• Member Since 11th Oct, 2011
  • offline last seen 9 hours ago

Pascoite


I'm older than your average brony, but then I've always enjoyed cartoons. I'm an experienced reviewer, EqD pre-reader, and occasional author.

More Blog Posts165

  • 1 week
    Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 66

    Some winter shows will be ending in the next couple of weeks. It's been a good season, but still waiting to see if the ones I like are concluding or will get additional seasons. But the one and only featured item this week is... Sailor Moon, after the break, since the Crystal reboot just ended.

    Read More

    19 comments · 88 views
  • 4 weeks
    Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 65

    I don't typically like to have both featured items be movies, since that doesn't provide a lot of wall-clock time of entertainment, but such is my lot this week. Features are Nimona, from last year, and Penguin Highway, from 2018. Some other decent stuff as well, plus some more YouTube short films, after the break.

    Read More

    4 comments · 61 views
  • 5 weeks
    Time for an interview

    FiMFic user It Is All Hell asked me to do an interview, and I assume he's going to make a series out of these. In an interesting twist, he asked me to post it on my blog rather than have him post it on his. Assuming he does more interviews, I hope he'll post a compilation of links somewhere so that people who enjoyed reading one by

    Read More

    12 comments · 311 views
  • 7 weeks
    Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 64

    Still pleasantly surprised by most of the winter shows I opted to watch (but I'm gonna die waiting on the dub of The Dangers in My Heart). But hey, there are plenty of good shows from past seasons! To wit, features are both from 2018, a random comedy series, Asobi Asobase, and a drama movie whose title sounds nothing like that's what it will be, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas.

    Read More

    0 comments · 56 views
  • 10 weeks
    Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 63

    So far, I'm rather happy with this winter season's crop of shows. Hopefully they'll keep the quality up. Features this week are a movie from the end of this summer season, Alice and Therese's Illusory Factory, and a comedy series from almost a decade ago, Barakamon. Those and some recently finished fall shows, after the break.

    Read More

    7 comments · 107 views
Oct
26th
2022

Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 42 · 11:13pm Oct 26th, 2022

Yeah, I'll skip the jokes about 42. I've been sitting on a feature item for a while, waiting to get another. Then I saw three things recently that were borderline, and ultimately decided one made the cut and the others not quite. Featured items are Diebuster and Someday's Dreamers, after the break, plus a number of other things, mostly good.

Diebuster follows Gunbuster, which I reviewed back in volume 11 without realizing they'd made a sequel. Well... not quite a sequel and not quite a prequel either, though it was an anniversary project. The events are intertwined a bit.

A girl named Nono from out in the country heads for more urban areas with a dream of becoming a space pilot. Instead, she ends up working at a bar and spending most of her earnings replacing things she's broken. She doesn't know her own strength—I don't know exactly where I missed it, but she's a robot, and I didn't catch on to that until the second episode.

But while working there, she encounters one of the no-kidding mech pilots named Lal'C and follows her back to the base, where she gets involved in an enemy attack and actually helps out some. Impressed, the powers that be accept her as a trainee. Which at first just means she gets to do all the menial chores.

Like Gunbuster, there's fan service. Much more of it, in fact, though it tries to play it more for humor, one example being that the special types of humans who are capable of piloting mechs are called Topless, which Nono misinterprets more than once. But by linking it to jokes like that, at least it keeps a comic tone, as opposed to Gunbuster wedging it into serious moments where it really didn't belong.

I don't recall them dealing with this in Gunbuster at all, at least beyond simply saying that only certain people can be pilots, but here, Topless refers to a brain structure that's necessary and can only occur in younger people. When they outgrow it, don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Nono really latches on to Lal'C, and they become a fearsome force in fighting off the space monsters, but you just know a bigger menace is bound to show up. It tests their relationship, and there's a pretty good character arc for Lal'C, plus as they gradually dole out what Nono's back story is, things click into place. She babbles on about wanting to be like someone, and when they finally show her origin, it becomes clear who and why. But I didn't catch on. If you give this a shot, keep in mind that she was in a bad state at the time, so she stuttered.

It's inevitable to compare and contrast the two. Diebuster is nearly 20 years newer, so the art is more sophisticated. You can definitely see the seeds of FLCL in it (same studio). The music was pretty good too, including a cool opening song.

As to plot, neither one had that notable a main plot, as it regards fighting the enemy, but as I noted (with Chris's help), Gunbuster did a good job with the romance subplot and the significant effects time dilation (from near-light travel) had on interpersonal relationships. Diebuster has good character arcs, but nothing like that time dilation thing which is so unusual that it stands out. In fact, Diebuster cares less about accurate physics, and things happen on a massive scale, approaching Gurren Lagann territory, which I find off-putting, but that's me. And one beef I had with Gunbuster is that the ending seemed cruel, though Chris had left a comment saying maybe humans changed so much over the time scales involved that they wouldn't have realized that. But now we get to see that nope, they're just dicks.

In summary, Diebuster has better art and music, does a good job with the main character arcs, and at least tempers the increased fan service by not using it in inappropriate places, but it pays less attention to realism and confirms that people are stupid at the end.

Rating: very good.
6 OVAs (a.k.a. Gunbuster 2 or Toppu o Nerae! 2 (Aim for the Top!)), but also available compressed into a movie, relevant genres: action, sci-fi.

Someday's Dreamers tells the story of a country girl who has a talent for magic and travels to the big city to study under a mentor. Nothing too new there. In this case, I kind of liked the way animes often give country folk a southern US accent in the dub, and main character Yume ("dream," which is a bit on the nose) tries to disguise it when she can, but it slips out when she lets her guard down.

She's the daughter of a well-known mage and the only one of her siblings to show an ability for it. And I use that word: magic. You hear that? How simple it is? The only annoying thing about the show was how they never used the term, repeatedly using "special power." Maybe that's a more faithful translation of the term used in the original, but it's a cumbersome mouthful. Well, one other thing, too: there's an incredibly rushed romance subplot involving two of Yume's friends that, once resolved, disappears completely.

Anyway, magic is run like a business, where you have to register and get a license, and customers come to request tasks to be performed, so Yume's teacher starts her out with providing some minor assistance and gradually ramps her up to doing the whole thing herself. They take a variety of clients, and none of that is particularly surprising, leaving the series to go on cruise control for a while. However, toward the end, Yume has a supreme loss of confidence and a bit of an existential crisis that, while not too hard to predict the nature of, is still treated with enough respect and realism that it comes through as heartfelt, and that made for a powerful enough ending to save it from being a run-of-the-mill example of the genre, but still not quite enough to earn a feature on its own.

Art reminded me very much of Yoshitoshi ABe's character design, but it wasn't him. It also looks similar to Noir. While the opening and closing songs were just okay, the incidental music during episodes was rather good, mostly peaceful piano melodies. I found it charming, and Yume was a sweet character.

Rating: good.
Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto, "Things that are Precious to a Mage," 12 episodes, relevant genres: drama, coming of age.

Then there's the sequel, Someday's Dreamers 2: Sora. It's nearly a carbon copy of the first one's plot. Country girl Sora, this time from Hokkaido, goes to Tokyo for mage training. This one was only available subbed, so if they did the country accent gimmick with Sora, I couldn't tell. The mechanism is a little different this time; while they do get personal instruction from a mentor and take on clients with them, there's also group classroom instruction, so Sora meets a couple dozen or so other people training with her.

I like the way they handled this class. The teacher is a stern taskmaster, but her assistant (basically a grad student) is quirky and fun. Not many shows can use a large cast and make all the characters seem like more than throwaway set pieces, and this show wisely doesn't try. As needed, various ones of them get a brief moment to shine, and it's handled really well. Aside from that, it mostly lets them shuffle to the background and focuses on a group of four who eventually start to hang around with Sora. And what makes it work is that a couple of them would seem to be poor fits for the group, but they still find their niche, because they become close enough to see through each other's veneers. Standard types, but mixed and matched well. And speaking of background characters, there's a street singer who turns up periodically, and she was a brilliant inclusion.

Then we return to the original series' format of Sora having a loss of confidence, but there's a cute romance subplot that starts up at the right time to keep that from feeling stale. I was a little disappointed, not to veer too deeply into spoilers, with a medical plot point that comes up in the last few episodes. It felt wedged in for pathos, and while it was tastefully done for what it was, it still felt unnecessary. Furthermore, the nature of the problem is something that exists for real and is very treatable, yet it gets hand-waved as "something that only happens to mages." Along with the epilogue seeming to come at a rather large time skip, considering the circumstances, and that part kind of did feel manufactured.

The music was very good, and it comes in two kinds. The street singer and similar music, like in the opening and closing songs, are easy-going, relaxing things, but a lot of the background music was deliberately done to evoke a rural feel, given Sora's origins, and in an Irish style, no less. Very convincingly done and unexpected to boot. Art was also strange but good. It's largely animated on top of photos, giving it a hyper-realistic look, though the less that was actually drawn, the cruder it got. I wonder if that was a deliberate effect to kind of keep the two separate, that the more art there was, the better it was. Even at its best, it still uses a somewhat simple style, but still cute and charming, and Sora herself is the series' requisite cinnamon roll.

Really, if there's one thing I can say to endorse this, it's that I never found myself checking the time to see how much of an episode was left. Quite the contrary: on every episode, I was surprised how quickly the end came around. Not many shows have done that.

Rating: very good.
Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto II: Natsu no Sora, "Things that are Precious to a Mage 2: Sora's Summer," 12 episodes, relevant genres: drama, coming of age.


I've still got a lot of the other stuff saved up, so here are 6 of them.

Book Girl (Bungaku Shoujo, movie)—this felt like a bunch of disparate pieces clinging to each other to form a whole, but there's still a good story behind it. It's based on a novel series. Main character Konoha is a first-year high school student, and one day he sees a girl reading under a tree, and she's eating portions of the pages. Realizing she's been caught (she was sitting in a public place), she admits she's some kind of supernatural being called a literature girl who eats stories. She's the only member of the school's literature club, and though she has zero leverage on him, she somehow forces Konoha to keep her secret and join the club. Incidentally, as common a thing as literature clubs are, it seems odd they can't get more members. Anyway, at their meetings, he writes short stories, and she eats them. Given that this is the title of the film and what dominates the early part of it, you'd think that would have great bearing on the overall plot. You would be wrong. He's got a friend named Nanase who has a crush on him, but this is also barely relevant. Konoha's family name is Inoue, and word around town is that a mysterious, reclusive author named Miu Inoue, whose debut novel at a very young age was a huge success, has returned to the writing world. Also given Konoha's reaction to this, it seems like it might be a family member of his, and it takes a while to get an explanation. I spent a lot of the first half struggling to keep names straight as we have these multiple Inoues, plus another Miu gets introduced. But by the halfway mark, everything settles into place, and this is where the real plot kicks in, dealing with someone who has severe mental illness issues. Despite being fairly over the top, this part of the movie was well handled, and it did draw me in to feeling sympathetic for someone who cares deeply about a friend who needs lots of help. Then there's a fairly weak ending, plus an epilogue showing what everyone's up to years later. It was not what I expected, as the premise summary I read made it sound like a whimsical slice of life thing, but it was closer to a psychological thriller. I also take a little issue with this premise of a very young person's first ever serious piece of writing being very good. I more appreciated the realism applied to the same situation in something like Whisper of the Heart. Rating: good but uneven, relevant genres: drama, psychological, some romance.

Book Girl Memoir (Bungaku Shoujo Memoir, 3 OVAs)—these mostly take place before the movie but overlap some with it, and each one has a very different tone. They provide context and back story to the movie, and I think it's appropriate that these also all feel like disparate pieces the way the movie did. The first gives the background of the literature girl herself, Touko. It's more slice of life, but it does a good job of showing how she picks the people she trusts with knowing what she is. The second fills in more context of Konoha's relationship with his childhood friend Miu, and it's quite serious, even brutal in a couple of places. Then the third is about how Nanase developed her crush on Konoha and got into one of the situations the movie shows her in, so back to slice of life with some romance. There's yet another standalone OVA called Book Girl Today's Snack: First Love, but none of the sites I use have it. One odd thing the movie does is have a little mailbox set up where people can deposit wishes, especially love wishes, and the Literature Club will solve their problems. It's strange for such a club to do that, but according to the summary, this OVA covers Touko setting that up. Even though I rate this highly, I'm not going to feature it, since it doesn't stand on its own, and combined with the movie, I'd still call them overall good. I'm also torn on whether I recommend seeing the movie first or the OVAs. Probably the movie. That's the order they were made, anyway. Seeing the OVAs first would alleviate some of the movie's early confusing plot, but it would spoil what happens later, so I guess live with the confusion, come out of the movie feeling like you mostly have it, then let the OVAs fill in the last few dots. Rating: very good but requires the movie for context, relevant genres: drama, psychological, slice of life, comedy, romance.

Granbelm (13 episodes)—this is from only a couple of years ago, but I didn't hear of it back then and I can't remember what brought it to my attention. It's a combination magical girl/mecha show, which I don't think I've ever seen before. The girls pilot mechs, but ones that are conjured using magic. There's a cold open of a girl being drawn into a battle without being a part of whatever caused it. The girls are each descended from a legendary mage, and on each full moon they go to something like a dream world to fight it out. In any given battle, it's not certain that anyone will be eliminated; there are only a few of these girls, and they've been fighting a long time. Though it's possible there used to be a lot and nobody remembers them, which the story suggests. Main character Mangetsu doesn't belong to any such mage family, but she can conjure a mech and participate, the final prize being mastery of all the world's magic that was locked up centuries ago. Plenty of shows have that kind of goal, even when it means the ability to define the world, like in Revolutionary Girl Utena, which shares a fair amount of theme and even aesthetics with Granbelm. I debated whether to rate this as good or very good. It's borderline, but it ended up a little below the dividing line for me because of a few drawbacks. For one, it does a good job of character arcs, but they're so back-loaded that the first half seems a little slow and directionless; it feels odd to say about a series this short, but it was a slow burn. For another, the powers that the mechs have don't follow any rhyme or reason. They develop new ones as needed, and the "how" is just glossed over, like a wedged-in plot point about how the girls can find spirits in this world to serve as familiars in battle. It was rushed and anticlimactic. There's a powerful reveal about Mangetsu's nature and a potentially very tragic ending involving sacrifice of the eternal kind. Art and music were both pluses, and if the idea of "Utena, but with mechs" appeals to you, it gets my recommendation. Rating: good, and pretty high in that range, relevant genres: action, fantasy.

Housing Complex C (C Danchi, 4 episodes)—miniseries that Toonami and Crunchyroll collaborated on, and it just finished this past weekend. A group of people live in the titular building in a rural area, somewhat isolated from the surrounding world. Most of them are older, but there's one young girl, Kimi. Due to its proximity to the ocean, a fisheries company wants to bring in some foreign interns to develop its business in the area, but this leads to conflict between them and the residents, though Kimi herself and the company executive who moves there to coordinate it all try to smooth things over. This executive's family moves there, too, including his daughter Yuri, finally giving Kimi a companion near her own age. But lots of creepy things start to happen. So... there are a ton of Lovecraft references in this, and the early plot most suggests something like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." However, the opening scene of the first episode is a flashback to events from thousands of years ago, and it pretty much tips you off as to what's going to happen and who's causing it all. So when the reveal is finally made, it's not much of a surprise, and the last episode has not one but two long expository monologues to fill you in on the lore behind it all, which isn't really even necessary to understand the plot... yeah. The show's got atmosphere, I'll give it that, but not the most elegant delivery of that plot, and the ending was left somewhat open in a way that didn't add anything for the effect. Yoshitoshi ABe did the character design, which doesn't look anything like his earlier work. Still, the art is pretty good, music is average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: horror, supernatural.

Lupin III Part VI (25 episodes)—I didn't anticipate watching this, as I had my doubts Toonami would show it, and I'd only had a lukewarm response to previous seasons, so I wouldn't have gone looking for it on my own. But this was pretty good! It also just ended, at least Toonami's airing, though I bet the sub has been finished for a while. It's the same master thief escapades that occur in any season of it, but they made more compelling arcs in this one. The first half involves Sherlock Holmes, and there's also a little girl he cares for who is part and parcel of what's happening. I don't have any inherent objection to using a modern adaptation of Holmes, and the way the plot plays out is mostly fine, but I did have to groan at what connection this girl has to Holmes and who's responsible for killing her father. Aside from that, it was a good arc, and the girl, Lily, is well portrayed. Then the second half delves into Lupin's past, and of course they want to keep that mysterious, so no conclusions are reached, but they introduce another side character, Mattea, who is rather compelling as well. At first, she just seems to be someone who has incidental contact with Lupin, but later happens to know who he really is, which ended up being a nice arc as well. Ever since Part V, they've done a nice job of these single-season focus characters. Art and music are no different than previous seasons, so decent. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, adventure, mystery, comedy.

The Magnificent Kotobuki (Koya no Kotobuki Hikotai "Kotobuki Squadron in the Wilderness," 12 episodes), The Magnificent Kotobuki: Ozora no Take Off Girls! (2 episodes)—series from just a couple of years ago. In a pretty barren land, the main method of transport between the isolated cities is by zeppelin, but pirates try to intercept them, so they keep mercenary fighter squadrons around to defend them. The action focuses around Kotobuki Squadron, made up of six young girls, plus the crew of the zeppelin they're contracted with. At first, it's just repelling pirate attacks, but it becomes revealed that there are occasional dimensional rifts that open up. Some of them go nowhere, but others have brought this world into contact with Japan, which is where they've gotten all their tech from: the planes they fly are all WWII-era Japanese aircraft. Political wrangling leads to one person trying to monopolize these rifts and the tech that results, leading everyone else to band together and resist him. It's not that original a plot, and it only delves into the back story of two or three of the girls, leaving the rest as set pieces. The art is very obvious CGI, what with stiff movements and all, though it's pretty good, on a par with Land of the Lustrous but not quite as good as Estab-Life, I'd say. Some minor amounts of fan service. Music is fairly good. Really, the draw here is if you like air combat. There are some glaring errors, probably done on purpose for effect, like clouds of condensation forming over the wings when they do hard pull-ups, even though these aircraft aren't capable of flying fast enough to make that happen. Aside from those few things, a lot of the technical detail is right, and it's pretty good and accurate as aerial combat goes. There was a mobile game released, and that two-episode sequel is basically an intro for it in which another crew of girls who idolize Kotobuki Squadron decide to form one of their own after the series' events. There's also a movie compilation of the series, which would have to be much shorter by necessity, though it also includes some new footage. I didn't see it, so I can't say if it adds anything significant. Rating: decent, though recommended for fans of accurate dogfight-era aerial combat, relevant genres: drama, action.

Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.


Last 10:
vol. 32 here
vol. 33 here
vol. 34 here
vol. 35 here
vol. 36 here
vol. 37 here
vol. 38 here
vol. 39 here
vol. 40 here
vol. 41 here

alphabetical index of reviews

Report Pascoite · 195 views · #anime #review
Comments ( 3 )
PresentPerfect
Author Interviewer

I wish that magical girl mecha series was more consistent, because I've never seen that combination either! :O

The Magnificent Kotobuki sounds very familiar, to the point that I can't believe I haven't seen it. Or maybe I'm getting it confused with Drifting Dragons or even just Talespin. I can also think of at least two vaguely similar video games. I guess as you say, it's not that original a plot.

5694751
It definitely sounds up your alley, and it might be worth watching an ep to see if it jogs your memory.

5694729
Granbelm was still pretty good. It's not going to amaze you, but it's worthy of a recommendation. Not quite rating a feature shouldn't be seen as a tick mark against it. It's just that "good" is the most common rating I give out (I vet most stuff before watching it, so the odds will be stacked in favor of liking whatever I do choose to watch), and I don't want to do the longer write-ups of that many things, plus I also want to have items worth watching after the break so that people won't just skip that part as being not recommended.

TL;DR you might want to give it a try.

Login or register to comment