Cinnamon Ass

OP - Pray (Tommy Heavenly6) - more rocky than her February6 stuff, this is a decent song from the ex-Brilliant Green singer. The OP animation is well done and captures the feel of the show well. This is the most boring comment I’ve ever written, as I can’t remember the OP very well…

ED - Fuusen Gum (Captain Stridum) - rap. Panning shot over cast. Whatever.

Gintoki is a white-haired samurai in Edo, a land a lot like feudal Japan except there are aliens and other weird creatures around. He lives with the hapless samurai-wannabe Shinpachi and the umbrella wielding Kagura surviving on odd jobs and reading Shounen Jump and generally just Getting Into Scrapes. Oh what scamps they are!

In this double bill, Gintoki and co get a visit from a washed-up ronin, who wants their help to become stronger and do his long left behind family proud; we’ve also got some villains of the week (who are introduced as the episode’s guest characters so I can’t be bothered to remember their names) who are planning to drill through the Earth’s core. I don’t know why, I was bored and stopped paying attention…

Anyway, the two plotlines converge at the end after Gintoki and co. get captured and head off to the villain’s base to defeat them, and the washed-up ronin does them proud by beating the evil alien after tripping up on a stone and goes on to forge a successful career doing a knock off of the Matsuken Samba. And there’s a high-tech Shinsengumi, but I had no idea what they were doing there except firing bazookas occasionally.

Do you like shounen action comedies? Then you’ll like Gintama.

I don’t.

Okay, that’s a bit unfair - these first two episodes of Gintama are really very well made (Sunrise is always a solid bet for animation) and the acting’s fine; even the script is occasionally funny when it breaks the fourth wall (and Elizabeth, the random giant chicken, made me laugh, despite doing absolutely nothing). However, being dropped in media res with only a brief pre-OP introduction to the show means that you’re just left to get on with it, really; it’s like you’re watching a filler episode about 5 episodes in or something, except it’s decently animated and goes on for 45 minutes.

I wasn’t expecting to like Gintama as I didn’t like the manga, so I don’t think it’s fair to take my opinion as anything other than that; I think that for the kind of people this show appeals to (and that’ll be a lot; it’s a wildly popular Shounen Jump manga, after all!) it’s a very good adaptation. But it just didn’t suit me, and at 45 minutes it tried my patience more than a little. At least I made it the whole way through the episode *cough*StrawberryPanicJoshikouseiSoulLink*cough*.

Just my two pence worth.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 11:55 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.