Saturday saw the rollout of 4 more anime, and a depressing lack of Space Brothers. I’m opening up with the magical girls before getting to the certain sequel I’m really excited for.
As an early member of the “Shin Oonuma can actually make good shows” club, Prismer Illya was sort of a win-win watch; if it was sub-par, there’s still WataMote, if it was by some fluke good, well, pop the campaign. It ended up being a decent episode. The sticks were fun in scene where they got fed up and left the older girls, and generally entertained while on-screen with whimsy acting and QB-tier salesmanship. Illya, for her part, was deadpan and sarcastic in a way that reminded me of Pretty Sammy, that one other magical girl spinoff of a prominent non-magical girl series. Visuals were fairly unimpressive for the most part, aside from a few scenes at the end where Shin’s tendency towards fluorescent illumination shone through. I’m giving this one 1 more episode to establish itself more firmly in its comedy routine.
I had seen a bit of the promo material for Genei wo Kakeru Taiyou, and it gave me the impression of a show that was trying to toss cute magical girls and serious bloody combat together for effect, but without really understanding how. That’s admittedly a bad attitude to have going in, but I’ve seen bigger negative impressions overcome by good first episodes. The dialogue in this episode, between vague foreshadowing and chats that reveal most of a character’s backstory, was pretty much as generic as introductory-episode dialogue gets, so no help there. Soundtrack was unimpressive, and trying way too hard to add a mysterious, witchy atmosphere to scenes that carried none. The most interesting thing this episode did visually was the fixed-camera running takes in the beginning, and the direction stood out more for how painfully obvious the foreshadowing was. Said foreshadowing made the abrupt turn towards bloody timelooping horror 2/3 of the way through even more underwhelming. This was another show where the lion’s share of the fun I had came from the himado commenters, and since I don’t have Woolongs riding on this one, that means it’s a drop.
At least I got to remember how fun Another was
