When the seagulls cry… (IV)
January 16th, 2010
It turns out I couldn’t deny the witch anymore.
I’d been fairly charitable throughout most of the anime’s run. I mean, there’s absolutely no way that any studio can adapt Umineko and have everyone be satisfied with the result. It just isn’t possible. So I was willing to give Deen a little slack. Okay, so it has bad animation, but Umineko isn’t known for great art. Okay, so some things aren’t paced well or got cut. I understand, it’s a challenge given the time constraints. Okay, so they remixed awesome tracks for the anime OST but never use them. Wait a second.
Episode 4 was terrible. Unlike the other arcs, there was not one scene throughout the entire Episode that was done well. Episode 1 had its tea party, Episode 2 had its tea party, and Episode 3 had Beatroll.
The weakest parts of every arc have been October 4 and 5, 1986. The problems with the pacing are because they decided to slow down only as much as necessary and to blaze through whatever could have been rushed. So all the mundane, important parts got the time that they needed, while the awesome parts got cut or rushed. And so, a lot of the emotional connection that Umineko has is lost.
The problem is magnified in EP4, where a lot of the story is introducing and fleshing out who Ange is. Ange’s parts of the story are comparable to the very first airport scenes. That is, they’re long, not very exciting, but pretty necessary. With that making up the bulk of the anime’s EP4 and the decision to do it mostly in one shot, the last part of the anime seemed worse than usual.
And what happens when you take all of the character and emotion out of Umineko? It’s just a bunch of tl;dr. It’s not even a coherent mystery that you can solve because there are quite a few things missing from the anime.
The final blow to the Umineko anime is that Deen just isn’t very good. Yeah, the animation is some improvement over Higurashi, but that’s not saying much. The music, even with the zts tracks that people were worried wouldn’t make it in, ended up being a travesty. And, as all Umineko fans are aware, the music of Umineko is a very integral part of the experience.
It’s really disappointing because I was really, really hoping that it’d at least be decent. At least now I know to preemptively be in despair whenever I see Chiaki Kon in the director’s seat (pretty sure Nodame Finale is going to be terribad).
