Maybe it’s just because today was a pretty shitty day, but I couldn’t sit through all of episode 5 of Kurokami, so I’m dropping it. I suppose it was only a matter of time. I hated the first episode. It was boring and predictable; all I really wanted to do was punch the protagonist in the face, and I get the feeling I shouldn’t have been laughing my head off when that little girl got flattened by a bus. I considered dropping it then, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least watch a few more. The second episode was markedly better, but the third episode tanked again. By the fourth episode, I was quite ready to drop it again, and the beginning of the fifth episode sealed the deal.
It’s a shame, I guess, because the animation is pretty damn slick and the music is interesting. The fight scenes are pretty from a distance, but they’re painfully boring to me. It’s because I feel utterly detatched from all of the characters involved so I don’t care about the outcomes. I don’t care about Keita because he’s whiny and generic and I just couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for his sobstory. It’s just too convenient. I don’t care about Kuro because she tries too hard to be cute and there’s nothing about her personality that’s interesting at all. I don’t care about her desire to kill her brother, and I don’t even care enough to want to find out more about whatever the hell she is.
The premise was all right enough. The idea of dopplegangers sounded neat enough, but the series has been moving too slow on that front for me to care. The cleverly disguised (or not) antagonists are sneaking around in the background with those snatches of plot, but it isn’t prominent enough to be meaningful. It’s a damn shame. I might continue with the manga since it’s so vastly different from the anime — I don’t doubt that I would have had an easier time sympathizing with Keita if he had been a good-natured computer programmer instead of an emo high school student, and being able to sympathize with the protagonist is pretty key for me. Unfortunately, it’s harder for me to sit down and read manga than it is for me to pop in an episode of an anime.
It’s further disappointing because Kurokami was the only new series I picked up this season. Now that I’m dropping it, the only current series I’m following are Soul Eater and Gundam 00 S2, both of which will be ending soon (well, for the latter, I guess it’s kind of a relief). I have no idea how well the Kurokami dub’s been doing on IATV, but it seems to me that they could have picked a much better series to be groundbreaking with. Then again, they never did announce any kind of official online stream, so maybe it was all irrelevant after all. Not enough people get IATV for it to matter.
Man, today’s been quite the lame day. :\
I finished my review for Ouran High School Host Club. I’m still surprised at how great this series actually was, and really want to see a sequel for it. In the meantime, I think I’ll make my way through the manga. I wonder how many chapters of material the anime actually covers? When will there be enough material for a sequel? :3
The first eight episodes of Host Club are available dubbed and streaming from FUNimation’s website. The first three episodes are also available subbed. I highly recommend checking them out~.
As far as the winter season goes, the first episode of Kurokami was amazingly disappointing, and I think I might end up dropping the series after another one or two episodes if nothing improves. It’s really too bad; Bandai picked a really risky series to put so much effort in. If Kurokami does go by the wasteside, I guess I can finish Darker than BLACK or something instead.
I saw “Anime Midstream” come up in the titles of a blog or two on my feed today, but didn’t pay much attention until I saw Anime Vice’s post about it, and that’s only because “Raijin-Oh” caught my eye. No one else mentioned that part. …Probably because no one else knows what the hell Raijin-Oh is.
Zettai Muteki Raijin-Oh is an old 90’s kids’ super sentai mecha series (you can watch the opening theme here). It’s also one of the first anime series I’ve ever seen way back… in the 90’s. I saw it as a hilarious Chinese dub. It was amazing. I have many fond memories of it. And it’s apparently been picked up by some new company called Anime Midstream. It’s amazing to me that something so old, random, and obscure should be licensed out of the blue, especially by a newbie company, and especially in the middle of this economic crisis. I love Raijin-Oh, haven’t seen it in years, and would love to revisit it, but there’s a lot about this license that concerns me. Taking a peek at Anime Midstream’s website was all it took.
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Well, that didn’t take long.
When Viz broke the news about streaming Naruto Shippuden, I began counting the days until someone would announce a near-simultaneous release for a new series as opposed to an established series. Now, less than a month later and after a good bit of hype, Bandai announces that its new license is Kurokami, an anime based on a Korean manhwa (licensed by Yen Press) set to start airing next season! Apparently, it will also begin airing on IATV next season, with each episode airing in Japan, South Korea, and the United States within 24 hours…dubbed! That’s definitely a huge surprise. To think that they actually dubbed off of pencil tests and unfinished animation just to be able to get this release together on time. That’s all kinds of wow. The domestic DVD release is supposed to follow the airing, so it’s likely we’ll get the DVDs around the same time as well.
Of course, this doesn’t exactly follow the groundbreaking Naruto announcement in that this title won’t be streaming online. A near-simultaneous dub is certainly a more impressive feat, but on a channel that not a lot of people get? I don’t know if my family gets IATV here, but I know for sure that the cable my college supplies isn’t going to have it, so there will be no way for me to catch this on TV. Kurokami was one of the few series I was actually planning on watching next season, so this is really disappointing. But there’s this to consider too: if the whole point of near-simultaneous releases is to deter pirating, why would Bandai skip an online streaming release?
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