Let's get one thing out of the way first and foremost - The animation quality of this episode was absolutely abysmal. There's no way to dress it up; while this series has often been an odd mix of breath-taking backdrops and not so stunning foregrounds, the character animation of this episode reached a new low, which left me suspecting that the episode has been completed by a bunch of six year-olds. Bad animation does crop up in anime from time to time, but on this occasion it was downright distracting.
Aside from that, this was a really hit and miss episode. As ever, the pace of this series has proved to be very sedated and relaxed, and to be honest I really rather like it for that, and similarly I've also been enamoured by the normal school friendship vibes that the show gives off despite its magic-related connotations, which makes for a very realistic series away from all the spells and such. While this focus of the series got some nice scenes this time around featuring all of the major trainee mages in some shape or form, the episode as a whole was a bit of a dead loss. While its start was fair enough, with Sora still suffering a little mentally from the problems arising from her use of revival magic last time around, the episode soon moved on to the story of a little girl who was looking for help from some mages to let her have a baby, which was a little disturbing in its own right but ended up being hugely uneventful and pointless to leave the episode feeling like filler above all else.
While this series certainly does certain things rather well, and is nothing if not relaxing after a stressful day or the like, this particular episode also well and truly highlighted everything that is wrong with the series. I really can't stress enough how bad the animation was here, and when mixed with a pretty disappointing story line there was basically nothing to recommend it whatsoever come the end of the episode.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment