Review by Hope Chapman
Rating: 1
I don't even know where to begin.
So this is a forgotten digi-paint show that was dug up in a time capsule from no later than the year of our lord 2002, dusted off, reformatted into 16:9, and re-sold as an adaptation of a Masamune Shirow manga from 2010. How else do you explain its hideous color palette, jagged flat designs, and painfully dated obsession with fetishes of yesteryear like catgirls, maids, androids/cyborgs with unusually sexual hardware, and busty scientist onee-samas? I refuse to accept that this was made by discerning working professionals in the modern-day anime climate. I mean, my god. Just look at it. And if your eyes rot out of their sockets from the onslaught of uggo that ensues, just get a load of that plinky-plonky-zero-effort soundtrack blaring away in the background, just underneath the unbelievably screechy performances of the poor voice actresses who got suckered into this exercise in purestrain cringe.
No sir, I did not like it.
Every second Pandora in the Crimson Shell was on, I could feel my skin writhing around on my bones, begging for me to turn it off. But I stuck it out to the end because I love you, and my only reward was a perpetually increasing sense of bafflement that this thing got made in 2016. It feels like trash from a bygone era, the exact kind of stuff that used to be mocked and scorned as pandering garbage in much the same way that light-novel-magic-high-school shows are now, and I definitely wasn't pining for its return. The advent of moe may have altered anime in plenty of negative ways, but one of the positive things that moe did for anime was give its comedies and slice-of-life shows a sense of calm and charm they didn't always possess before. Anime used to be so much more shrill than it is today, and I had almost forgotten that fact before Pandora in the Crimson Shell popped up to remind me. I don't miss the mistakes of yesteryear, especially when they reach that oh-so-special pitch that sets dogs to howling from several miles away. Yuck.
If you've gotten bored with the worst kinds of modern anime and want to start feeling some sweet nostalgia for the worst kinds of anime gone by, then give Pandora in the Crimson Shell a try. But if you don't want to feel precious seconds of your life slipping away one-by-one while flipping you a spiteful finger, you might want to steer clear of this nerve-grinding oddity.
