Scalpelexis

86 knows how to reward the viewer. Everything we deserved and wanted. More please...?

A little parkour fairy. Indeed, in the anime production, this project is confusingly peppered with the biggest names: Tetsurō Araki, the lauded director of Attack on Titan. Gen Urobuchi, the man behind the excellent scripts Fate/Zero, Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Psycho-Pass. Hiroyuki Sawano, one of the most famous composers of anime music in recent years. The dubbers include such stars as Yūki Kaji or Mamoru Miyano, all under the aegis of one of my favorite studios, WIT. The opening immersion and bouncing around in a world sketched out by a giant bubble blower is an incredibly effective audiovisual spectacle; the opulent focus on the watery state is the centerpiece of this animated Tokyo, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if you assume this is another Shinkai, since it's similar in quite a few aspects to his recent Weathering with You. You can see the WIT style above all in the composition of the background against the static images of faces, with the accentuated play of lighting effects frequently found in Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song. You can't help but enjoy the camera frenzy during the competitions, its endless wrapping around all the athletes' axes. The parkour action sequences are beautifully animated, and the only thing that slightly snapped me out of my reverie was the script's confusion over whether to use the classic run or the ridiculously inappropriate "Naruto run" (Like why even? Surely you don't wear a suit to a ball so you can ultimately put boots on?). And speaking of the script, it was only a slight hint of a bigger noise. I have no idea if Urobuchi slightly flubbed it, it was heavily cut, or if there were other external interfering factors: The inspiration from Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" is beaten into our heads every few minutes, but that shouldn't be allowed to create a fantasy world that is unfinished compared to the original tale and filled with unknown rules, or to churn out a bundle of characters with no backstory and no deeper characterization, and then try to retroactively wrap it in a romantic gift package meant to tug at more sensitive heartstrings. The romance between the fairy and the prince follows the aforementioned pattern and is created with gestures rather than words, but is nothing more than a bland shortcut. The main "wingman" of the script, the visuals, tries to convince the audience of their existing proximity, diligently selling one magical scene after another, but without meaningful actions and chemistry between the lead couple together, it's just a hollow picture, literally an advertisement for silence. The implausibility of the plot seems to be sadly symbolized by the author’s reluctance to have the surrounding characters question or even ponder the supernatural elements surrounding our fairy, or the strange ignorance of her origins. The emotional impact of the last dramatic minutes was thus, for me, like the grand headline of a weak tabloid. As Jeoffrey wrote, it wouldn't have hurt at all to have less action and instead more very fragile bubbly relationships for more touching animation, to put it ironically. It's a waste, a very nice looking waste, and a burst bubble. 3 stars

Is it just me or did they replace the writers from season 1 with the clowns from the president’s office? Or do I have to be somehow educated in DOTA lore, which I'm not? Because I absolutely did not get what was going on here. I'm having trouble thinking of a single character who was consistent with their character, knew what they were doing, and yet wasn't awkwardly and weirdly enamored with Davion, who did absolutely nothing. Lina? The handmaiden and the blue-winged wyvern? The teleporter? The departure of an episodic bad guy? The connections between episodes are chaotic, and the direction of the plot is like rolling a 50-sided die. Aside from these major flaws, the other qualities from Season 1 remain, but this was all Greek to me. A better 2 stars.

Here the writers literally ran out of steam and it seemed to me that the story was planned out for those 2 or so seasons but they couldn’t manage to end it in the second one. Truly, the first 2 episodes were the proverbial last pages and after that there was an unnecessary stilted epilogue where everyone had to sort out their inner complexes and social issues in relationships and one character had to establish a new order in order to convince himself, despite his omniscience, that it wasn't the real Lotus. The entertainment literally ran off to places in the galaxy where the story had rather sporadically and bizarrely failed to go. I liked DOTA better in the D&D fantasy mode, with character development and exploration of the lore and the outside world. None of that was on the menu anymore; indeed, I wouldn't sign up for the verbal haggling of all the characters or the bogged-down, overdone fight sequences even if I had no other choice. I hope we don't revisit this particular storyline, and I'll be waiting all the more for the next installment of Arcana. I would never have believed that I'd rank LoL higher than DOTA anywhere. A better 2 stars.

A relatively naive and slyly manipulative attempt at a tear-jerker that doesn't forge hot steel with an impeccable first half only to boil with water that has long since evaporated from the pot. The narrative doesn't waste time on Haruto and Misaki getting to know each other, and it quickly flips in an unpleasantly suspect manner through the first wild images, which will hardly overwhelm audiences saturated with Japanese cinema (or the uninitiated, most likely) with its inventiveness and use of metaphor/experience. Despite some noteworthy foreshadowing, which my romantic self didn't mind at all, I wished that this part could have been prolonged substantially (note: It's almost unbearably ironic that the relativity and evenness of the time sequences of the two halves is woefully out of balance with the rub of the film). After all, it wouldn't be the Japanese if they didn't pour not a dash but a full demijohn of emotion into it, and so I was sorry they didn't take a clear opportunity to maximize the happiness of the characters, and the audience on the receiving end, so that the subsequent dramatic impact would be all the more crushingly effective. The whole time you can see clear from the moon what the director was trying to accomplish, but in my opinion they missed the target by the distance of Pluto and made the second hour drag excruciatingly slowly for the filmmakers, the actors, and above all the audience. The hitherto passable script completely crumbles, the characters start acting downright unnaturally; I truly hate it when a simple and obvious solution is thrown away to create an artificial island of disaster. Ultimately, the relationship between the main characters is bitterly unrealistic, and the final showdown left me shrugging my shoulders. It's a great shame, because the potential was enormous and its skillful exploitation would certainly have left me emotionally destroyed. I have no complaints about the actors, cinematography, or music. The disappointment that’s filling me up inside won't let me go higher than a very shabby 3 stars.

Ooof, this fell apart rougher than the proverbial house of cards. Most of the time we're forced to endure the over-the-top melodrama of a bunch of teenagers arguing about whether or not we're family if we (un)adopt a random alien while competing with..mutant nuns? The plot is a mutant too, adding elements of random nonsense and constant idiocy to its unusual DNA. The creators have no idea what to do with the Kaiju, so of course we have to puff them up and let them spawn here and there out of nowhere, during which the characters actually move a half step backwards in their development. The theme of redeeming several of them is unintentionally comical because of the zero effect it ultimately achieves. The fight scenes are merely average.

A surprisingly harsh, body-ripping, and above all fresh idea to place the extraterrestrial hunter among the Indians. The film strikes an artful balance between the more intimate atmosphere of the American forests during the colonial era and the unbounded bloodlust of the Predator, which the film constantly parades shamelessly past the camera with minimal pauses. The protagonist doesn't come across as a woke celebration of feminism, but a believable student of hunting who thinks logically. The script doesn't really waste time with anything, the plot hurtles along, and so its a bit of a disappointment that the final fight is a rather weak one that a predatory audience wouldn't give its champion a medal for. Decent fun for a single-serve action film, and in the context of its rather inferior predecessors, this representative of the franchise makes it to a weak 4 stars by the skin of its dreadlocks.

The eccentric cosplayer (with slightly unconventional character design) Marin, who has her heart (and camera shot) not in the palm of her hand but right in her cleavage, and submissive Gojo, who would rather sew than sleep, even if he’s sewing for extraterrestrials. I wouldn't have expected such a combination of characters and a fair amount of fan service from the pen of a female author, but on the other hand, the topic of cosplay is a welcome fresh introduction to this relatively young hobby. The anime, through the aforementioned perpetually smiling diva, is appealing in its liveliness and unassuming quality; indeed, through the wry, brooding, and good-natured Gojo we are introduced to the technicalities of textiles, which unfortunately I thought were way more interesting than he was. It's impossible not to feel Marin's undying passion for the cause through the screen, and even though she often overdoes it, you'll gladly forgive her for a thousand episodes, but her male counterpart (the entire 1st half of the series, in fact) was nothing but dead weight dragging everything down. I wouldn't be surprised if the respectable frequency of Marin's appearance in scantily clad fashions was the main attraction for many, especially kicked up a notch as it was by CloverWorks' excellent art design (I would have preferred the opposite; a certain bathroom scene by a minor character in particular was nasty FBI bait), but the mopey, overly slavish, same-clothes-wearing, dull-witted, anything-woman-shy Gojou-kun resolutely failed to bring me much in the way of enjoyment. For me, the main immersion, their relationship, kept tripping over the characters’ lack of compatibility and the harmony they needed from each other. I couldn't help it, even though it probably wasn't directly intended that way, I still couldn’t imagine how any healthy or respectful relationship could exist between the queen and her run-of-the-mill and unremarkable servant. These personal doubts of mine began were successfully dispelled by the breathless conclusion with a healthy dose of evolving romance, exploration of the unknown (again the sea, reminding me of the magical scene from Josee, the Tiger and the Fish) and, most importantly, a screen time allocation that rightly kicked the uninteresting side characters aside, leaving the spotlight only to our chosen ones. All it would take is 2-13 injections of a pick-me-up, acceptance of the outside world, a shelf of new t-shirts for our tailor, and we'd be someplace else in no time! And uh... a bit less of the fan service, but that would pit all the waifmakers against each other in the charts :-) My Dress-Up Darling definitely scores points in creativity, a dose of charm that is inconsistent but present, and its love of cosplay, but it doesn't ooze depth, focus, or anything significantly above the average for softer works. I'd have to tape the corners of my mouth to smile at this anime rather than just watching it normally, but I'll tack on a better 3 stars mostly thanks to the production values.

Yeah, uh, okay. Once you start apologizing too often, the characters start making confusing decisions too often and are too often given roles/abilities that are out of character or there are too many situations like "Gee, I have to get rid of him, but I can't because I’d end up getting rid of someone else, so I have to get rid of still another person...but I just can't", then you know you're starting to run around in circles, and by the end of Season 3 it's sad to say that we've gotten nowhere. The characters are severely underused, be it The Seven or even Soldier Boy himself, and I didn't enjoy any of them, quite the opposite. I fear that too much melodrama will lead to too many seasons.

My relationship with vampires in anime (which, let's not kid ourselves, applies for the live-action variety as well) is quite stunted, with the classic rule of exceptions proven in the form of the marginally stirring Bakemonogatari or the cults-warming/lovingly sinning Hellsing. I have yet to see the iconic Shiki, though, so I'm leaving the final conclusion open despite this representative. Curiously, one of Vampire in the Garden's earliest episodes was the bloodsucking rodent-infested shōnen Seraph of the End, which in the studio's current portfolio has the flash of a Russian souvenir stand amidst the wonders of the world. Their comeback with a slightly more poetic tale about the reunion of an unremarkable human girl with a bored, humanistically-educated vampire noblewoman (strangely, her garden made it into the series' title on the basis of only 2 minutes of footage?) turned out even rougher than when these creatures get a full salvo of light cannon. The emotional basis of the story is downright disastrous: we're pointlessly made to sympathize with a run-of-the-mill girl who, after X years betrays her race, which is defending itself night after night from being massacred by vampires. Even though she lives in an industrial hell evocative of inhospitable Siberia, nonetheless she trades relative safety for escape into a frozen unknown that is anything but safe. And at the same time, we are expected to comprehend that the vampire queen, still living at an andante tempo in a preserved castle, is being easily enticed out of nowhere into a little war campaign, where she oddly decides to risk her neck for a random girl from the other side of the lines. The getting-to-know-you sequence that follows is the best, most believable, and most endearing part, but once we get back to the life of a sheep and a wolf under the same roof, it gets hard to reconcile/easy to, um, sink your teeth into what the promised land actually is or the awkward and perpetual "I'll save you so you can save me next time" nonsense, and things all promptly go down the toilet. This isn’t helped by the undeveloped side characters whose purposes in terms of the story are largely two-dimensional, or the immersion in raging idiocy like amateur CGI car wrecking or vampires carrying things/people in flight when their claws turn into wings. The ending is predictable and the message of the entire series fizzles out into a 404 error. The animation is unusually mediocre for Vampire in the Garden, and above all the simple character design did not appeal to me when compared to the detail of the surrounding world; the music, on the other hand, was surprisingly solid. That didn't smooth over my general disenchantment, and thus my relationship with vampires received a validation stamp in the "Another Edward" column. 2 stars