March 22, 2004
Read or Die TV Episode 3
"Let's Meet at Jinbouchou"
Instead of feeling fuzzy and nostalgic with all the references to the ROD OAV series, watching this episode made me feel nothing but pain.
This episode seemed to try to establish two things: 1. the sisters are crazy about books, and 2. Nenene misses Yomiko, a lot.
Unfortunately, this is all stuff we already knew, and didn't really need a whole episode dedicated to further explanation. Like I've mentioned before, the cast of characters are all so obliviously stupid (with the exception of Nenene), that it makes watching their antics teeth-grittingly terrible. They act like vapid, brainless women, and do things that so defy logic it requires about two more leaps of faith than it takes to believe a bunch of girls could manipulate paper to create enormous paper constructs.
On top of that, the art style and animation can sometimes be a little spotty. One of the weird things (compared to most anime art design) is that the girls are very hippy (referring to their hips), and seem to have waists at lower points than most anime character designs. Because of this, when they walk around (and this is accenuated by the poor animation), it looks like they're just falling forward in a somewhat controlled fashion. It doesn't help that many of the girls usually lurch around, or otherwise propel themselves in an awkward fashion.
Hopefully some plot can come to take my mind off how annoying some of the other parts of the show are. I enjoyed the music cues from the OAV, at least.
Rating: D+
Posted by Kei at March 22, 2004 11:10 PM