Cinnamon Ass

Rahzel gets kicked out of her family home by Koyasu Takehito in order to revolutionise the world with her magic abilities; teaming up with an albino, vengeance-obsessed, gun-toting bishounen she meets under a bridge called Alzeid and an oddly-proportioned sword-wielder named Baroqueheat (where do they get these names?), she potters around getting involved in magical mishaps as she goes. Here, she meets a rather tiresome ghostly maiden who’s haunting a forest due to a long lost lover; a story that Rahzel helps elucidate despite being totally disinterested in it.

Much like I was, to be honest. Hatenkou Yuugi (or Dazzle, as it’s known to Tokyopop readers) comes across as a totally halfhearted effort. The script darts all over the place in an effort to make things more exciting by juxtaposing Rahzel and Alzeid’s initial meeting with the ghost storyline, but neither is actually particularly exciting and both are poorly paced. Koyasu kicks out Rahzel with virtually no setup as she exclaims the most unconvincing “uso!” ever expressed in anime, and her teaming up with Alzeid would be amusing if it wasn’t so lacklusterly storyboarded and directed. The jumping around doesn’t work because we don’t know any of the characters; I have no idea why Baroqueheat is even in the series as he gets absolutely no characterisation whatsoever aside from fancying Rahzel a bit and beating some people up.

Worst of all, the show is the epitome of Death By Studio DEEN. It doesn’t happen in all their shows, but over the years I’ve noticed that DEEN have a strange habit of producing shows that are extremely bland to look at in some way. It might be partly the colour choices, it might be the broadcast quality - I only own one DEEN show on DVD, Fruits Basket, and the problem is a little less noticeable there - but for some reason shows from DEEN seem to have the same, slightly vacant-looking, oddly moving characters. Look back at their most recent series - say, Shion no Ou, or Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, or Shining Tears, and even at times in shows like Code-E - and I think there’s a trend to be observed of dull-eyed, pointy-chinned characters with slightly ropey animation on top of uninteresting backgrounds. I can immediately tell when a show’s done by DEEN without looking at the credits - even when Hiroshi Watanabe isn’t doing his usual “distract them with pretty colours and static in the OP” tricks - because they all share this weird, low-budget look, and Hatenkou Yuugi is much the same.

Interestingly, all their shows announced for 2008 are targetted at female audiences. This, Junjou Romantica, Vampire Knight and Amatsuki all skew heavily towards the fairer sex. Are they going to try and palm them ALL off with flat, uninteresting animation and poorly adapted (and quite possibly poorly written) source material? One can only hope that’s not the case…

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 11:15 pm and is filed under One Shot Wonders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.