otorimonogatari 1
Categories: episodic review, monogatari
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“It was me. I was the one at fault.”
(Monogatari Series Second Season twelve. Wait, did we skip over Hanamonogatari?)
Shaft drew in placeholder crowd people! The world isn’t completely deserted! Though they look like they came from Gatchaman Crowds… still, while Shaft is stylish, I wonder how much Shaft is helping/hindering Monogatari at this point. There’s a few things that they blow out of the water, i.e. fanservice, Senjougahara spite, dental hygiene, and Araragi’s Araraginess, but I can’t help but feel that maybe a more normal treatment might have been better. Like they went to a normal school. With normal architecture. With normal people around. Maybe it’s like Wound and Unwound Jun in Rozen Maiden… maybe there’s a world where Shaft produced Monogatari and another where Brains Base or Kyoto did it. I think it is interesting thought since Shaft provides more than just production values– they have their own artistic bent on things.
(Everything is so art deco and 1950 futurist. I do like it, but the absurdity of it is pretty overwhelming. This school has like a billion shoe lockers, yet there’s hardly any students around. Though for this animated universe, I guess four people is the equivalent of a gold iPhone 5S line at Apple’s Stanford Shopping Center store.)
Fuck yeah! Shiny red fire truck!
In terms of production values, Tatsunoko is destroying the field this season with Gatchaman Crowds. It’s not even a fair competition at this point… they do everything well, except maybe for the gaudy Gatchman character designs… the show is animated very smoothly, the characters and the backgrounds are detailed, the characters don’t all share the same shape (or as I like to call it, The Da Capo), and they animate background people doing things. This show and Free! don’t even hold up. I just wonder how much money did Tatsuoko toss at the project.
Get over here! Fatality!
Arargi lost approximately seventy-five hundred liters of blood, give or take a few liters. It’s not even gory blood. It looks Mariya painting it red.
If there’s anything that the haremettes of this show should realize by now, it’s “if you see an oddity, run the fuck away.” Don’t talk to them and definitely don’t trust them. Nothing good will come of it, and Araragi will lose seventy-five hundred liters of blood before it is resolved. The oddities all represent some sort of Monkey’s Paw (in Kanbaru’s case, literally) gift to the person, and the best outcome so far is that you get to live with the oddity, i.e. Araragi’s vampirism or Black Hanekawa or Kanbaru’s hand… shouldn’t Nadeko be like, “You know what? I had a bad experience with snakes already, and I just got conned by these fortune telling Beanie Babies by Kaiki. I think I’m good. I’ll pass for now. Though you can have this five dollar gift card to Jamba Juice.”
Remember back in the day how you could make anonymous phone calls using a pay phone?
(I wonder how much older this sentence will sound in five years. Also, I like how Araragi is arranging to meet Nadeko at 10pm in her room. I mean, high school boys casually meeting middle school girls late at night is a totally normal thing in Japan? I’m also convinced that Araragi could be the Scottie Pippin of anime if he put his… uh… mind to it.)
I can’t tell what Ougi’s role is. Is she like a soothsayer character from classical fiction? Is she there as a foreshadowing participant? Is she there to kill time? Show off killer BMX moves? I don’t know. I find her super pale skin color, lack of eye detail, and her not-very-straightforward yet straightforward nature to be a bit off-putting. It’s also a curious decision to introduce here, an arc after she appeared. It’s like Shaft went, “Wait, we only have three characters for this episode? Better toss Ougi in as well.”
So the whole class turned into Watamote‘s Tomoko. I wonder if this incident help drive Nadeko into the snake’s arms, or was it something else. She seemed to be dissatisfied enough to go to the shrine temple because the snake asked her to without consulting or waiting for Araragi. Like maybe she didn’t really care if Araragi could help her, just if he was willing to play some nakkid Twister with her.
(Nadeko could have just used his sisters as an excuse to see him. She could have done that. Or posted creepy Facebook updates about Araragi. Basically, what all middle schoolers do with a ridiculously high value crush.)
Three predictions for next episode…
1. Nadeko will throw herself at Araragi, he will do something stupid, and Nadeko will turn into Medusa because of it.
2. Fanservice! Finally! I know I’ve been predicting this for weeks… but… come on…
3. Half Life 3.
6 Responses to “otorimonogatari 1”
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apparently, since Hanamonogatari isn’t in the same timeframe as the other 5 books, they’re going to animate it separately next year.
She reminds me of one of those anime blog commenters who feel smugly superior to other posters since they’ve read the original source material… but we already got a new character like that in Gaen! Did we really need not just one but two characters from that fourth wall breaking mould?
Twister with a snake
Ougi Stalling Meme. She’s Shaft’s budget preserver. That’s her role. Not just her eyes, they don’t even need to animate her hands. Her little “encounter” with Sengoku lasted nearly four minutes. A huge chunk of time was devoted to essentially nothing that wouldn’t already be expounded upon later on and would be perfectly understood without Ougi having ever been involved. That’s my little prediction. And no, I don’t know any more than what’s been shown, but I have watched enough anime to see where this is going. In fact, all the previous arcs follow a distinct pattern which even the show itself has been keen to point out on more than one occasion. Yes it’s a formula, just like Scooby-doo, and as always it’s up to Shagiragi and Scoonobu to do all the dangerous work.
I’m pretty sure the weird Ougi scenes are supposed to be important to the original NisioIsin novels. My understanding is that Shaft just deletes dialogue and doesn’t insert new scenes.
Also I find this series a lot more enjoyable when you don’t take what’s happening onscreen too literally :)
But yeah I also wish this city had actual inhabitants at least so it breaths a bit.
Ougi has a whole season’s worth of books about her, if Wikipedia is to be believed. Should be the next (and final, not counting Hana) series of stories after Second Season. I can’t say for sure though, since I only read up through Neko White and a bit of Kabuki before getting lazy and waiting on the anime.