goblin slayer. yosuga sora character
I think everyone and their mother have commented that every episode feels like it only lasts 5-10 minutes, it’s very engaging. But outside of pacing, the direction isn’t all that much. The series director is Omata Shin’ichi, a Studio Shaft graduate also known for Kaguya-sama and Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu. You can clearly see this with the visuals of the show being full of recognizable “shaftisms,” yet those feel like mechanical surface copying without any underlying substance, especially when measured against other ex-Shaft directors such as Itamura Tomoyuki (Vanitas and Youfkashi no Uta) whose “shaftisms” look like a genuine artistic vision.For example, the "glitchy green screen" and the "archaic wipe transition" effects are just failed "ironically bad" stylizations. Because stylizations are supposed to have style to them, there is nothing stylish about a wipe transition, anyone can do them in Windows Movie Maker, it takes no thought or effort. And wtf do green screen effects have to do with a murder mystery set in the XIX century? It's the last genre you'd expect to see CGI special effects in, there is no thematic connection, again, it's just pretentiousness.
The director also took the worst possible lesson one could take from working on the Monogatari franchise: how to fuck up the narrative by arbitrarily changing the arc order. The anime starts with an (original?) lore-dump episode that irreparably ruins the actual first arc of the story (episodes 2-4 of the anime) by retroactively turning all the plot points revealed there (for the first time, in the proper order) into pointless repetition (like the reveal of which exact supernatural beings the main couple are), as well as deflating many intended to be tense moments (like when the main character who’s been acting as a goofy clown for the entire arc reveals himself to be an insanely strong fighter in the arc finale - but we’ve already been spoiled on that by the first episode).
And then there are fight scenes that are pure cringe, with characters double and triple jumping in the air as if it’s a match of Super Smash Bros.
On top of all that, the anime is hamstrung by being single-cour, we just see a few disjointed criminal cases, without any meaningful progress to the overarching narrative (assuming the original source material even has any).
I think everyone and their mother have commented that every episode feels like it only lasts 5-10 minutes, it’s very engaging. But outside of pacing, the direction isn’t all that much. The series director is Omata Shin’ichi, a Studio Shaft graduate also known for Kaguya-sama and Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu. You can clearly see this with the visuals of the show being full of recognizable “shaftisms,” yet those feel like mechanical surface copying without any underlying substance, especially when measured against other ex-Shaft directors such as Itamura Tomoyuki (Vanitas and Youfkashi no Uta) whose “shaftisms” look like a genuine artistic vision.
For example, the "glitchy green screen" and the "archaic wipe transition" effects are just failed "ironically bad" stylizations. Because stylizations are supposed to have style to them, there is nothing stylish about a wipe transition, anyone can do them in Windows Movie Maker, it takes no thought or effort. And wtf do green screen effects have to do with a murder mystery set in the XIX century? It's the last genre you'd expect to see CGI special effects in, there is no thematic connection, again, it's just pretentiousness.
The director also took the worst possible lesson one could take from working on the Monogatari franchise: how to fuck up the narrative by arbitrarily changing the arc order. The anime starts with an (original?) lore-dump episode that irreparably ruins the actual first arc of the story (episodes 2-4 of the anime) by retroactively turning all the plot points revealed there (for the first time, in the proper order) into pointless repetition (like the reveal of which exact supernatural beings the main couple are), as well as deflating many intended to be tense moments (like when the main character who’s been acting as a goofy clown for the entire arc reveals himself to be an insanely strong fighter in the arc finale - but we’ve already been spoiled on that by the first episode).
And then there are fight scenes that are pure cringe, with characters double and triple jumping in the air as if it’s a match of Super Smash Bros.
On top of all that, the anime is hamstrung by being single-cour, we just see a few disjointed criminal cases, without any meaningful progress to the overarching narrative (assuming the original source material even has any).