WARNING: There are spoilers ahead that will NOT be blacked out b/c otherwise this would just be a black box and not a post....
Once a long time ago I made a post that was titled something like, "Studio Bones hurts me...". That was back in the days when I was still going by sailor firestar and I'm not motivated enough to search for it, but I feel the need to talk about them again. Studio Bones is, among other things, responsible for both versions of the Fullmetal Alchemist anime, and I'd say it was right up their alley. Their original stuff is almost always a bit of an emotional rollercoaster to watch too. First there was Wolf's Rain...
...in which all the characters die in the end. Everyone searches for this "Paradise" which only the wolves are allowed to enter, and inevitably, they can't get there. Along the way the wolves get attached to, try to save, or are attacked by the other characters repeatedly, and in the end, they all die too. It seemed like maybe the 4 of them were reborn, but the new world they existed in didn't seem any different, or better than the original one. Then there was Eureka 7...
...and while none of the main characters died in this one, they still went through all kinds of horrible stuff (which I'm not going to detail here b/c I'm sure I did it before...) and in the end it turned out that the "strange" planet they were living on was actually the same Earth their ancestors had been forced to leave after nearly destroying it with their negligence. Somehow people had found their way back, but the planet still wasn't happy with them and the creatures it gave birth to with the intention of protecting itself nearly destroyed it again thanks to more crazy humans trying to exterminate them.
I think Bones' writing staff may have some issues...
Earlier this year a new series called Heroman started airing.
I didn't want to watch this when it was first advertised in Newtype b/c it looked like it was some kind of stereotypical show about "America" which would drive me up the wall with it's cliches. And then I looked a little closer at one of the articles and realized it was done by Bones. And I had to watch it. They've changed a bit since their angsty Eureka days. For one thing, the story moved really fast, and there was never any explanation of why Heroman came into existence. Some things were still the same though, the hero was kinda wimpy at first, the girl was way out of his league, cities were destroyed and tons of people were killed without a second thought. One touch I really liked was that Heroman never spoke. He was a robot, and that was all, but he could understand Joey's feelings and they could still work together. I didn't realize that stuff till later on though. In the beginning it was, oddly, the American stuff that made me like the show. It was obvious they put a lot of work into making it accurate instead of just going with the typical Japanese perception of the US. Down to the lockers in the hallway of Joey's school. It made me so happy I was almost homesick. I'd say they were dead on about 90% of the time, which is pretty damn good. It ended with a good setup for a possible second season, but in the meantime Bones is working on Star Driver, which I decided to take a look at last night.
There are a lot more girls in that picture than there were in the first episode which worries me a bit since I'm really not into the recent "harem" anime fad, but some of that is probably inevitable since their working on it with/for Bandai. There were a few things in that ep. that seemed reminiscent of Code Geass too, like the mysterious main character who appears out of nowhere and has a power the others have been trying to achieve, or the happy-go-lucky gakuen life storyline juxtaposed with some secret war going on (literally) underground. I'm not so sure I like the mech designs in this one (never really been into the female body type robots...) but I'm gonna give it a chance, b/c despite being emotionally exhausting (or maybe in part because they are...) Bones' shows are always amazingly well made. The stories are always something new, something different from what everybody else is doing and there's never a boring episode that you can tell was just thrown in to take up time. The characters actually grow and change and not just in the typical, "It's better to make friends and work together!" kind of way. They're a lot more real than other stuff that's been out recently.
