I think I've reached the holy grail of terrible anime. This is Maze.
In a fantasy world full of war and conflict, the Jaina Holy Group have nearly taken over the world with only Princess Mill left to capture, but a mysterious girl named Maze appears out of nowhere, possessing powers known as Phantom Light power, she reluctantly becomes the world's last hope for victory against Jaina using Dulga, a giant organic mecha to stop them, but there is more to Maze than you might think as Maze suddenly changes gender at night to a more aggressive, wild male persona.
Where to start? I don't exaggerate when I say this is the holy grail of terrible anime, in fact I say this is the worst 90s anime period.
It's the type of bad where every decision that was made caused you severe whiplash in terms of "Wait WHAT?!"
The story is horribly paced and constantly backs itself into a corner with it's own narrative only to pull a reset button just to escape.
The few characters that are good are under used and suffer for it.
Female Maze is an insufferable protagonist who some how acts and dresses like Shinji Ikari.
The few times male Maze gets screen time he wastes it either being a pervert or repeating his lines over and over.
Mill is a clingy little bitch whose only mode is cheerfully annoying.
The need to make sex jokes every chance they got was distracting and don't get me started on Episode 26.
The Japanese had so little faith in it, the west only got the edited version of the tv series and the OVA with the unedited version on vhs and laserdisc only, so no movie or episode 26 as that was laserdisc only and episode 26 was also banned from broadcast a full two years before Excel Saga did it.
Then there's the dub which is incompetent in every way; no emotion in dramatic scenes, female Maze under sells her performance, dub mistakes are frequent, the fairy switches between high voiced to helium voiced every other scene, another voice actor was changed halfway which only made the character sound worse, Mill is painful to listen to, male Maze is trying way to hard and to top it all off they forget to add dialogue in some scenes HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
After all that, is there anything I like? The opening music and the other main party members Rapier, Aster, Woll, Solude and Randy despite the fact that they are horribly underused and Randy sounds like she snorted helium. I've also seen worst villains, Chic and Gorgeous have their good moments.
Final Verdict: if you can get over some of the creepier in context moments I'd watch the OVA, that is passable. The tv series on the other hand is an epic train wreck that manages every scene to have something wrong with it. It's every single bad 90s anime trope wrapped into one anime, sure there are anime that are way worst than Maze, but the badness in this is so bad that it's almost artistic in it's delivery.
This one is long overdue, time to finally tackle Captain Planet.
The planet is being ravished by pollution and mass destruction, Gaia no longer able to tolerate such atrocities calls upon five teenagers to summon the champion of Earth, Captain Planet to rid the world of looting and polluting.
Yes it's the king of environmental cartoons Captain Planet, and it's really, really cheesy, to a degree that you wonder what on Earth the program makers were taking.
I enjoyed it when I was a kid but I don't look back on it fondly mainly because there was a period where cartoons would stop their antics to deliver PSA messages, a side effect to the rules set out by Ronald Reagan for kids TV deregulation was you can screen a 20 minute cartoon to sell toys but it was to come with a good healthy message, don't do drugs, recycle and don't be an ass hole, all wholesome preachy stuff that parents demanded were on every show.
There's nothing wrong with these messages, they are good messages but there are some issues with it.
1. They are being dictated by cartoon characters, not real people, this is the kinda stuff you should be taught in school.
2. The high cheese value later killed off the genre in the late 90s during the Golden eras of cartoon channels and the advent of anime in America
3. It's failure means that crazy people are now preaching these messages, the same people who super glue themselves to trains and buildings thinking the government will stop and listen to them.
I remember Captain Planet's guest appearance in Ok Ko Let's Be Heroes, where Kwame is now the only Planeteer remaining where he says "the planteers quit and got real jobs" whether that's a dig at the actors not coming back or a sadder in context statement that no one believes in Captain Planet anymore.
I find 2019 exhausting, every week there's a protest or a report that's either about racism, sexism, environmental concerns, political correctness, LGBT rights or another pathetic argument spoken by a pathetic human; worst thing about it is, both sides are as bad as each other.
The right wing are being portrayed as pathetic whiney bigots.
The left wing are being portrayed as whiny intolerant snowflakes.
So where am I going with this?
As cheesy as Captain Planet was, we need him back just to teach us how to be decent human beings again, only then can we solve the problems of this world.
If you thought the last review had violence, the Germans clearly disagree as they have Felidae. Slight warning the subject I'm discussing is very disturbing so read with caution.
A cat named Francis has just moved into a new neighbourhood and already there's trouble as cats are being murdered on a near daily basis; with help from Bluebeard, Francis discovers a suicide cult in which cats are willingly electrocuting themselves as it's soon discovered that the place linked to all this was a former animal testing lab and the cult aims to create a master race of cats by selecting worthy individuals through this twisted process further hinted at with the nightmare sequence of Scientist Gregor Mendal ripping apart cats with strings.
This is disturbing and I grew up with Watership Down a cartoon infamous for animal death.
I'm racking around my brain wondering how this cartoon film was allowed to be made and even more amazed that it was dubbed in English. The sad thing is it's extremely well made both story and voice acting but graphic deaths of cats in gruesome detail makes every other disturbing scene you've grown up with seem tame in comparison. Your sick Germany your sick.
Now for a classic in the Swan Princess.
A prince and a princess of neighbouring Kingdoms meet up every summer in an effort to fall in love with each other to unite the Kingdoms, only they don't get along during the time of the opening musical number right to the end of their childhoods. Puberty hits and they do fall in love. Only Prince Derek lost some brain cells as he can't think of any other quality than beauty as to why he should marry Princess Odette. Odette rejects Derek only to get ambushed by the evil sorcerer Rothbart who curses Odette to transform into a swan and can only return to normal in the Moonlight of Swan Lake.
After befriending some animals Odette must find a way to escape while Derek refusing to believe Odette had been killed by a great beast tries to find Odette himself with his best friend in which he succeeds after some mistakes but Rothbart has a backup plan in disguising his henchwoman as Odette with his magic as the only way to break Odette's spell is a vow of everlasting love which fails as Derek declares his love for the disguised henchwoman. After a final battle with Rothbart, the spell is broken and happy endings for all.
They tried so hard to make a Disney style film that it's almost plagiarism, but apart from the beginning the rest is ridiculously cheesy and over the top to the point where the film is a slow motion trainwreck, but saying that, it's so ridiculous that it's also very fun, made even funnier when Derek becomes the Prince from Enchanted with all the over the top declarations and speeches, this coming from a child who previously hated Odette; that's puberty for you.
After Swan Princess were sequels, bad sequels, coming up to today there are 5 sequels and a 6th one in production, someone thought it did better than it really did.
