Maidens of the Kaleidoscope
~Beyond the Border~ => Sara's Audio-Visual Import-Overflow Retail => Topic started by: commandercool on July 11, 2016, 02:51:50 AM
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Anybody else watch the first episode of this?
It's a fantasy show written by Gen Urobuchi, and the first episode is generic as all get out. There's really nothing special about it... Except one thing. The animation is fucking insane. It uses Taiwanese glove puppetry (basically, incredibly elaborate sock puppets). Imagine Thunderbirds, but way more bishonen and with way more samurai yelling the names of attacks and then shooting lightning waves out of their swords.
I genuinely have no idea how seriously this show wants us to take it, but it seems to take itself extremely seriously and the effect is worth checking out just to see it if for no other reason. No idea if the plot will pick up, but I highly recommend the first episode just to see the interesting spectacle.
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This was cool as hell, and made me want to find more PILI stuff to watch.
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My roommate was like 'yeah that's totes taiwanese', it's really cool, I'm rather a smalltime fan of these deeply orientalish minor details like the owing buddha a favor sort of thing. I feel like I was watching a tokusatsu show with all the showy and unblending cg effects. Not sure what to expect but I expect to keep up with it.
First impressions of the first 2 episodes of madoka are very misleading if you somehow didn't know about the biggest wham, so I can't imagine the unconventional animation style (for 'anime') is the extent of his surprises.
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Yeah, I was telling my roommate, who I watched it with, that I can't recall an Urobuchi show ever having a strong opening. I mean, Madoka's opening isn't weak by any means but it's also not great at holding people's attention, and Fate/Zero has one of the least compelling first episodes of anything I've ever seen (hour running time and all).
It's just that I'm having a hard time imagining how this show could get much more complex. It seems very earnestly simple. Not that that's a huge problem, I'll keep watching anyway, but I can see how some people might not be immediately hooked. And of course there's plenty of room for me to be surprised
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Just watched the second episode, which was, again, fine. Nothing groundbreaking story-wise, but totally serviceable. I'm going to keep watching for sure.
Spent the entire episode trying to figure out how the puppetry works. The arms definitely look weird, so I'm guessing they're manipulated from below through the long-ass sleeves all the characters have and aren't actually mechanically attached to the rest of the body. I know there's a making-of thing that probably explains this, but it's fun to try to "see the strings" as it were.
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If it has the background of a wuxia story, expect plenty of dead characters by the end by default. The first girl is generally the OTP, second girl ends up with the secondary main, third girl is guaranteed to end off alone (or dead (or killed off-screen to come back to life near the end)).
These kinds of shows tend to warrant long seasons. Live action wuxia dramas are typically 40 episodes (45 mins) or more and will still leave out parts of the original novel. I hope this one has enough momentum to do a decently fleshed out story.