Subtlety Sunday!
Impressions:
Uh, yeah. Any merits that this may have are going to be drowned out by it being a studio wracked by scandals about overworking its animators, creating a show about an animator dying from overwork, and discovering that her special super power is being able to work extra hard if it actually matters to her. No part of that sentence should exist, and no amount of blood squeezed from the animators who created this should have been shed. It’s super bad too because she’s such a passive, terrible character who needs to be spurred into action by her magical stick telling her it’s time to get back to work, which summons up a goddamned cubicle for her to work in. Could this be any more on the nose? Which is annoying because it is pretty decently animated. The decision to make this girl covered in hair is godawful and the payoff when you finally see her face is absolutely nothing, but there are around 15 other fantasy shows this season with godawful animation, so… it’s all relative.
It also feels incredibly off to be using Random Generic Anime Fantasy here because the story relies on the hairy NPC main character wanting to change the tragic outcome of her formative anime, but we the audience don’t have any knowledge of and are just relying on her flashbacks of being sad over dramatic moments in it. But there aren’t really any pieces of media that are just tragedy on tragedy on tragedy that end in tragedy. Even Shakespeare has more nuance than that. So like villainess things, it’s tilting at windmills that don’t actually exist in the media it’s I assume trying to extol. It would be far more interesting to take an established hero’s journey story and start messing it up out of naive lack of understanding. Yeah, also something done a thousand times before and would just end up another Flashpoint Paradox, but I’d rather that than an overworked animator learning that her real crime wasn’t working hard enough.
