Sunday, January 6, 2008

Winter '08 begins!
Well, the new season's slowly rolling in and I'm beginning to fill out the new scorecard. There's not nearly as much to worry about this time, and a lot of it's just sequels and remakes.

The first new show I've seen is the new Macross (Frontier). As expected, it's not perfect: there's a sense that they're trying to give us a look at everything they're doing all at once, which makes the first episode fairly topheavy. The battles are a bit bollocks (though still way better than most CG animation in mecha shows), the acting is occasionally suspect, and - worryingly - the series is a direct sequel to the endlessly awful Macross 7. So you'd expect it to be crap, a cynical cash-in on the venerable Macross name, yet it's not. In fact, based on this first episode I'm willing to say that Frontier's got a shot at being the best Macross series since the original (which, granted, says more about the quality of the other sequels than anything else). It's a bit shaky, but everything works. The designs are great, Yoko Kanno's Macross Plus hat still fits after 14 years (which sells the series for me all by itself), and for the first time in decades this is a Macross series where I don't want all the characters dead five minutes after they're introduced. The whole thing is like a love letter to the old fans - right down to using "Do You Remember Love" for the ED. I am genuinely pumped about this one, folks. Satelight better get moving with the new episodes asap.

I'm taking more of a wait-and-see attitude for some other shows. Rosario Plus Vampire is kitschy sci-fi/fantasy harem comedy stuff that we've all seen a billion times since Tenchi Muyo. There's enough panty flashes to give Ikkitousen a run for its money, but aside from that there's not much to recommend it (it's on the bubble, and I'm giving it one more ep to impress me). Water: Footprints in the Sand is a second harem-looking sort of show, but seems far more promising. The gimmick here is that the male lead is blind, which - as you would expect, if you've got more foresight than me - lands him a favored place among the girlies way, way faster than he otherwise would have. If I'd known being blind would get me knee deep in that much affection, I would have poked my own eyes out years ago.

The last show is Ayakashi, for which I'm making a special note because it's got the absolute worst writing I've ever seen in a series. Granted, shounen material is not known for its fine plotting, but I still expect better than tripe like this. The characters are obnoxious and follow no reasoning, and the situations range from boring to absurd (and not the good kind of absurd). The defining moment for me was at the end, where the male lead had to confront the bland boxcutter-wielding heavy from earlier in the episode. Just then the writers realize that they haven't yet demonstrated how scary and mean the heavy is, and their solution is to bring in a redshirt. Seriously, they drag in a random, apparently unnamed tough-looking fellow to get Worf'd so that we the audience will know: gosh, boxcutter guy is pretty dangerous! This single scene perfectly exemplifies just about everything wrong with anime: half-assed results from overworked writers and artists which will sell anyways because the original game/novel/manga/whatever was popular. Come on, people. I don't ask you to be flawless, but you can do better than this...
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