Summer 2023 Anime First Impressions

My computer blew up over a week ago. Hard drive fried, I was left to wander the streets in search of substanance. I would blow on windows then draw pictures of cartoon ladies stepping on me in a desperate attempt to recreate my desire for new anime. I just got my repaired computer back, and I had a ton of work to do. What? Like in a real life job? No, I had to watch a bunch of new anime and report back on whether they’re good or not! Silly you!

(I say this, I’ve watched all of four anime, but it doesn’t seem to be a particularly packed season anyway)

(Also I still haven’t finished anime from last season. I got 5 episodes into Oshi no Ko and need to watch more of that because I really liked what I saw)

Undead Murder Farce

I knew the staff going into this were really good, and they really delivered with this one. Tight direction, delivering on jokes, the whole lot. I’d forgotten this team was ex-Shaft folks, so I wasn’t anticipating their use of quick cuts, but I liked its style. Talky detective anime can be quite boring if you don’t get creative with the visuals. I wasn’t super keen on what little I read of the manga adaptation, but the anime version glossed over the extremely silly chain of thought that led the detective head lady to deduce that their cart driver in episode 2 had a loving wife who he was maybe fighting with. If they knew what to gloss over, that’s a really good sign.

It also made the interesting directorial choice to put the backstory for the main character meeting up with the detective as the plot for the first episode. I liked this choice, as it helped contextualise him as a person more. The manga started with what was shown in episode 2, and the way he acts in those first few scenes made me dislike the character intensely. With the backstory he’s more sympathetic right off the bat. We know he’s a changed man, and that change is interesting to see. It’s just an instantly interesting, well-made anime, and I highly encourage everyone check it out.

Level 1 Demon Lord and One Room Hero

I was prepared for this being horny and trashy after reading the manga, and yes it’s definitely horny and trashy. I’m a grown man, I can handle trash if the trash helps serve the jokes. But the trashy horniness is just sorta jammed in your face with jokes that aren’t terribly funny. It’s one of those ones where you grimace at the screen in confusion at it jams a big wedgie butt in your face with no real relevance to the joke in question.

There’s a solid idea here for a comedy. I like how much Max is a fucking loser. Wandering around, drinking beer at the park, getting mocked by small children. He makes for a good duo with the main character. In the pantheon of “middling horny comedies that Scamp watches the entire way through for some reason”, it’s one of the better made ones. Which is to say I’m two episodes in and it hasn’t completely shat the bed. But it’s not quite delivering on the premise. I’ll probably end up watching all of this before finishing Vinland Saga Season 2 though because I have a brain worm.

Helck

Modern anime have ruined me. They got too good. I don’t want to call Helck “low effort” because that’s obviously not the case. But there’s a lack of distinct visual features that would mark an artist really trying to show off their craft. Take the lady and her fiery explosions. A lot of new anime would have had a field day with those explosions. Great balls of color and smoke physics. Instead her flames look like a free fire asset from Unity.

The strength of the source material does shine through. Helck himself is fantastic, but what makes him work is how everyone around him acts. His new best bud on the game court going “awww shucks Helck you don’t need to praise me” is just so inherently silly as something to happen in a battle to decide the next demon lord. But like the flames example above, there’s lots of areas where the series felt like it went for the quickest, simplest, most boring visual and directorial option. The OP is maybe the most blatant example of that. It’s a top 10 candidate for the most generic OP ever.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Zom works as a great contrast to Helck. While the Helck anime takes some solid source material and adapts it in as straightforward and bland a method as possible, Zom takes a fairly standard zombie fiction story with a neat twist on the main character, and leans so hard into its vision of how that story should be presented that you end up with something incredible on the other end. The moment where the main character breaks apart the cinematic black bars on the screen in his burst of freedom is one of the best single scene moments in anime of the decade. His release of energy comes across so strongly, it manages to capture you in its wake, dragging you along with the main characte’s wave of elation. It’s genuinely powerful.

I had to readjust my expectations after I watched episode 2 though. It’s camp zombie fiction. Of course camp fiction can have themes, and I’m shocked at how strongly the show managed to deliver on these themes in the first episode. “Learn to live a little” is a funny theme for a zombie movie but it definitely works. But now we’ve had the release of him escaping his work life, I worry about its ability to continue delivering on the theme. There’s also the part where it clearly put as much time as they could into the episode 1 to leave the strongest first impression, and the animation noticably dropped in episode 2. However I don’t have much of an issue with that, as I enjoy a big showpiece episode. Plus at least they didn’t make the opening episode an hour long like some anime have been doing.