What They Say:
Racing heartbeat and expanding fantasies… After being accepted to her dream school, Stella Girls’ Academy, Yamato Yura is excited to begin her high school life. “Maybe, at this school, I can change!” Then, when she lies down to rest after moving into her dorm, her hopes still high… she finds a Desert Eagle under her pillow! High school girls?! The C³ Club?! A survival game?! A new youth survival story is about to begin!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Having just finished re-watching Gurren Lagann for the countless time on the new (and very expensive) Blu-ray set, it’s appropriate to now start watching the new Gainax series. Needless to say, my expectations for Gainax reaching the level of the few masterpieces they’ve churned out over the years have been reduced to zero in the six years since that series aired. The studio really excels when creating original stories, particularly ones involving robots (although that certainly doesn’t seem like it should be a requirement), and they really need their next brilliant director to come along and reach that level once more. Hideaki Anno took all the Evangelion staff to form Khara and Hiroyuki Imaishi took all the Gurren Lagann staff to form Trigger, so Gainax has lost their best talent and has yet to have really found adequate replacements. So what we get here is an adaptation of a manga, one focusing on themes that, while full of entertainment potential, don’t seem capable of ever reaching the levels of Gainax’s top-tier work. The directors of their masterpieces weren’t the most well-known names before their respective finest moments, but the director of this has done just about nothing else at all, and the staff in general doesn’t seem especially remarkable.
Fortunately, Gainax animation is something that is always both very distinctive and of very high quality, regardless of the subject matter or quality of the property otherwise, so that keeps the experience of viewing this anime enjoyable on at least one level. There’s not much material to really show off with, although the scene near the end of the episode that transforms the perspective of the simple game the girls are playing into an over-the-top epic is definitely a nice touch in this regard. The studio, having been formed by a bunch of otaku, is also famous for constantly referencing other anime, often the studio’s own past works. I’ve always been a sucker for that, one of the reasons I’m a big fan of Gainax, and while I didn’t notice any specific references to Gainax works in this episode, which are my favorite kind, there were some references to great anime like Maria Watches Over Us and K-ON! that definitely worked for me.
The premise of the series is that our protagonist finds herself caught up in a club that plays “survival games” and desperately wants her to join. Survival games seem to be pretty popular in Japan, but interestingly enough, the most I’ve seen of them was in episode 5 of, yes, one of those Gainax originals that I hold in such high regard, FLCL. What this episode amounts to is these girls being typical cute anime girls and occasionally playing one of these games, which isn’t all that exciting to watch until it gets taken to comical extremes. It looks like this is what the series has in store for us for the most part, so while entertaining, it doesn’t look all that promising.
In Summary:
The new Gainax show is pretty par for the course for them in the past few years: another nice-looking and relatively well-executed adaptation of a manga with pretty unremarkable themes, with neither the material nor the staff looking to be likely sources of what the studio is best at.
Grade: C+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Custom-Built PC, Sceptre X425BV-FHD 42″ Class LCD HDTV.
