Tag Archives: Anime

Sell Me in 20 Minutes: Knights of Sidonia, Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu Ka, and Ping Pong

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You can do most things with 3DCG as it stands now in anime, if you use it in a manner conscious of its limitations. But Knights of Sidonia didn’t feel like it was bringing any kind of production-side A-game beyond the first-2-minute action scene. The scene in the rice plant where the male lead was running away put way to much focus on motion that was very wooden, and it cut out of that scene with a very sloppy fade-to-black transition.* The show is just nowhere near as good as Arpeggio was at handling the weak points in its CG style, and it was missing opportunities by not, among other things, restricting walking exposition scenes like the one about the third gender to discretion shots. The mech scenes, at least, were smooth as silk. I kept watching, though, and development of what seems like a very Xenogears-y world got intriguing pretty quickly, thanks in part to effectively washed-out pale color palettes and in part to the fast-moving story (even before counting the cliffhanger at the end). I’m willing to give this one two more weeks.

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Sell Me in 20 Minutes: No Game No Life and Hitsugi no Chaika

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No Game No Life had some cool color schemes and showed some respectable chemistry for the main duo. Unfortunately, the games proper this episode showed off (a game of chess and a cheat-heavy game of poker) were written in fairly pedestrian ways. The presentation seemed a lot more focused on making the main duo into cool characters than it did on creating compelling scenarios. That approach can work in some cases, but it’s not doing it for me here. Dropped.

Hitsugi no Chaika managed the first couple of minutes peculiarly. I’m not really used to seeing action shows introduce their characters to each other in low-key comedy scenes; more often, they tend to either already know each other or encounter each other in the middle of a fight. I tend to prefer the latter, since it starts the show out at a faster pace. And while I did feel like the show was a bit of a slow starter, the lower-key scenes felt like they at least worked individually and the infiltration at the end where they had to figure out how to get the coffin in was actually kind of neat. I’m giving this one another week to introduce more of the story.

Fun With Numbers: Normalized Google Traffic for Spring 2014 Anime Thus Far

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I keep forgetting google trends is a thing. It occurred to me that there’s a really basic stat available to measure an anime’s $0 popularity level. I’ve been tossing around the idea of trying to tinker up an effective way of displaying variance anime fanbase size by cost, and how much google search traffic it generates is likely a pretty good approximation of the lowest possible end of that. I searched the spring anime which have aired thus far (via mal, skipping the shows with 2000 members or less) on global google trends in both their official Japanese and Romanized titles, normalized against the term “Spring 2014 Anime”.

Obvious caveat – some of these series go by alternate titles, so the romanized search traffic may not be all of it.

Also, somewhat unexpectedly, series like Baby Steps and Black Bullet with full-English titles still see peak traffic this month. I guess phrases have to be pretty popular to beat out kids looking for free streams of anime. Love Live still seems fairly inflated, though (considering how much of its English title traffic was the same pre-2012).

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Via Newtype USA: Yousuke Kuroda and Yasunori Ide on Onegai Twins (November 2003)

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Or: An article in which Yousuke Kuroda takes the time to tell blatant lies about Yasunori Ide within his earshot. It’s not something I see particularly often – the writer and director both get interviewed simultaneously and bounce off each other a little bit, giving off fun hints of the chemistry they might have had working together for two seasons on the same series. The two then talk about their desire to get away from typified one-keyword heroines and move towards less simple, more realistic characters (taking what may or may not be a subtle jab at 13-heroine Sister Princess in the process). The second page also has a blurb on the beautiful scenery of Lake Kizaki, the source of the franchise’s top-5 all-time background art.

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Via Newtype USA: Taniguchi Goro on s-CRY-ed (July 2003)

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I’ve been collecting a bunch of old Newtype USA issues off of ebay lately, with the goal of eventually uploading scans of most or all of the [inside] series. The next batch arrived at my apartment yesterday, and in addition to an article on Gainax with an offhand mention of mid-90s OVA budgets, it contained this feature on s-CRY-ed with a number of comments directly from Taniguchi Goro. Even though there’s not a lot of historically notable material in there, there’s interesting s-CRY-ed specific stuff; focusing on hand-drawn art against current industry trends, struggling to translate the core concept into a coherant final story, being surprised that a series he tried to make as manly as possible ended up with a majority female fanbase, and the offhand comment that turned into the OST track In His Memory. It’s something I personally enjoyed reading, as a huge s-CRY-ed geek. Scans are after the jump (statements from Goro are all on the fourth page).

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Fun With Numbers: Statlines for the Video Game-Anime Adaptations of 2012

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The investigation into video game source popularity (started with 2011 data here) continues into 2012, where, despite an increase in the total number of shows aired, the number of game adaptations remained almost constant (rose from 9 to 10) and the total number of 10k+ shows actually went down (from 4 to 1).

To recap the meaning of these numbers; in order to get some idea of how existent and/or strong the video game franchise popularity -> anime popularity -> added video game franchise popularity chain is, I pulled a pair of stats for each of the 10 video game adaptation anime made in 2012 that I have data for. The 2 stats I chose to measure video game popularity were maximum yearly rank of the franchise on popular VN retailer getchu (mildly NSFW) and total console game sales for games released within one year of the anime’s initial airdate, via vgchartz. Data is archived here, and summarized on the chart below.

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Sell Me in 20 Minutes: Isshukan Friends and Kanojo no Flag wo Oraretara

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Isshukan Friends was set up by pretty much all the promotional material as a heartwarming drama, which made the fact that it was a 4-koma adaptation an interesting one. We’ve seen exceptionally well-handled 4-koma adaptations very recently*, shows that succeeded by building a more cohesive flow out of the generously loose framework offered by the source. Apparently, that’s an approach that works just fine for a more somber atmosphere. This episode did a great job of varying the mood from somber to lighthearted as needed, keeping conversations flowing while mixing in background cutaways and other spices to break up the action between days. It helped that said background art was pretty great by itself (even if it played a minor role). I’ll be spending three more episodes on this one, since it seems to have a vice grip on its identity right off the bat.

Isshukan-2Reminds me a lot of Kare Kano, which is just about the second-highest background-related compliment I could give

Kanojo Flag didn’t have super-polished animation at any phase in time, but it did pack a level of fun energy into most of the show. The characters weren’t jump-off-the-screen interesting, and there was a fair bit of flashback melodrama bogging things down to a degree. But the opener seemed to get a lot of mileage out of the “flags as physical manifestations of the power of narrative” schtick, which was equal parts clever and funny and made for a cute climax. You can build a show around that if it gets used like it was this week. I’ll give this one another two episodes to build up a cast and a broader arsenal of jokes.

*Vis a vis Sakura Trick and Seitokai Yakuindomo Footnote.

Fun With Numbers: March Amazon Data and Ambiguity

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Having 2-3 times as many datapoints does usually make things more clear, except when it doesn’t. Adding March releases to the set of amazon rank data I’ve been gathering did help fill out some of the plots, but it also brought me face-to-face with some very real points I overlooked last time around. At any rate, it’s been an informative month of data gathering (table’s here, if you’re interested). This post is mainly an update on where I stand right now on this cf of an analysis project, with a recap of points addressed last month, a summary of the other things that came up, and an *extremely* rudimentary sales estimation model.

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Sell Me in 20 Minutes: Kamigami no Asobi and Captain Earth

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I was planning on capping my Saturday viewings with Captain Earth and Ace of the Diamond in a one-two whammy, but I saw Kamigami no Asobi up there on crunchyroll and decided to give it a few minutes of consideration. In return, I was treated to an intriguing, if somewhat incoherent fight scene, a very out-there transformation sequence, and a school life first day of vacation sequence that mixed in plenty of casual walk-and-talk to keep things moving. The big mystery in that first half of the episode was how the show would handle that transition from crisp slice-of-life to Greek gods burning their cosmo in battle, and while the transition wasn’t an elaborate one, it did have a whimsical feel thanks to a flighty soundtrack. The character intro bits were a bit overdone, but were more interactive than monologue-based, which counts for a bit. I’m keeping up with this one for at least another week.

Captain Earth was the show I personally thought had the highest if-everything-goes-right ceiling heading into the season, with the caveat that it was probably less likely to reach that ceiling than a few other shows. This episode didn’t take a great first step in that direction, jumping around a lot between scenes in a way that felt fairly choppy. I hate that sort of format; while quick pacing that focuses exposition as nice, the most enjoyable scenes are the ones that come from flowing continuity. That said, the part of the flashback that featured the two kids bonding and surprising each other was engaging, and they got more coherent as the episode went on. Less encouraging was the soundtrack usage, which was super-unbalanced; it felt like it was just out of sync with the atmosphere the show was trying to build in a good 30% of the scenes (particularly the gravesite/death flashback one where some upbeat Space Brothers-esque inspirational stuff was playing). It’s like they just left the music on play, rather than fitting it to the scenes at hand. After the choppy first half, the whole thing was a short intro for the first villain and a very elaborate docking sequence. I’m gonna give it some time because a fight has yet to happen and it still does have potential to build out the story, but this episode did not inspire much in the way of confidence.

Sell Me in 20 Minutes: Sound Robot Daimidaler, Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei, and Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii

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Daimidaler was split between pervy humor that felt fresh and organic (the uniform scene at the beginning, everything penguin-related) and stock pervy humor. While there was enough of the latter that I certainly wouldn’t be watching it in a group, I felt like the former made a stronger impact. Between the comedy and the wicked hot-blooded/punny intro, I’m happy to see where it goes on a week-to-week basis.

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