August 19, 2008

A vast wasteland

Man, how can an anime season have so many new shows and absolutely none of them are going to be worth watching? Ye Gods.

THAT has its quarterly preview of the upcoming season. There are going to be a lot of shows, but only a couple that I'll be even faintly curious about, and those only because I'm strange.

There are a bunch I wouldn't go near. We've talked about some meager source material used for series in the past, such as Strike Witches being based on a line of figurines. But I think that Bihada Ichizoku has set a new record for bizarre source material. It's an anime based on a cosmetics product line. The women in the concept art all look like they met the guillotine a year later in France.

So what does look interesting? As long as we turn the "interesting" threshold waaay down, then the following:

Hakushaku to Yousei. The story idea gives me the hives. But the cast! Mizuki Nana (Shinobu, Fate) and Sugita Tomokazu (Kyon)? And Midorikawa Hikaru (Zelgadis)? Sadly, I won't be able to hear that without downloading the fansubs, which I won't do.

Rosario to Vampire CAPU2: will be fun just because of all the opportunities to snark at it, as well as for opportunities for pandering frame grabs. The first season managed to introduce all the characters and get the scenario established, and maybe the second season (another 13 eps) will finally begin to dig into the story a bit.

Kannagi has real cut-rate animation, based on the concept art, and the story concept is not what you'd call original. But it could have a lot of manic energy.

Macademi Wasshoi! Oh, brother. Another one where the snark and frame grabs will be fun. All you need to know about it is this picture (NSFW).

I was just realizing as I was scanning through some of my favorite fan-sub-monitoring blogs just how uninteresting the summer season turned out to be. But fall is going to be even worse.

(Note: There are some that I can see how others might be interested in, such as the Clannad sequel, but they don't interest me.)

UPDATE: Pete thinks that Hyakko might be the best show of the season.

UPDATE: I noticed the Pygmalion connection to Hyakko, too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:41 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 387 words, total size 3 kb.

1

Every season has a surprise in it.  Shigofumi was reputed to be extremely good, last winter, but fell into the clutches of Evil Bandai.   Kamen no Maid Guy was entertaining fun last season; I have found it to be genuinely funny.

 For the summer season though, disappointment reigns.  Code Geass R2 picked up at the mid-season point, but if an out-of-control Sunrise roller coaster is the best the season had to offer, it was pretty lame.  Birdy's been a bright spot with a quality "medium-weight" script, and Sekirei has been the sleeper, as it actually has a very slowly progressing plot & backstory to go with the fanservice and mediocre art.  (I'm not offering odds on them actually taking it anywhere though.) 

I'm not interested in any further KyoAni tearjerkers; I watched Kanon, and that was enough.  Hopefully there's a surprise in the coming season somwhere that continues the positive trend of finding something worth watching.

Posted by: ubu at August 19, 2008 01:38 PM (dhRpo)

2 How can a season have so few shows worth watching, yet have so many new series? Easy - a third of them aren't actually new. There's a whole crap-ton of sequels in there, and many of those are being produced by the studios who we'd usually be looking to for the good, new content.

Kannagi is likely to be the "surprise" hit of the season, largely thanks to it's ex-KyoAni director (the one who got kicked off Lucky Star after four episodes, though he did have heavy involvement in the better Haruhi episodes) and Hideyuki Kurata scripting the series. Then again, the only Kurata shows I can see on your review history are Kamichu! and RoD, neither of which rated highly. I guess you may as well just write the season off.

Posted by: DiGiKerot at August 19, 2008 01:58 PM (2NEuT)

3 Well if you look at it in terms of something not catching your interest for the preview right now, you can be surprise if that happens in the later run.

Posted by: TheBigN at August 21, 2008 12:06 PM (8pTlG)

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