Well, it’s over.

It goes without saying that the production is still spot on and beautiful. Even better is the fact that Seventh Heaven is essentially the vocal version of the main motif that you hear when Shiki goes into fight mode.

This chapter was a really fitting end for the entire series. We finally get our answers to just what happened four years ago. Araya really is the central villain of the series, throwing in one more roadblock for Shiki and Kokutou to overcome before they’re allowed to be happy. And Shiki and Kokutou are finally forced to confront Shiki’s murderous nature and their relationship.

It’s definitely not as epic or action packed as Paradox Spiral. This movie is much more personal than that one. Paradox Spiral was all about taking down the last boss. Murder Speculation Part 2 is about tying up all the loose ends.

One of the revelations that we’re treated to is that we’ve been following Shiki’s adventures under the assumption that she’s a murderer, when it turns out she hasn’t actually killed anyone. Her kills that we see include a bunch of ghosts, zombies, and Araya. And so, it’s really interesting to see that after all of Kokutou’s pleas for her not to kill and in the face of her own reluctance to kill, the series ends with Shiki being driven to murder someone.

is amazing.

Summer Wars was on my list of things to look out for. The first promo pictures were intriguing, with Natsuki standing in front of her family. And then the first trailers came out and that shot my anticipation up by about 2000%. In hit theatres in August and sadly, there still hasn’t been any news of a DVD/BRD release. Luckily enough, a terrible Korean-hardsubbed raw showed up on the Internets. I debated for a while whether or not to wait it out, but impatience and people going crazy over this movie won me over.

Let’s start out with the first and coolest thing we’re introduced to: OZ. OZ is essentially a much, much cooler Second Life that is actually useful beyond flying around. Every possible thing that you could think of is tied to OZ: GPS systems, utilities, emergency services, commerce, entertainment, everything. As someone who understands software design, this super-centralized system is frightening.

Now, Natsuki mentions that she’s born in 1992 and she’s 18, which sets Summer Wars in next year. I guess that’s why we’re seeing Windows 7 and DSes connect to OZ. Again, I find it frightening that someone imagined that every aspect of our lives would be intricately tied to Second Life by next year. The movie’s main plot thread starts when OZ’s security (which is apparently a 2056 digit number) is broken and an AI starts taking over. Obviously, because everything is tied to OZ, the real world is essentially thrown into chaos.

So who do we have to save the day? Mild-mannered math nerd Koiso Kenji. How does he get roped into saving the world? By getting conned by his crush, Shinohara Natsuki. Basically, she wants him to pretend to be her fiancee at her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, where her entire extended family will be gathered.

Being the unconfident guy that he is, Kenji doesn’t really do much saving at first. Much of that glory falls to Grandma, who might be the most awesome character in the movie. She demonstrates her power and her sense of responsibility, using her vast connections in the midst of the OZ crisis and by not taking any crap from one of her kids. At the same time, she’s not crazy like the head of the Sonozaki family. Her priority is her family and she’s the central figure to that family.

That family is pleasantly diverse. Unlike your standard powerful anime families, this family has members everywhere. They’re civil servants or rescue workers or businessmen or fishermen. They’ve got housewives, kids, and young adults. And what’s great about the movie is that the interactions between the family and with Kenji feel very real. Yeah, those are those annoying aunts and those cousins that you meet up with every year.

Now, honestly, Kenji doesn’t really do that much saving. I mean, he’s good at math, but the only useful thing that seems to come out of that is only factoring 2056 digit numbers on paper. He really doesn’t even do much in OZ. What he is able to do indirectly is move the rest of the family into action. He starts off very unconfident of himself, but grows through his time with this rambunctious family to the point where he’s able to take a stand for fighting this thing and by the end, does end up saving the day through math.

There’s a ton of good stuff that’s explored here. We’ve got the whole technology angle with OZ. We’ve got all of the family stuff going on. We’ve got a bunch of characters that are unsure of themselves who grow throughout the movie. And of course, there’s a budding romance that needs some growing.

One of the things that I really liked from this movie was the fact that it had so much stuff that happened in it. Usually, I prefer TV series because I find they have more time to develop their characters and carry out more elaborate plots. Summer Wars was able to have a lot of discrete events and still have it paced really naturally. I’m surprisingly satisfied with how much the movie covered.

And the visuals! Madhouse is a pretty amazing studio. Most of the movie looks like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time stuff, which is to be expected. And those parts look great. But the real eye candy is in the OZ scenes. That stuff is worth watching in Blu-ray. OZ is ridiculously detailed. There are a ridiculous number of objects in OZ and they all look great.

I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of stuff I missed out while throwing this post together, but basically, tl;dr: Summer Wars is probably the best animated work of this year.

I’m not entirely sure what to say about Cencoroll, but it’s the sort of thing that makes you feel like you should give it a mention. It’s certainly impressive that most of the work that made this happen was put in by one guy. Most of my preconceptions of the movie were from the related tracks on supercell’s 「君の知らない物語」 single.

Basically, the entire thing is an excuse to watch monstrous blobs do weird things and fight each other. Not that that’s not entertaining. It’s pretty awesome seeing Cenco turn into various things like a car or a giant staple gun and have him just stare at the characters for a bit. The reason that that’s all the movie boiled down to was because it was just too short.

I mean, there’s tons of stuff that was really interesting that could have been expanded upon. The whole antenna-ahoge controlling the monsters and the mechanics of the monsters, some more about the characters, and tons of other stuff that weren’t explained are all fertile ground for more stuff we could have seen.

Since it’s only thirty minutes, it’s worth taking the time to see. Again, it’s pretty neat and I’d be surprised if someone who didn’t know about it would be disappointed by it. The worst thing about it really is that there isn’t any more.

So while I am waiting for stuff to cook, it’s time to do something I haven’t had the chance to do and hammer out a post. This way I can keep up my monthly posting schedule in between hammering out Galois theory problems.

I remember looking at the season chart for GA and going MORE LIKE HIDAMARI SKETCH HURR and didn’t look at it for a few weeks. After all, I had a ton of other stuff to watch. I did give it a shot after a fairly positive reception from PA forumers.

The thing about GA is that its pace, direction, and style is a lot like Hidamari: quick, really SD and cute, and tons of SHAFT-like cuts and backgrounds. There weren’t any weird photos or text, though, which was a nice change. On the other hand, the content of the gags was more like Moyashimon in that they were grounded in the topic.

Both of Hidamari and GA are about a bunch of high school girls in a specialized art school. Where they differ is that Hidamari is about school life and the relationships between the main characters, while GA is entirely about art. We’ve got art history, art techniques, art tools, art design philosophy, and more. And since I’m interested in design, it was pretty neat seeing jokes about composition and colour theory.

The flipside to this is that I can’t remember the names of most of the characters. There are a lot of them and the time that they do spend time on characters is spent on exploring that particular character’s quirk. So there’s emotionless girl who likes black, hyper active girl, hyper cutesy girl, shy girl who likes cat, and the most normal out of the five girl.

I wouldn’t say that this is what would immediately come to mind if someone asks for a recommendation for this genre. That’s not to say this is anywhere near bad. It’s really good and fun and enjoyable. This can definitely get another season, and maybe next time they will talk about typography, please. ◔ ◡ ◔

…there is one survivor.

Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

So if it wasn’t clear enough from EP2, EP3 will definitely convince you that Umineko is a completely different beast from Higurashi. We begin with a look into the past with the revelation of the existence of Kuwadorian and someone who’s actually named Beatrice as well as Rosa’s confirmation of this fact. We also take a look inside Eva’s ambitions and how this plays a part in 1986 Rokkenjima.

The exciting parts of this episode during the actual twilights were decent. Both Beato vs. Virgilia and Rudolf/Kyrie vs. Stakes were a bit short. All of the important good parts were kept, of course, but the extra stuff that really sealed the deal was absent. The depiction of Evatrice’s carrying out of the second twilight was one of the more disappointing parts of EP3. The visual novel was able to render it much more nightmarish than in the anime. The anime’s offering was also a lot weaker than what we all imagined. When they said sea of jelly and mountain of cake, I think that was what we were expecting to see.

But the most important part of the Episode was the ending. How well did it do on that front?

I felt like the ambiguity of who died and who survived shouldn’t have been there (yes, Eva was the only who survived). The buildup from the beginning of the episode was fairly well done. From the looks of my feed reader, Beatrice did her job and masterfully trolled everyone. Ange’s introduction was pretty good, although it could have been foreshadowed better (like mentioned once in a while over the last three Episodes rather than have a flashback the episode before). I’m not sure about the choice of forgoing more EP3 Tea Party stuff for going straight into EP4 material. I suspect that they wanted to clear up who died and who the mysterious girl was, but from the discussions I’ve read, it seemed to make little difference.

The main problem with the adaptation is that it hasn’t managed to convey the depth and richness of the visual novel’s storytelling. This is for two reasons. The first is that there simply isn’t enough time. At the moment, I think that they’re doing the best that they can, leaving in all of the important stuff. That’s good, but it’s all of the small details that get paved over that really makes Umineko fantastic and I think that another twelve or thirteen episodes would have given enough time for the studio to include even small, incidental stuff. I’m not saying that it needs to be one-to-one, but the selection of material to adapt can definitely improve.

The other thing is that I just don’t think DEEN is good enough to render an adaptation that matches up to what we see in our heads when we read the VN. All of the awesome parts of the visual novel so far have been good in spite of the adaptation. However, for every single one of these moments, there’s always something lacking in the execution.