May 27, 2005
Speed Grapher Episode 8 - Kagura's Light
Suitengu "recharges" himself with some kind of electrical doohickey before visiting a factory which seems to be relying on Kagura's DNA to mass produce Euphoria Factor people. The rest of the episode is taken up with Dr. Mizonoguchi the creepy dentist and his battle with Saiga - we get our standard disgusting fetish bit when Mizonoguchi gets off on Kagura's tooth, before Tsujidou and co. lead the attack on Dr. Ryuugoku's house. Cue lots of dental tentacles (dentacles!), multiple cameras concealed on Saiga's body, and an utterly unsurprising win for Saiga - and so he, Kagura and Dr. Ryuugoku flee once more.
I find it hard to get particularly wound up over the actual fights in Speed Grapher - not only is the frequently crummy animation making it hard to enjoy them despite the clever choreography and character designs, but it's still so early in the series that there's no tension whatsoever in the battles, as I moaned before, because Saiga is certain to win and come away completely healed. That said, Mizonoguchi was suitably creepy, and it wasn't exactly bad or anything. Next episode looks to feature no fighting at all, which could be interesting (although I'm not necessarily that keen on Saiga's forthcoming lust for Kagura as implied by the episode preview - she's not a camera, damm
Posted by BluWacky at May 27, 2005 06:13 PM | TrackBack'twas a pity since there were some puportedly very good animators in this ep, just that the schedule is so fscked up that all the Korean in-betweeeners couldn't do anything, the animation director (who is apparently very good: an example of him can be found in Samurai Seven #7) was killed trying to correct all the drawings...
There's a lot of parts during the fight where it's purely key animaiton, it seems - there's no movement between the frames drawn...
But on the other hand, this week's Honey and Clover was very well animated. I kid you not!
Posted by: wao at May 28, 2005 02:52 AMDid you notice that the opening animation gives away
a scene from the same episode each time?
Chris - yup, it's why I hate the fact that there's no "proper" opening animation - each week they splice in the new Freak into the OP so that you know what the episode's going to be about before you watch it, which really annoys me.
However, this week's episode might not have any fighting in at all, so I don't know what they plan to do with the OP.
Posted by: BluWacky at June 1, 2005 02:40 PM