Yeah, the Animation and the Origination serve as nice character pieces, but The Natural is where Neo Venezia is allowed to shine.
Four Devas is my favourite arc, barring my minor nitpick about it. It is the series all coming together. But really, all Gintama arcs are great ones for one reason or another. That's what makes it one of the best animes.
You want sparkly vampires?!
So I've never watched a Shinkai movie/ova/anything before. I've been meaning to watch his stuff for the longest time as most of his works are highly recommended. I guess what kicked me into gear were some webms/gifs I saw of the movie recently. So I'm just going to power through his stuff this weekend.
This is one of the best looking OVAs/movies I've ever seen mainly because it comes so close to photorealism at times and the style is so distinctive in that regard. The zoom shots are out of this world, at times. I think a very large part of how good it looks comes down to three key areas, mainly that of that of texturing, lighting, and coloring. Each of these areas are handled in a very distinctive manner and so it all comes together into a finished product that looks remarkably better than its contemporaries. My understanding is that a lot of tracing is done over real life photographs in order to help keep the movies grounded and I think it goes a really long way. The background shots really help in setting the atmosphere for so much of the movie. The production goes really heavy on the post processing, especially depth-of-field shots, but I didn't mind. The photorealism does fall apart a bit due to the character designs and animation, but that can't be helped that much. I thought the character designs all really good and there were some great character animation cuts in the 2nd half of the work. I'm sure there were quite a few foot fetishists that got off watching this.
I'm sort of mixed on the OST as I liked some pieces and I didn't like others. For example one of the earlier pieces is this big piano composition and I don't think it was a particularly good piece. However the one at the finale is really stellar and captured the moment.
I recently watched Harmonie and I have to say that, for me anyway, everything that Harmonie does wrong with the main character, GoW does right. I didn't really like Harmonie mainly because I'm sick of dealing with 'pathetic' main characters pining away after a girl. While I did appreciate the development of the lead in Harmonie, the earlier parts annoyed me to no end, mainly because I've seen it so many times before. Here in GoW, the lead is aggressive but not overly so and for the most part is a regular teenager, even if he's a loner. While I can't say I relate to his dreams of making shoes, I felt that he was an interesting enough character to make me empathize with him.
I have to say that I really liked this a lot, much more than I was expecting. I kept thinking it was some weird foot fetish anime that looked super good, due to posts joking about that aspect all the time, but I got a really well developed romance out of this. Also the 40+ minute run time meant that the film never outstayed its welcome.
The first half of the Utena movie has some of the best art design ever so it's worth it at least for that
Wow. Most perfect description ever.
I like to believe the reason why OST didn't stand out so much is because Kashiwa Daisuke was not able to be all creative due to outside factors. Really like his other work a lot more. Especially April.#02 (just a small clip from the whole song)
Also obligatory post to show how nice this movie looks.
Oh boy. This felt like the inverse of Garden of Words and I don't mean that in a positive way. I appreciate the concept of the story and the attempt made but I feel the execution is lacking in pretty much every regard. First off the 20 minute run time really truncates what could have been an interesting fleshed out story and relationship into something that feels a bit artificial. What sane person would revolve their life
These character designs look like something I expect out of Key. Man this was a rough watch just due to how bad these designs are. I wasn't really expecting anything of this level and compared to how great the character designs in GoW was, this made for a rather sharp contrast. The background art was pretty decent but I could also tell how much Shinkai has improved in that area.
The mech and aliens being CGI also dragged me out of the experience a lot. This is an OVA that looks worse in motion than it does in stills. There's something 'off' about the animation for the production in that it looked like the framerate is low. Anyway it really gave the movie this cheap feeling to it, like a Flash production. I know that's a bit of an exaggeration but that's really the best way I can describe it. Background art aside, I did not find this a visually appealing OVA. Looking at ANN, it seems this was a solo project on the animation side. If true, I do find that impressive on an effort front but the visuals just aren't there.
I appreciate the effort to actually portray time dilation but it's just not handled in that great of a manner. I think a longer runtime would have really helped out in this regard. The production values were pretty shocking to me as I expected something close to GoW's level and I'm not even sure if I would have found this impressive in the time period it was released.
Give the manga a try if you have time. If my memory is right it goes much deeper into the characters motivation and expands on other aspects and has art of Mizu Sahara so it looks good too.
never
