Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin: Now That’s A First Episode
Oh, great, another show about a school with a bunch of supernatural stuff going on, taken over by the surly high-school-aged daughter of the crazy founder.
…is what I was thinking, but wow does this show have a heck of a start. The first episode is spectacular: A quirky, brilliantly-timed sense of humor, huge animation budget, a pile of nods to movies from The Exorcist to Porco Rosso to Terminator 2 (heck, the whole thing seems to be something of a 12 Monkeys homage), time travel, Nostradamus, unintentionally undead parents, a huge, hilarious action sequence, a touch of human drama, and a funky, piano-heavy soundtrack.
The razor-sharp blend of way-funky humor—both offhanded, concept stuff and sight gags—and horror/sci-fi standbys reminds me a bit of the Evil Dead series, of all things, which is to say potentially all kinds of awesome. The second two episodes are rather lower-key than the spectacular opener—they seem to be setting up the premise and developing the characters as people some—but still have some funky stuff, and the comic timing is near-perfect. Plus, the characterization even seems to be decent.
It’d be too much to ask for it to keep up the first-episode momentum all the way through, but if it manages to stay even half as good it’ll still be a memorable show. Definitely looking forward to more of this one.
September 14th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
I know this has nothing to do with what you’ve got up here but there is something I want to say. Recently,I heard about the death of Satoshi Kon,the director of such anime as “Tokyo Godfathers” and “Paranoia Agent” I’d often hoped that one day,he might do an American animated film or tv series. I wonder what that would have been like. Now that he’s gone,I guess I’ll never know.
September 17th, 2010 at 2:51 am
This was a truly sad event, due to which I’ve started back in on an attempt to review Tokyo Godfathers–probably my all-time favorite movie, any genre, any medium–as the only homage I can think of to pay the man.
That said, this sort of comment–as well as remarks on main-site reviews rather than blog posts–would be better suited to the AAW forums, which I’ve been intending to promote and try to bring back to their glory days of old. You really should sign up and kick off some discussing there.