As I mentioned with the first and also second of these posts, I’m heading back to old reviews and expanding/updating/adding things to them – mostly (but not exclusively) pictures as it turns out.
And so, here are the contestants for update post #3:
Steamboy
Blood Blockade Battlefront
The Napping Princess
Fractale
Armitage III
If you’ve seen any of my reviews over the last year and a bit here at the Heap then you might have noticed that there aren’t a whole host of 2 or 1 star scores. (And thus it probably seems like I enjoy everything).
In a way that’s true – because if I’m not enjoying something, I probably won’t finish it, or sometimes won’t review it. I also don’t seek out things I suspect I won’t enjoy, and thus, when I do review a film or a series it’s mostly getting 3-5 stars because I’m only writing about stuff I liked.
In addition, I’m quite easy to please when it comes to the media I consume 😀
So to counter this, I’ve rustled up some reviews that are actually lower than 3 stars, just to… prove to myself that I don’t like everything?
And so here they are, the lowest rated anime titles I’ve mentioned here at The Review Heap (so far…):
Wildly uneven tone on what was almost a magical adventure (as I saw it).
Like the Clouds, Like the Wind
If this hadn’t been so rushed near the end I would have loved this for sure!
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise
Worth seeing… maybe, even if the lead is kinda terrible (in more ways than one).
And there we go – only three so far, but I do have one coming up that I think will be 2.5 so one day I can update this post, I guess!
Update – found one more!
Fractale had some interesting concepts and nice animation… but really wildly inconsistent tone and approach to some of the themes.
Fractale (Furakutaru)
2011
At times there were nice dashes of humour (and you can see the fingerprints of Laputa and Nadia Secret of Blue Water here) but the flickering from violent to moé elements, to super-creepy then high-spirited adventure, and then philosophical… it was really jumping around too much for me.
I have read that director Yutaka Yamamoto (the guy who has been quoted as saying adult anime fans who were obsessed were ‘handicapped’) claimed that he wanted to “overthrow the ‘moé anime Yamamoto Yutaka’ image” and it seems the director felt pressure to do just that… and maybe that’s why the series really missed the mark, for me. Supposedly he’s retiring again this year?
I don’t think Fractale pulled off that true sense of adventure or the gradual reveal of the darkness either – even the ultra bright colour palette seemed to clash with the more mature moments.
Anyway, I’m not sure I could recommend Fractale for fans of those other texts I mentioned in the end… because it seems that those comparative aspects were meant to function more as a cloak for the attempt at deconstruction.
I do think that Fractale had some genuinely funny moments and I did like a lot of the character design but ultimately, too many great ideas just weren’t explored deeply enough for me, or worse, were sadly mishandled.
2 Stars
