Cinnamon Ass

OP - Theme of Wellber - instrumental with a bit of oohing and aahing as we kind-of jump around things a bit to introduce characters.

Didn’t watch the ED, so I’m not saying anything about it.

The 2ch thread for this show is filled with people going “breasts? BREASTS!!!”. Yes, this show has naked women in. Oooooh.

Anyway, Princess Rita of the Kingdom of Wellber is due to be married to Prince Gernia of the Kingdom of Sangatrus in order to try and bring peace between the two kingdoms. This doesn’t exactly work out, as Rita runs Gernia through with a dagger on their first night together and is witnessed by a buxom thief named Tina who was out to pilfer some royal treasures. They end up fleeing together (along with Tina’s annoying little mascot fairy Sherry) and sleeping in the same bed. No breasts this time, boys.

Anyway, the next day Rita goes walkies and meets up with a loyal Captain of the Guard, Pious, who has prepared a getaway for her to the neutral Kingdom of Greedam. Rita and her slacker boyfriend trail her, but they are ambushed by Gernia’s bodyguard, Galahad, who is after the bounty on Princess Rita’s head (and Tina, too). It’s lucky that Rita’s talking tank, Bergerac, bursts out of a shed at an opportune moment to snatch her to safety!

…yeah, that’s what I was thinking, too.

Anyway, Rita and Tina team up as Tina’s searching for Them Folks What Killed Her Parents or something, and they’re off on their grand fantasy adventure. with their talking tank.

Okay, so the talking tank was a particular sore spot, but it’s not the only thing I disliked about Sisters of Wellber. It’s not really an awful show, though, and I’m slightly perplexed at my reaction to it.

First off - the music is terrible. It sounds like it’s from a bad RPG game from 20 years ago or something, it’s all inappropriate synths and Roland drum machine noises and it completely kills most of the tension (what there is, as the pacing is so manic to fit everything into this first episode). Sherry’s REALLY annoying as well, and I could do without a miniature naked eight year old flying around as it really does nothing for my perception of the show (the rest of the nudity, including BREASTS!!!!, is fairly pointless but hardly offensive).

More nebulously, something just seems a bit “off” about the whole production, like it’s very artificial. The voice acting doesn’t have much cohesion (I’ve nothing against Galahad’s voice himself but his bishounen looks and deep voice don’t really match, and it feels a little as if Rita and Tina are in different shows!), and although I was lucky to be watching an absolutely stonkingly good quality video for this the show looks VERY digital indeed; big blocks of colour and not much subtlety. There’s quite a lot of cel-shaded CG which doesn’t look too bad on average (there’s a really nice shot in the OP sequence involving splashing/rippling water, but then there’s also some terrible CG cigarette smoke in the episode itself) but the movement and layout feels a bit sloppy; it’s as if there’s a lot of money in the show, but the animation team don’t know quite how to use it.

Here’s a slightly better way of explaining it - many of you reading this might have watched (or will watch) the first episode of Seto no Hanayome, which I watched earlier today but was generally very disinterested in so will not blog fully. Whoever was dealing with the overall direction of the episode seemed to me to have decided that the best way to capture the pacing of a comedy manga was to make everything as fast and frenetic as possible; most of the latter half of the episode is people screaming and backgrounds juddering wildly to try and keep up the immediacy of reading manga panels. In Sisters of Wellber, on the other hand, it’s like the staff know they’re making what’s supposed to be some kind of romping fantasy adventure but they’ve done it by just cranking up the pace to get things moving faster whilst not really paying enough attention to getting the details right; there are sections when things just click, but it’s fairly inconsistent overall.

I won’t be continuing to watch Sisters of Wellber although I do believe there’s the potential here for something interesting to turn up plot-wise later on if it’s handled properly. Personally, Sherry is enough to turn me off the show (I can tolerate the crap music), but moreover I’m just not convinced that things will get more cohesive or enjoyable for me; after all, this is the first episode where everyone does their best to make things good tohook new viewers, and if I’m already having doubts that’s not a good thing, is it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 12:20 am 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.