Guaporense and Zotis Review Animation

203) Golden Kamui (2018)



Golden Kamui was a mixed bag. Being a historical fiction title that also includes a relatively more complex plot it has the potential to become a classic however the first season adaptation of the critically acclaimed manga was characterized by a quality of execution below my expectations.

The art and animation were the weakest part of it: I was constantly turned off by the low quality of the production specially the horrid CGI bears.

However, the writing is of very high quality with complex well rounded characters. Although I personally didn't find the plot to be very compelling: it's about a veteran of the Russo-Japanese war trying to find a stash of gold that was hidden by some prisoners.

204) Keijo (2016)



Really creative stuff: think about a sport about women trying to push each other to fall into the water using their butts and breasts. Brilliant. I was laughing out loud several times watching this.

The execution follows all the tropes and standards of sports manga although in this case the level of quality is still quite high. This being a parody of sports manga cliches wrapped in erotic content it also works as an effective sports manga narrative on it's own right.

The quality of the art and animation are also very high. Although the quality declines towards the end of the show:


+ (made me laugh out loud)

205) Anne Happy (2016)



Oh yeah, another animation from my favorite genre: slice of life comedy featuring cute girls. However, this title is a bit more, how can I say, less peaceful than the usual representative of the cute girls doing cute things genre. In fact I might say this is not a pure cute girls doing cute things title although it features and focuses on all the usual thematic elements of the genre. The main thematic element of the genre of cute girls doing cute things is the concept of friendship and it's relationship with happiness but this time it is infused with a lot of hard hitting comedy.

In a way, stuff like this is made for people like me who are overworked and don't have time to hang out with friends or don't have a lot of nice people to hand out around. I remember that since I finished college most of the people which I interact with are not people that I really feel like are nice enough so that I want to hang out with them. Instead I a nice feeling of basic human affection from these virtual friends.

CGI?
Nope. It's stop-motion!

It's quite obvious it's CGI. You don't know much about CGI don't you?

Wow... I swear I must have heard all this time it was stop-motion animation. I'm so confused right now... Maybe disappointed as well.

I guess you got confused because Rango has a very high level of detail for CGI. That's because it was not made by Pixar or Dreamworks but instead by ILM who is the main studio that does special effects for live action movies which tend to be more detailed to appear realistic against live action footage.

206) Asobi Asobase (2018)



A modern classic. This is perhaps the best hardcore cute girls doing cute things comedy that I know. Yep, this title has greatly impressed me. Why? Well, because it's so aggressive: it's K-On! on steroids. This stands compared to to conventional CGDCT to what death metal stands with hard rock.

The art style is also very cool and the super exaggerated expressions combined with the hard hitting style of humor make this a massive win:

I request Ping Pong the Animation

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That punishment game clip was pretty epic... Now I think I want to watch it.

This miniseries just aired on Netflix, and it was amazing. The comedy and animation were excellent. I got a lot of laughs out of it and was thoroughly amused by the characters and situations. There were a lot of pratfalls and characters acting tough only to get humiliated. The writing was excellent with a rich vibrant world and characters that had a lot of personality and would reappear later. The characters were distinct and creative with a lot of variety and backstory. The artwork had a lot of vibrant color and excellent motion with a lot going on in the backgrounds. I noticed some elements that made me think, "Wow, that animation right there was terrible," or, "That thing wasn't very well drawn," but then at other times it blew me away. I wondered how intentional the little elements that didn't seem all that good were in contrast to the more superb elements. For example, one scene the foreground was two people standing in a motion as if they were talking, but frozen. As the camera panned they slowly slid across the screen, but in their frozen motion. Meanwhile, the background had a lot of motion and was richly detailed. It looked like they did it on purpose to be funny, but I wasn't sure. Maybe it was just a mixture of a-team and b-team in the art direction. Although Netflix advertised it as an anime, it was made by China. I also saw it listed as from 2020, but on Anilist.co they list it as from 2018. It looks like it originally aired in China in 2018, and just came over to America now. There are 10 episodes, 15 minutes in length, and 4 bonus episodes at the end. I binged the whole thing in one sitting.

The story revolved around a mysterious man named Seven, who lost his memory and befriended a blue chicken named Ji Dabao who comes up with the idea of working as assassins to make a lot of money. Seven's weapon of choice is a pair of scissors that he can manipulate telekinetically. So they open a barber shop as a front for their assassin business. Along the way Seven looks to recover his memories and uncover his mysterious past.

I wrote this over 5 years ago:

"Ping Pong: The Animation is simply a great show, looks like one of the masterpieces of recent years. It's characterized by great visual creativity and a very distinct visual style, the director is known to not follow any of the standards of the industry to copy typical manga styles and bright color schemes.

Instead of focusing on detail as most anime shows do, the focus is on the animation. Indeed, in terms of fluidity some scenes in this show are superior to most films and the realism of the depiction of the physical motion of the sport is incredible. The tactility of reality can be better captured in animated form in this way than by the use of live action film as well as the explicit characterization of the character's psychological states.

Character development is great and each individual main character is endowed with a distinct personality and conveyed in a very economical way given the whole series is 11 episodes long. It reminds me of Madoka in being a masterpiece that succeeds both in terms of writing and on the visual levels while not having any sort of "fat" as quite sophisticated plot, thematic pursuits and character development is compressed in a short number of episodes.

Out of Yuasa's work this is my favorite but I also liked Mindgame, Tatami Galaxy and Catsoup very much but this one rises to another level thanks to superior writing (like Madoka is superior to other Shimbo's titles mostly thanks to superior writing). The plot is extremely entertaining much more than the Tatami Galaxy, the other TV series Yuasa directed. I was glued to the screen for the duration of the show. Character development was extremely well done and the themes the show deals with had strong resonance with me."

I would add that I liked it more than the new show he did for Netflix, Devilman: Crybaby, which was also very good. Ping Pong is certainly one of the best shows of the decade.

Ping Pong the Animation is a classic:

My best is 4th - Masaki Yuasa