The brief question and answer session after the screening of the K-On movie yesterday was preceded by the announcement that a further, dedicated event would take place the next day. Free but ticketed, it was an unmissable opportunity to get an insight into what K-On was like to develop as well as working for one of the premier animation studios, Kyoto Animation.
Starting off with a message from Andrew Partridge, the festival organiser, that there should be no recording of any kind: video, audio or photographic. This reinforced yesterdays message passed down from the production company and with news that it would be enforced this time around, the message was loud and clear. (This means except for authorised stills if they are ever released, no photos on this post)
"What are you watching?" "It's about a rebellion and government sponsored mercenaries, but in space." "What's it called?" "Bodacious Space Pirates" "..." "..." "Want to watch a documentary on polar bears?"
These are not today's surly pirates who kidnap and extort or even those of yesteryear who rape and plunder but- well, in three episodes there hasn't been much of any kind of piracy. The assumption is that there will be pillaging and perhaps even looting at some point, it may even take place in space but whether these endeavours will be bodacious is the primary question.
Ben-to is completely crackers. And, for a while, you can believe it knows how crackers it is. Then it runs out of steam and its concept can no longer sustain what is already pretty flimsy.
why the twins are fighting for discount food given their nouveau-rich status?
It's in good company with the likes of Tenjou Tenge and Ikkitousen which take a similarly flippant view to the high-school brawler genre, populating their casts with impossibly buxom ladies. Here proportions are fast and loose with one recurring character - charmingly known only as "Brunette" - only ever shown from the neck down and waist up.
Obnoxious, but typifies the opening episodes which trudge through the regular tropes of harem building and "must get stronger" mentality from the protagonist. The story of bored students fighting over discount bento boxes is completely absurd, likely borne from a creatively blocked writer witnessing a minor scuffle one evening in a convenience store and spinning it out. From there it's only a short mental hop to the grandiosely titled "wolves" who value guts and glory over smart thinking, through to the lesser dogs or the belligerent boars.
There's definitely a space between "High" and "School" so why High School of the Dead dropped it for the canonical abbreviation H.O.T.D. is unknown but this is just one of many oddities the first three episodes of the zombies-invade-Japan series contains. It plunders recent genre movies with gay abandon but still feels unique; it lays on the gratuitous - blood, breasts and banter - but never feels protracted or beyond the pale; it has a punk rock opening and ending themes but steers clear of banshee-strangling or ALI PROJECT dirge. What the series so ably does is nail the necessities and leave everything else to sort themselves out: characters are stereotypical and bland, the storyline hackneyed, but damned if it doesn't fire full bore with the action while keeping the pace quick and letting the tension build.
carnage, combat and cleavage blend together into a heady cocktail that stimulates all the right areas of the lizard brain
It is another uneventful day at Fumiji High School: Takashi is loafing about, Saya is berating him, Rei is in class, and no one has any idea of the apocalypse unfolding around them. A single zombie inadvertently bites and kills a teacher at the school gate and from there, panic and terror spread until the entire school is either the walking dead or in hiding. Takashi and Rei meet up with other survivors including the kendo club's champion, a firearms enthusiast and the ditsy school nurse; together they manage to procure a bus and escape from the school, but with the city in ruins and discontent brewing in the group there is the important question of whether they will ever see their families again. If they want to survive they'll need to put aside whatever quibbles they have with each other and find a way to exist in the now ruined world.
Amagami SS parades hollow, vacuous simpletons around in a grotesque approximation of a romance plot; cretins drawn with all the grace of a gorilla with a crayon shoved up its nose, splattered wholesale into a story that is as if the plot of a romance novel were faxed to the writers but was horribly smeared and distorted in the process, leaving just a grim and disfigured estimate as to what was intended. These are not even characters but amalgamations of the most tired, staid and all-round tedious aspects of archetypes that have mutated into a hideous, cringeworthy diorama of what sociopaths believe realistic or dramatically engaging human interaction is. There is no merciful release from these mannequins pretending to be people, only the grim realisation that there are twenty four episodes of uninspired, stupidity inducing drivel to come.
delights in emasculating her sycophantic barely-male toy that one day latched onto her like an unwelcome parasite
The plot as it stands concerns Junichi who after being slighted by an as yet nameless girl doesn't take the honourable and budget saving route of giving himself over to a psychiatric ward and instead constructs a pithy home made planetarium in his cupboard out of marker pen and tears of rejection. Through the abject failure of natural selection, the doddering halfwits he associates himself with haven't murdered him out of boredom or compassion and continue to potter about their own superficial lives. His hormones eventually determine he should pursue a girl one year his senior but whose mind is the colour of bitumen and has all the personality of a long deceased lemming. While he kowtows to her every whimsical desire, humiliating himself in front of his sole male acquaintance in the process, she remains fickle and obtuse and, with any luck, is plotting a gory end to his pathetic existence.
