evil now and her sister’s dead for about thirty seconds while we watch her fight some robots.


(what is it with CG and random awkward pantyshots?)
And those robot fights.  RWBY’s fight scenes absolutely destroy this anime’s.  They’re frantic, varied, and fun, with all sorts of different techniques and fast-paced movement to keep you entertained.  Here?  We see the chick with her ridiculous outfit constantly slow-moing her way around, spinning her guns (even though there’s no one around for her to show off to) and shooting a bunch of samey robots who, as one commenter noted, all apparently graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper’s Marksmanship academy.
Then we smash cut to a different scene, seeing her do something completely unrelated and then HOLY SHIT robots show up and she slo-mos them to death.  And then there’s some robot sex.  But I thought robots were evil...? 


Okay, honestly, I know I’ve been criticizing this heavily, but I can’t hate on this too much.  It isn’t a harem with a bunch of ten-year-old-with-huge-breasts sex dolls, and it isn’t a stupid comedy full of braindead high schoolers doing nothing.  It’s a sci-fi action show, which are strangely rare in anime nowadays, especially if you discount mechs.  This anime could be good if it settled down and got itself a coherent plot, but the awful CG animation (why do all CG anime look terrible?  RWBY is a largely amateur work and it looks leagues better than this) and random vignette-y nature of the plot makes this seem like some dumb action show that only wants to show us some chick fighting robots.  The dialogue isn’t insipid or obnoxious, and they seem to be trying for a more mature audience, but this anime actually needs to try a little harder to actually attract such people.  The ten-minute episode length isn't doing any favors, either.



It’s a trap!

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