Did you ever want a series that shows you good action without any of the Shonen cliches interfering? Well look no further than Soul Eater.
Soul Eater is a Tim Burton-esque anime about trainee weapon meisters and their living Deathscythe weapons fighting against the likes of Kishin Demons and Witches all in the name of the Grim Reaper himself.
We join lead protagonist Maka Albarn and her partner Soul Eater as she hunts for the witches soul to make Soul Eater into a proper Deathscythe fit for the reaper. The same goes for Black Star and his partner Tsubaki along with Death the Kid and the Thompson Sisters.
But their lessons at the Deathmeister academy get disrupted by the Witch Medusa as she plots to revive the Kishin Asura, so it's up to the Academy students to stop her while also fighting off other Witches, a Werewolf, a Swordsman and Crona the ambiguously gendered emo kid with black blood and a scary weapon named Ragnarok.
Now this does sound like a plot of any Shonen series but the execution of the show is well done; this is mainly helped by the very stylish art style, awesome music and well choreographed fight scenes. With all this you kind of forget that the majority of the cast are all rejects from other anime. Allow me to expand.
Watching these characters it becomes immediately obvious where they take their inspirations from. Maka reminds me of Witch Hunter Robin, Black Star reminds me of Naruto, Death the Kid is the spitting image of XXXHolic's Kimihiro Watanuki, Soul Eater looks like the forbidden love child of Dead Leaves and the Gorillaz while the Thompson Sisters could easily walk into Burst Angel no problem. Only Tsubaki seems to escape the comparisons. The supporting cast does slightly better with original designs at least but they aren't nearly as strong as the main cast.
Quite early on we meet the unoriginally named teacher Dr Stein, and while at first he seems awesome through his battles and eccentric personality but after a while he just gets annoying, this is true for a lot of the supporting cast as they seem to fade into one dimensional characters rather quick and this is where the show starts showing it's cracks as well.
For a series with enough source material for a long runner, it tends to rush things an awful lot come part two. New characters are introduced out of the blue both enemy and ally with nothing much to work from other than names. The end result is a taped together mess which ends in quite a let down come last episode.
Final Verdict: It's definitely worth picking up but random pacing in part two really messes with the story far too much. Nevertheless its art style and action really save it from being generic.
Sorry it's a couple of days late but here is the Cartoon Vault review for Angela Anaconda.
Angela Anaconda started as a short on Nickelodeon's Kablam, a series featuring numerous cartoons much in the same vein as Cartoon Networks Cartoon Cartoons production.
Despite the fact that Action League Now was the best series, only Angela Anaconda actually became a full on cartoon when it got picked up by Fox.
Yes this hideous cut out cartoon managed a 65 episode series but god knows why, it's awful.
Let me explain how this was made, basically a number of photos were taken of willing models and the faces were animated onto cartoon bodies, problem is it's not just creepy but makes everything look cheap in terms of production.
So the show is about Angela who kindly reminds us in the opening theme song that it's her show, much in the same way Doug does. In fact there are many similarities between the two; both enjoy self indulgent fantasies, both are social outcasts apart from a small group of equally weird friends and both can't shake off an annoying bully but while Doug at the very least is likeable to a certain extend, Angela on the other hand is very obnoxious and pretty much all her fantasies revolve around getting revenge and you have to wonder if they deserve it sometimes, even Nanette Manoir, little Miss "I can't speak French but it makes me look better if I fake it anyway"
Actually that's another thing, I find it odd that a Canadian show would put in a fake French character for laughs, which comes across as slightly uncomfortable but it's not nearly as bad as Angela gets particularly when in one episode she fakes Agoraphobia to avoid school which to real sufferers is very awkward and offensive.
Like I said before, this is bad, Johnny Test bad. While it is a neat animation technique to use cut out pictures it's not such a good idea to form the basis of a full on cartoon using said method. Flash animation and Robot Chicken suit this style better; but still were stuck with the haunting memory of this show ruining Digimon.
Now as I have some days off and lots of free time so more entries will come thick and fast.
Before I start I should explain Angela Anaconda.
Angela Anaconda was a Canadian Cartoon that used Cutout animation which is essentially a mesh up of flat images cut out from sources such as kids drawings or black and white photos in the case of Angela Anaconda. It's basically reverse gender Doug but Angela is a lot more obnoxious, ironically this was first made for Nickelodeon before Fox took it up for US audiences.
Now for this pile of shame; you see Fox had the rights to the Digimon Movie and decided to try and promote it with a shameless self promotion for Angela Anaconda.
The basic plot is Angela and friends are going to see the movie and all rush to get seats until local stuck up fake French girl Nanette and her teacher Mrs Brinks block the view of the screen, then using her imagination she digivolves into Angelamon and defeats Nanette. After her little self indulgent fantasy they realize they're in the wrong movie screen and all rush away leaving Nanette and Brinks in a mess.
Yes that was real and here is the evidence to prove it complete with my own personal reaction to it.
This is pretty much how Anime haters pictured Digimon and that's a sad thing to comment on; it certainly didn't set us up well for the film, if anything we all felt put off by it. Not that the film is any better, it was a huge mess of a story anyway but that's for another review.
However if you want me to expand on the abomination that is Angela Anaconda, then post your comments below and she'll go into the vault.
Back in the sixties, the Flintstones were making headway for the cartoons industry by cracking TV Networks hereby bringing the once pre-movie cartoon to the small screen with great results but in those days, rules were also different and this time we cover a particularly infamous advert where the Flintstones were advertising Cigarettes.
No that's not a photoshop, that image is real and so to is the advert.
To anyone interested in animation history, back then it was so expensive to produce cartoons that the only place they could do it was on the big screen before a major film, which explains why the quality of the likes of the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry were so high for it's time period; to do a cartoon for Primetime TV was unheard of and needed more than most budgets would allow hence they needed a sponsor in the form of Cigarette brand Winston, so at the end of every episode during it's original run would include a commercial for Winston Cigarettes; it's not restricted to Cigarettes either as they would later move on to Busch Beer.
So how can a cartoon get away with advertising such adult products?
Well Flintstones was never marketed to kids, it was meant for the sitcom crowd, it was a take on the Honeymooners to begin with so it shouldn't come as a surprise, in fact cartoons were never originally marketed for kids, ironically it was Hanna Barbara who realized that kids were enjoying cartoons a lot more than adults and started marketing them to kids more than adults. In fact it would be many decades before it would market to older audiences again, with the likes of Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast and Harvey Birdman Attorney of Law.
And a nice welcome back to the Urban Legends feature, there will be another shortly.
Whenever you look at certain titles, you seem convinced in yourself that you know what's going to happen but this anime really manages to throw a curve ball at the last possible minute. Today I review Petite Princess Yucie.
Yucie is 17 years old, only she's stuck in a ten year old's body; she gets selected to attend the Princess Academy run by the country's ruling monarch Queen Ercell. The purpose of attending this Princess Academy is to select the Platinum Princess who is selected every thousand years to wear the Eternal Tiara and have their wish granted; but to gain the title, Yucie alongside other cursed 17 year olds in ten year old bodies must work together to show the true virtues of being a Princess while recovering the fragments for the Eternal Tiara, which include action, volunteer work, dancing and Idol singing??? (It makes sense in context) The other cast members include Cocoloo the Spirit, Glenda the Demon, Elmina the Angel and Beth the Fairy all alongside stewards that support them in every way possible.
Now from all this, you've got the plot to Sofia the First in Animeland right?
WRONG!!!
This has the most surprising depth of any series of the same genre; yeah it's clearly a show for girls and it would probably be no surprise that it gets in a lot of cutesy stuff but once you get into character depth you discover some surprising truths.
Glenda has family issues as her dad can't run the Demon World properly while acting like a doting father which caused her mother to leave, so becoming the Platinum Princess may give her father the motivation to do his job properly again.
The realm of heaven is revealed to be a world obsessed with perfection so when Elmina messes up a dance routine she suddenly acquires a fear of failure as well as losing the respect from her father.
Cocoloo worries she has no presence at all..........She's a ghost.............I got nothing.
Beth on the other hand has to deal with an invader in her world named Diaboros, with such dangers affecting her world she resorts to desperate measures to win the Tiara.
Yucie doesn't really have a motivation other than wanting to be tall, which is lazy but then again supporting casts have often made up for cookie cutter female protagonists in Shoujo Anime.
I'm not really going to mention Prince Arc, he's very much a typical anime Prince but one side character that needs a mention is Gunbard.
Apart from having an awesome name, Gunbard is also a former knight who served the younger Queen Ercell. He actually found all the pieces of the Eternal Tiara and restored it all for the love of Queen Ercell only for Ercell to marry someone else while he was away, although he reluctantly continued to serve her, he would later find baby Yucie summoned by some kind of magic, so he adopted her and raised her as his own daughter, a great background story for an unexpected character.
Speaking of unexpected the last few episodes were an act of sheer genius in plot twists, I won't spoil it but lets say you're an expert on Shojo anime and you've probably guessed the ending by say the Pop Idol episode, then you get to the climax and you expect to see the ending you predicted only for the show to throw a complete curve ball that's unexpected and so well executed that you have to give credit to the writers for doing it, and on a series that's based on the Princess Maker Sim games to boot. Nice job Gainax, even with relatively small productions you can still make good anime.
Final Verdict: It's a really good series. It may drag in some episodes but the more in-depth plot points really save it from falling into a cliche pit and the ending is downright memorable. The dub is pretty decent for a late ADV production as well. Pick it up, you won't be disappointed.
