Freezing 02: the hilarity continues

I have to come out and say it, I love this series! *cough* for all the wrong reasons *cough*. I never felt like poking this much fun at something for a very, very long time. And here I have the fabulous opportunity to do it again.

Infinite Stratos 02: I love ponytails

Hmm yum, episode 02 of Infinite Stratos. I guess I could say nothing
else much here as far as story depth, aside from the evenly placed
know-hows of some story details, such as the explanation of Personal
I.S.'s.

One of the things I like though, is watching Houki's hair
flail about, truly a sight for a Ponytail lover such as I. There were
a couple of scenes where they animated her hair very well. Now I could
only wonder what she's like when in the I.S.

I'll say though, the CG in the battle was honestly well done, despite
the lack of attendee's in the stands. Granted, they aren't using EA
Sports/2K Sports impressive background crowd rendering in their sports
games, but I do wonder if such a thing is possible. The CG certainly
is decent enough, although I do prefer hand-drawn over CG, I'll say
this much: this CG is much better than 7 years ago *cough* BakuTen
*cough*. Other points of interest is the 3 girls (honestly I forgot
their names), Of course Houki and her hybrid twinponytail hair, a low
visibility bathing scene, girl-falls-in-love-after-winning-a-loss,
great censors (/s) and an inexperienced teacher. The last part is
probably just me...

Freezing Episode 01: I'm melting...

I was really looking forward to this series. "Was" is probably a harsh word to use, but it's true: it didn't start good, or even better for someone to dive into the Freezing series with this animation being their first taste. Granted, my view on this series is from a mangawha readers' point of view, in my own twisted sense of insanity, but that's not what I'm griping about here. Oh, I'm from the camp of "The Freezing mangawha's first half was a bunch of trite", but if I'm not talking about that, what else could I possibly be talking about?

I viewed this first episode purely from a viewers standpoint, which is probably due in part to me being a tad forgetful of the first half of the mangawha, thanks to the unintentional deception laid out by manga database sites such as Manga Updates (the synopsis is so not like that). No, I'm not surprised, but rather, a bit unhappy with the production handling of this series. Let's start in order, shall we? The girls are training with, well, let's call it "live fire training", like if those aren't movie prop weapons what else can I call them (they're armed). My beef starts with, I don't recall from the mangawha, but here the episode starts with regeneratable clothes, and yet while these girls fight, they just leave their clothes be? If they are manufactured combat weapons, they at least covered the part where the clothes came from, but if you had the god awesome tech to make these kind of clothes, shouldn't you have added a little extra armor in there?
But that's not all. Here comes Satell strolling in, and I threw up. No not the gore, I have never seen an "Untouchable Queen" be untouchable by simply standing there only flailing her arms about in order to defeat her opponents. This isn't her character I'm knocking on, it's the poor handling of animating her so-called dominating performance. I'll tell you right here, I did not believe in a single kill of her's, if I am supposed to believe that she's an "Untouchable Queen" by simply standing there with a Goa'uld shield, oh right duh that's why they can't touch her. Here's where the production staff failed big time: no character has a believable performance if you animate them in the "I lift my weapon up high, then cue blank screen to the AfterTouch". If they had animated her in a totally high-frame rate domination of the other students (ie hunting them down), that is believable. Not in a few swipes of her blade that really didn't take a thousand frames.
Yeah, I wanted to see her kick butt, but not kick butt while standing still. That means no bend of the knees. This isn't an arcade machine.

I got a laugh at another part, really, when a tilt-rotor (I refuse to name it) picked up Kazuya. Ok... why is this funny? Well, for one thing, how the hell did they know he was there? Oh right, I'm supposed to believe he's got a GPS Tracking device on him. Or maybe I'm supposed to think that he's some VIP that needs a chariot to pick him up just because he took a detour on his way to class. Slacker. If a helicopter picked me up when I was visiting the WWII Allies (no offense to those fine men and women) graves at Luxembourg, I sure as hell would like to know how that came to be. In fact, I stood on several landing strips in US Airfields across Germany back in the day, and no helicopter dropped in on me while I was stargazing. If someone told me to shut off my brain or leave it at the doorstep or FEDEX it to someplace else, hell, this series turns your brain on even when I didn't want it to.

Of course, this never ends, even when I want it to. No, I'm not going to gripe about that rather awkward placement of that "what, Arthur Criptonite?" (I know it was supposed to be an introduction, but come on, imagine using someone's full name when you greet them :D), no, I like to laugh at, yet again, production execution. Really, who handles this story? I know Dal Young writes the most convuluted mess of a storytelling in almost every manwha he wrote, but come on! Whose idea was it to have a bunch of surgeons "repair" these "fatally wounded" girls, who were in a training zone mind you. Of all the tech in the world, you have the power and tech to "manufacture" the Pandora's, and yet when one of them gets hurt, oh lordy pinch me now because if we don't repair her Stiggy in time she's a veggie tale? Dammnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a mechanic! Where's all the stasis pods, or those healing capsules, or insert-sci-fi-healing-device-here? Some hospital that
turned out to be.

I should stop. Really, I should. But I won't, because the hilariousness doesn't end there. Oh, it does have something to do with the end of the ep, that's for sure. No, I'm not going to question why Ganessa's clothes didn't Regen, I want to talk about the sniveling little brat called Kazuya, who, for all intents and purposes, assaulted and Froze a poor (armed) girl, pinning her down and pretty much registering for Assault and Battery. What's his defense? "Your honor, I sacked the poor girl from behind, but miraculously ended up with my face buried in her breasts, due to a shampoo commercial of a girl who looks like my big sis." SERIOUSLY, he thought she was big sis simply because of the flowing hair? Hell, I feel like going to the mall right now glomping girls left and right, then sheepishly admitting that 'I felt like hugging you because your hair reminded me of my sexy sister'. Really, she didn't even open her mouth, which is a dead giveaway and a more
plausible excuse as to how he could have "thought" she was his sis, no, she just happened to have her hair flow in the same way it was animated for the sis. So let me get this straight, if that was, say Ganessa with her hair down, and she had her hair flow like that, would this story now be centering on the "Tsundere Queen" and the maso lead male?

Hell, time won't tell. I thought I'd be surprised with some great production values, but those hopes were destroyed in 2 identical PV's... and yet I still laughed.

Infinite Stratos 01: infinite girls

Disclaimer: don't always take the mangatron seriously. Sometimes he's
serious, and sometimes he's totally the opposite. Which one you think
he is being is entirely up to... you. Heh.

So, Infinite Stratos gets the first blog post of the year's Winter
Season of Anime. Of course, one of the main talk surrounding I.S. is
the "been there, done that", which leads me to say, in this day and
age, just how original can one be considering almost everything
imaginable has been done in anime so far? While I'm going to reserve
my discussion on that for another day, what I want to talk about is
the episode at hand: 01.

I actually liked it. There, I said it. Why do I like it? Well, they
never pushed the envelope that the so called "originality" imposers
placed on it. 1 man in a paradise of girls? Sure, it's been done. But
at least here they didn't have the girls throwing themselves at the
guy for the most of the episode. The guy would have been lusting after
every girl, but he didn't. What I was looking for was the excuse they
gave, or part of the excuse, of why he exists in such a paradise, and
they gave a good one.

Or maybe my bias towards my ponytail fetish is getting in the way. Not
a chance, although I am very much enjoying the lead female being a
ponytail. No, what I actually liked was that aside from the Hyakka
Ryoran-ish pre-op sequence, during the rest of the episode, we didn't
see what we did not need to see: the involvement of other characters
needlessly taking up airtime, when if you're not going to do
something, then you don't need to be there.

Personally, I am anticipating this more than Freezing. Cue laugh track.

Sent from my Touch Pro. First one for this device!