Was Anime & Cartoon Megathread recommendation weekend for me this week. Saw the first five episodes of the 2012 3d Turtles show, a couple more episodes of Nozaki-kun and the Memories in the Rain Bleach OVA.
The Turtles show surprised me. I had seen some teasers for it after watching some live Legend of Korra episodes and thought it looked ugly, but seeing it in action I actually think it looks pretty. It's animated snappy, the Turtles all look good, the action scenes are cool. The inserted anime(Or more Wakfu, actually) smiley expressions over their masks looks dumb to me, though. When it comes to the show itself, my impression of it so far is that it's fine, but a little boring. As for reasons: A lot of it is in the "It's different and therefore ruined" catgory, in this case different from the old animated movie(and a small part of the animated show) that I have seen. The Turtles themselves and Splinter are fine, I quite like them. They all look younger and cooler and their behavior is on point with what I expect, with Michelangelo finding a new way to be both annoying and fun. I like them as a team. But what's with these villains, and this conflict? The Krang are doing some weird unexplained thing that so far has not been followed up on. I guess the Turtles are waiting until April's dad sends them a mail or something instead of going out looking for him? The Krang themselves are surprisingly boring. Krang had a very strong, very whiny personality and these guys can't even form a cohesive sentence. They were creepy when they first appeared, but after a while they're just boring dudes who just stand still firing laser guns. Also, why is April a kid now? Is it so Donatello can have a weird turtle to human crush on her? Because I'm not a fan of that. I don't enjoy the mutated forms of Snake and the Spider guy either, there's nothing left of their human selves in their looks. Shredder and his goons show some promise, but they haven't gotten to do much yet, for all of Splinter's backstory talk. Baxter Stockman was the most fun villain, although him being a put-upon, stupid African-American now really reminds me of Amazing Spider-Man 2s Electro. He was first, I suppose.
What it mostly comes down to though, is that the old show is goofy and dumb and silly, but the parts of it I saw were also funny and fast paced. There's a clear conflict from the get go that they follow all the way through. The villains are fun in how they work together, but constantly try to sabotage one another behind each others' backs. There's a grandmother with a machine gun. This new show is surprisingly serious, it's slow, the conflict is vague, the turtles seem to create half of their villain roster themselves, it's always nighttime for some reason and THE THEME SONG IS NOT AS GOOD AS BEFORE ARGH BLARGH. I watched Turtles the first time when I was like 5, there was probably no way I was gonna like any different take on it.
Nozaki-kun, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. The voice acting and expressions are really on point, and it's nice to see some characters that aren't these really common archetypes.
Memories in the Rain was nice too. It had surprisingly good animation on Grand Fisher in particular, which helped make him feel a bit more.. mythological, I guess? It's easy to have these guys with huge skulls feel very heavy metal. I have barely watched any Bleach, but this is one of those parts I wanted to see.
Log in to comment