Review Vampire Hunter D OVA Movie (1985):

Overall, a decent OVA, but lacking in scale to the book. Basically a downgrade to the book but a good standalone introduction to VHD.
First on character designs. A lot of inspiration from the novel mixed with original interpretations. D's design is faithful to the novel and the voice actor chosen fit the role well. What I liked is how a lot of the details of the book were interpreted in D's design. Many times the author uses prose to hint at D's mysterious powers in vague ways. For example, the author will allude to D's cloak being able to expand and seem to move on its own, which is never explicitly revealed to be D's aura or the cloak itself. In the movie this was interpreted as D's cloak often flowing out and being able to move by itself. Good attention to detail, even though it's not noticeable to someone who hasn't read the book. Besides D, the other character designs were mostly original interpretations, which was a detrimental choice overall. Most characters suffered from huge foreheads, off putting eyes (mismatched or at strange angles), and unappealing coloring. Doris is changed from a brunette to a blonde and she is much less imposing. For one, they took out the scene of her stripping at the beginning to distract hunters before attacking them. Her boldness was toned down, making her a generic, strong willed token DID compared to the kindhearted but unashamed character she was in the book. Garou the werewolf was replaced with Rei Ginsei, whose redesign was lacking. The 80s punk mullet did not pair well with the dark color scheme. The choice to give him more dialogue and a personality-a slight code of honor-was another original choice. It's decent, but would have been heightened if he had used his powers more than once. Might as well have, since his position displaced all the other minor book villains to side cameos. Count Lee and his daughter were changed to be dark skinned, which felt out of place, especially when they are described as pale skinned, as vampires are, in the books. Besides that, and the weird foreheads, everything else about them was pretty well done. Count Lee was as imposing as he is in the book and the twist of his daughter being dhampir made her more relevant than she was in the book. Overall D's design is the only notable one, and it's arguably better than Bloodlust's. His face being both more fair and melancholy than Bloodlust's fits how the book would describe him as unnaturally handsome. Bloodlust's D has a more unnatural and imposing face which is a reasonable interpretation, but leans too far into his nature as a vampire than into the fact that the way his face alludes to his vampire nature is because of how perfect it is. Besides this, the character designs are passable.
The monsters were great being both true to the novel and creative as interpretations. The scene of D walking into the castle was one of the highlights of the OVA, having a great series of original designs mixed with gore and uncleanliness.

It was disappointing to not see more detailed backgrounds of the noble's castle or more references to the scifi/gothic setting. Much of the composition during the castle scenes was made up of close ups, black backgrounds, or action backgrounds, which was disappointing considering the book has a unique scifi, gothic fantasy setting which begs for interesting interpretations. There are a few interesting shots of the castle, but it seems more inspired by Castlevania than VHD and the inside of the castle was an uninspired tech factory, with grids of tiles, pipes, and scaffolding, etc.. Despite this, the art was a strong point, with lots of detailed background scenery outside the castle and interesting effects. Lots of scenic nature shots and great details such as supernatural lighting effects, just not many attempts at interpretations of the scifi aspects of the novel's setting, something Bloodlust does better.

The narrative generally follows the book's, albeit with some new parts and parts cut out. Most of the new scenes aren't really necessary and most of the cut out stuff would've been better than the new stuff. However, this is likely owed to the budget and the need to cut down original scenes that would have greater detail, for shorter, original ones. For example, the scene of D reviving cuts out the the details of how his revival works which would have made a better scene, but have taken more effort to make. As with OVA, it feels slightly rushed, and a lot of scenes cut into each other abruptly.

The music is made of fairly standard sound tones-80s suspense stuff-but is fairly effective and well composed. It's usually either tense, mysterious, melancholic, or uplifting. The composition is standard, low pitch drone synths/key tapping for tense or buildup scenes, higher tone/key synths/flutes for uplifting or melancholic scenes, the usual 80s stuff. It's not a memorable soundtrack, but it is a good one.

The animation is also fairly standard; lots of limited animation techniques going on like sliding cels and whatnot. Animation isn't the highlight, but the art is, besides the characters. Colors were fitting and when there were detailed backgrounds they were detailed with bloody moons, scraggly distant mountains accented with purple fog and lush country, flowing grass plains, grungy corridors with maggots, and the like.

All in all a good OVA, with great direction, good sound and monster design, and fair animation. It's downsides are the wonky character designs and the budget/time constraints, the latter limiting it from properly encapsulating the goodness of the book's setting and detail.

7/10

Review Shouwa Ahozoushi Akanuke Ichiban

It's a superpower romcom, but mostly comedy. Characters do not change, romance barely develops, and the episodes generally follow the same formula even if the premise changes. It's love triangle comedy broken up with a few dokidoki moments.

The comedy is loud and mostly slapstick, along with verbal misunderstandings and constant gags (like UY). Most of these can be pretty funny, but binging is not recommended as the form of the jokes is repetitive.

The characters are charismatic and the premise is unique enough to make it work. The MC acts on the trope of country hick, although he is more broadly a dumb pervert trope character. The voice actor who plays him puts 100% into the exaggerated emotion, silliness, and heroic aspects of the role. Similarly, the other voice actors are all well in tune with their characters.

One downside is that some episodes lack a driving plot. Each episode usually involves a central problem and the resolution being a climax near the end of the episode. When this premise is lacking the entire episode can move like a slug. For example, the stories centered around the Jariten character are fine, until they repeat and it's the same plot of him following the girl he likes or messing something up involving his planet.

When the premise is decent enough, the episodes are fine to great. The non narrative aspects of the show are generally top tier. The direction and storyboarding is well done, with shots flowing into each other with seamless transitions that introduce the subject of the following shot into the scene usually with music being employed to signal or ease one scene into the next. However, even good direction isn't enough to carry a boring or unoriginal plot, which is why I mention these aspects after mentioning plot.

Other minor downsides include there being sometimes excessive sound effects when the animation/cutting should be doing the talking and there sometimes being too many jokes that aren't tied into the plot. I get slapstick comedy involves abrupt jokes, but when there are so many that aren't ever acknowledged by the character or plot, they begin to feel like unnecessary pauses that make the narrative less engrossing. Generally these aren't always the case which is why these are minor nitpicks.

Other aspects that are done well include the art, animation, and music. Light and bright colors, with a lot of detail in setting and characters, like shadows, detailed buildings, blushing, eye detail, expressive faces. Often the artstyle switches between high lit shojo and the normally lit soft comedic setting, but both are crafted well. The animation uses a lot of movement blurs and comedic tropes to budget, but in the same light there are many sasuga moments for humor and overall the show can be called well animated.

Overall a great show, funny most of the time and light hearted with likable characters and good music.

8/10

Review Video Girl Ai

High quality all around, except that it's hard to find online in high quality. Romcom OVA of 6 episodes, at about 30 minutes each, including OP/ED.

Animation was extremely polished, majority of what is happening onscreen appears fluid with the exception of the mouths. Art was also top notch with lots of detailed shading (on characters and setting pieces) paired with complementing lighting choices, such as bright sun flare effects and the general presence of bright, but soft overhead sources of light, creating glossiness and illuminating the soft colors, while also creating deep shadows.
Expressions are fairly emotive, but not overdone as is usually the case in comedy anime. There are comedy faces, but it's kept to the art style; they lean towards realism more than wackiness. Highly detailed outfits paired with already mentioned aspects made the characters fit well into the backgrounds, a rare example of characters not looking out of place in front of artistic backgrounds. The faded, laid back color scheme is relaxing and anachronistic, making this a good late night anime. The colors, setting, and art also add to the bittersweetness of the romance. This is a romcom more focused on the rom, although the comedy is fairly funny. There's a lot of oppai and good ecchi scenes too, yet it's a genuinely heart tugging show and the ecchi never detracts from the overarching romance.

The style is oddly denpa. There's lots of imagery reminiscent of denpa such as tv static, telephone lines, strange heavenly techno imagery, uncanny shots of distant places, EM waves effects. Ai in the tv is very reminiscent of that one shot from Lain, and I feel there are many other shots that Lain could have been inspired by. It often feels similar to the atmosphere of Beautiful Dreamer and Lum the Forever.

The music is great. It's more like VN osts than the usual 80s stuff, but with some unique tones like in related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlBhuD04lT8

In all really well done and a real classic.

10/10

Review Lily Cat OVA (1987)

Homage to horror classics The Thing and Alien. Set in the future, the crew of space cruiser Saldes is sent out to explore a new planet. The crew wakes up from a 20 year hyper sleep having arrived at their destination and to the notification that two crew members are disguised criminals. Unbeknownst to them, their ship found and captured a floating alien life form during the journey.

Minor spoilers: Despite the direct influences, the story isn't a direct copy. It follows the framework of the classics, but to the effect of subverting plot anticipation. It's clear from the get go what route the story is taking, but this upfront presentation of narrative also sets the audience up for twists and the unexpected find of depth in the writing.

The art style has impressive lighting, but it's a fairly standard 80s OVA art style catered towards realism. It isn't poorly made, but it's not outstanding either. Characters are detailed with shadows, hair glossiness, realistic facial/body structures, face feature lines, lips, etc., yet none of this really pops out. I would owe this to the use of thin lines over the stylistic thicker lines that most anime go with. Without thick lines and few hatch lines, the faces lack the depth or style to be memorable. This choice seems to have been made to appear more western, but honestly a more distinctive style could have looked better at the cost of some realism. The monster is also fairly lacking in style. Its tendrils were well done, but the main biomass was pretty boring. The choice of coloring it completely black was a copout as it obscured. detail of the monster's gore/tumours. The lack of gore was also disappointing.
Despite these faults there is a saving grace in the interiors. The detail here is at its peak. Most of the backgrounds are fully 3D and pop out with multiple layers of shading, coloring, and line work. As the background rarely appears flat and distant, it's often present and imposing.

Music shows promise at the start, then they make the choice of going full campy. Monster scenes were accompanied with 80s hard rock like it was Scooby Doo or something. Not the best choice, but there were some good uses of music near the beginning. Sound effects were well done though. Footsteps and echoes were used well to create tension and the monster sounds were creative. The monster sounds were clearly inspired by The Thing, using some kind of hissing sound, reminiscent of cicadas, that sounded right out of the dog scene in The Thing. Good job overall.

As mentioned, the writing had its influences, and was also schlocky at time, but it delivered in originality. The twists were well delivered and interesting and there was an interesting reflection on hypersleep at one point, but besides that it was fairly tropey and cut by its inspirations.

Direction was decent. Most of the deaths being off screen cutaways was fairly disheartening. As well, the amount of cutaways in general was annoying. However, when they weren't used to kill a character they were fairly effective at building up the mystery by cutting off details of actions or repeatedly showing that something strange was going on with the ship. The dialogue wasn't always campy, but there was too much dialogue in general, especially considering the lackluster monster scenes. More time should have been spent developing the setting, as it was hard to gain a scale off how big the ship was from the inside, despite the detailed interiors, which I felt was due to too many closeups for dialogue.

Overall worth a watch, especially for horror fans, but not outstanding in many regards. Art is well crafted but kind of dull. Music varies, but had good moments. Setting is interesting with some outstanding plot points and interior design, but nothing else really capable of drawing one into it. I believe this would have been much better if they had focused more on the horror and included less scenes of people talking.

5/10

Review Yawara (1986)

Yawara is a TV series about a young girl, Yawara, who has, all her life, been trained to be a judo champion by her 5 time national judo champion grandfather and master. Despite her training and natural talent for judo she wants to live a normal life distant from judo.

By technical aspects this anime is impressive. The quality of the animation stays consistent for over 100 episodes and the style is fairly detailed. Flaws are mainly present in writing and plot.

Spoilers:
The main flaw of the show is the contrived bias and unrealistic sway towards Yawara accepting judo. Like Yawara's grandpa, the plot is excessively one sided towards Yawara becoming involved with judo. There is little exploration or leg room given to Yawara's desire and the show insists that judo is right for her. None of the supporting cast supports Yawara's wish to live a normal life. This is to say, all the supporting characters are either directly or indirectly involved in convincing her to do judo. There are characters, like the grandpa and newspaper journalist, who excessively believe Yawara has to do judo, and do everything to convince her so; characters who have some sort of emotional deficit which can only be healed by Yawara doing judo, like Fujiko; and characters who are there to show that Yawara can do judo and live somewhat normally, like Jody and Belkins. Even the one character Yawara sees as her connection and outlet to a normal life secretly wants her to do judo. The lack of thought given to Yawara's personal desire makes her struggle for individuality nonexistent and the show a repetition of plots where Yawara is unfairly coerced into being involved in judo. It's hardly fair, or good writing, that she's surrounded by people who either excessively push for her to do judo or are somehow dependent on her doing judo. She's also portrayed as selfish when she puts her own desires over the hopes and needs of the rest of the cast who all coincidentally agree she should do judo or are in a position where her doing judo would benefit them. The writing basically insists that Yawara needs to do judo and even portrays her wish to live by her needs as superficial and silly. The full title of the show is "Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl", yet most of what "fashionable" refers to are scenes such as Yawara thinking about going shopping while she's being forced to participate in judo. I continue to use words like coercion or forced because the show feels that way. It's not a story about coming to terms with self identity, it's a story about a girl being forced to live and cope with a life she doesn't want to live. Even if the latter was the intended story, the way it is done through contrived plot devices is not satisfying and poorly written.

5/10

>>3715
>>3715
is that crummy upscaling or denoising?