Anime

Still not following anything this season, though May I Ask for One Final Thing? looks promising.

Watched two odd older series last week, each odd in their own way.

First was Girls Band Cry. Or more precisely, the first three episodes of it.

I almost dropped it part way through the first episode, just because the animation is so horrifically awful. And that's something I've never done before. Unlike many, I have no particular issue with CGI, and can at least tolerate pretty much any animation for a good story and/or good characters. But this is something else entirely - it's like Initial D race scenes levels of awful CGI, except made 25+ years later. I'm honestly not even sure how they managed it - I would've thought it would be impossible to make CGI that awful in 2024 - that they'd have had to invest extra time and labor into deliberately making it that bad.

But the thing is that I really liked the characters. So I gave it the "first three episodes" chance. But I just couldn't get past how awful the animation is (I still can't forgive them for what they did to that poor cat - it looked like something out of a Nintendo 64 game).

So then I wandered a bit, and ended up on something that's sort of been on my horizon for a while now - Majo no Tabitabi. And it was... odd.

From the description, it seems like it would be sort of somewhere between Flying Witch and Kiki's Delivery Service, with maybe a bit of Kino's Journey mixed in. And that's pretty much what it is. Part of the time.

But the thing is that it's very episodic, and the individual episodes range anywhere from all bright and shiny and cute to some of the most horrifically soul-crushing tragedy I've ever seen, and back again. It's beautifully animated and Elaina is adorable and the stories are generally well told, and there's a bit of a background plot that one can catch glimpses of here and there that looks interesting, but the mood whiplash is sort of exhausting.

Then, because I couldn't stop thinking about the characters, I went back to Girls Band Cry.

The animation was awful throughout (Rupa in particular is almost unwatchable - her sweater's the worst, but even her hair and her face look like they were done by a novice following a Blender tutorial). And the performances were surprisingly lackluster - even beyond putting the awful animation on full display, the songs are nothing special and even Nina's much-vaunted voice really isn't all that (though admittedly my opinion might be colored by the fact that I just watched Zombieland Saga a couple of weeks ago, and those are some of the best anime music performances ever).

But damn I love the characters. They're just so rich and so detailed and so realistically complex and emotional and stubborn and awkward and frustrating. And they almost made it worth the rest of it. Almost.

They deserved better.