All CLAMP.
If you’ve ever seen a CLAMP anime, you must be familiar with overly elongated humanoids with tiny, tiny heads. Even with this in mind, I can’t help but get drawn out of the anime by the characters’ bizarre proportions. At times, especially in the OP and fight scenes, the quality of the anime is solid enough that the CLAMP style doesn’t interfere too much with the viewing experience. Unfortunately, the rest of Blood-C’s premiere episode doesn’t inspire. At times, I was laughing at the characters more often than not.
Saya’s design smacks me as fussy. Let me employ an analogy to explain what I mean. From experience, I’ve seen when young chefs are eager to impress. What do they do as a result? They throw everything on the plate. They can’t help but add touches here and flourishes there because they want to show everyone that they’re ready to cook with the big boys or gals. The people in charge of Saya’s design are guilty of the same sin: far too many frills. She has a tacky black and red uniform, but to top it all off, she also wears a chain around the neck that just screams Hot Topic. Her skirt is unnecessarily pleated; her twintails are unnecessarily poofy. What really sets the whole thing off for me, however, are her glasses. It’s just too much, too distracting.
Okay, okay, so I don’t like the art style, but what else does Blood-C have to offer? A surprising amount of dead space. There are two montages in the anime involving nothing but Saya running to and from school. The first montage is a little over a minute long and contains nothing but Saya’s singing. The second montage, from when she leaves school to the moment she greets her father, is even longer. At about ninety seconds of leggy Saya running, it is only broken up for a brief moment in the middle so that Saya can wave to a puppy. When you include the short basketball scene at school, a good chunk of the episode is devoted to nothing.
To compound matters, Blood-C borrows from the tradition of many anime where the writers think that less the viewers know, the better. Mysteries are always fun, but between the cryptic opening soliloquy from an unseen voice and the nonexistent setup before Saya’s fight scene, the audience is left grasping at straws for a solid handle of what Blood-C is really all about. We are meant to juxtapose Saya’s clumsy self and everyday schoolgirl life with the sleek, sexy demonslayer at night, but what results is a first episode of little depth. There wasn’t much in the way of intriguing character relationships (another moody shounen in which our heroine takes a inordinate amount of interest in for no particular reason) nor did the writers really establish a sense of impending doom that will compel the audience to yearn for the follow-up episode. There was simply a fight against something, which quickly died and then the episode ended.
Oh well, at least the choreography of Saya’s fight scene was decent.
I just finished watching this and as far I’m concerned, CLAMP only functions in two frequencies. Genuinely good and terribad. I don’t know where this is going but at least the proportions aren’t as bad as the ones in xxxHolic.
If Blood-C does end up sucking, I think Production IG will have a bigger hand in the anime’s undoing than CLAMP. Talk about a snoozefest of a first episode.
This. I did like the music though. I hope it gets better. ;_;
Hm, I didn’t really notice it. I do plan on watching the higher quality rip of the anime whenever it comes out though so maybe I’ll pay more attention to the music then.
Series from Production I.G. that aren’t directed by Kenji Kamiyama have a tendency to disappoint me. So I’m not sure whether or not I should give Blood-C a try, and to be honest, the generic CLAMP designs are only further exacerbating my disinterest.
Well, he did do the screenplay to the last Blood film, but I guess he’s busy at the moment. I dunno, I liked Eden of the East but I found his Ghost in the Shell stuff pretty average. His stuff lacks a bit of heart for me.
If you ask me, Eden of the East is my least favorite Kenji Kamiyama work. Which isn’t to say that it’s bad or anything (far from it actually), but I prefer GitS: SAC, and especially Moribito over Eden.
Well, I must admit I like Eden of the East more for the concept than its characters.
Did you watch the movies? The whole ‘concept’ behind the show is driven to the ground, then thrown out the window. But even without them, Eden of the East jumped the shark for me about halfway through its run; when words like “Johnny” and “NEET”, and the so-called “Eden system” just kept buzzing by for no apparent reason.
Nah, I have the feeling that the movies would run the idea into the ground so I haven’t touched them. I still think the series itself was very well done. I don’t think NEET is a very esoteric concept so I’m not sure why it bothered you.
It was a new word to me, but regardless. I just thought their inclusion and purpose in the story was forced and overdone. They were truly a bunch of dead weight to the plot.
Well, the anime is about saving Japan. Akira’s plan had something vaguely to do with the jobless and despondent youths of Japan. NEETs fit right into that.
‘Vaguely’ would be putting it lightly. That is precisely what I mean…
Again, I agree that the specifics of the anime weren’t strong. Still, the anime touched on a lot of my pet topics like youth despondency, joblessness, what to do with old people, etc. I couldn’t help but love it. Sure, my assessment of the anime is subjective but I never claimed otherwise.
I like the ideas presented in Eden as well. It’s something unique for an anime to do.
It’s just too bad Production IG decided to split the story up into a series and three movies. By the time the last movie comes out, most people will have damn forgotten about Eden of the East.
The main problem that this anime has is that it’s just boring. They probably wanted to show off Nana Mizuki’s singing but couldn’t they have done that in less boring way?
The opening narration probably makes more sense if you’ve seen Blood+ since that had similar themes (Saya’s nature as a killing machine vs. her upbringing). Not that that makes it any better.
I actually like Saya’s design quite a bit, although I can’t say the same for her personality. I’ll probably stick around anyway since I do like girls with katanas.
Oh, we came to the same conclusion. I just had to use far too many words.
I have no clue who that is nor why it should bog down the first episode of an anime where presumably everything should be interesting.
Yeah, that’s a problem for me. I get that they’re going for a contrast, but does the contrast really make her more interesting? Or does it just seem silly that she’s half moe, half killing machine?
I got heavy Black Rock Shooter vibes from this: Decent to look at, but not a lot of substance. I was on board for this show at first, but it’s a case of leaving way too much to the imagination that nobody really cares about. I’m not going to count it out yet, but it was a pretty rocky start.
I’ll probably just watch for some slick sword fighting, assuming the action scenes hold up past the first episode. There hasn’t really been a satisfying swordplay anime recently. As for the boring… uh, everything else, I can always skip them.
There is no good CLAMP. If you think there is good CLAMP, you have bad taste and should be ashamed. Even more ashamed because you probably recommended something by CLAMP to someone or otherwise praised them in a way that helped continue and spread their horrible influence on anime styles. While other influences like Akira Toriyama were also terrible for a wide swath of anime and manga, at least Toriyama’s own work wasn’t retch-inducingly ugly itself.