Waking Dead

Last night I managed to catch two of the shows included on this month’s Newtype USA cover DVD. There are actually three trial episodes on the disc, but Best Student Council doesn’t really appeal to me. I’m generally not a fan of shoujo shows most of the time, even worse if they’re slice-of-life shoujo shows. Anyway, you also get episode one of Coyote Ragtime Show and episode four of Utawarerumono – I watched both of them.

Coyote Ragtime Show

From the opening scene, even from the moment I read the title, I had an inkling this would be something like Cowboy Bebop. Not necessarily in style (I think Shinchiro Watanabe’s work really stands apart anyway) but certainly in tone and setting. Essentially the opening episode sets up a far-future civilzation, with some Wild West-style themes, although the main bulk of this episode is set in a prison.

The main character appears to be a master criminal called Mister, although you don’t really get to meet him until about 5 minutes before the end. The other protagonists are a Chief Investigator called Angelica, a young prison official that ends up joining Angelica, and a group of twelve robotic assassin “sisters”.

The good: essentially, this is highly entertaining shlock. The animation is excellent, the character designs tasteful (minimal fan service here it seems), and the action once it gets going is fairly brutal. There’s not enough in this episode to endear me to any one character, but I’m certainly intrigued by Mister and his two cohorts.

The bad: essentially, this is highly formulaic shlock. Really, its not a show to set the world on fire, its not asking any deep questions, and more importantly it isn’t going to win any awards for originality. It feels like some kind of mish-mash of Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star, but lacking the former’s style and panache and the latter’s humour and inventiveness.

The ugly: Angelica has a very odd shaped face during the close-up scenes.

Utawarerumono

This may be brief as I only managed to watch about fifteen minutes of this. Actually, that might suggest more about what I thought of the show than a full-on review. In its defence it isn’t too bad, and its actually played quite seriously. The problem is that it looks awful and has a terribly clichéd plot – it all feels so familiar, but a bad familiar, like when you’re not sure if you like Vegimite or not so you have a bite and then it registers that yes, it sucks.

I got a distinct whiff of early-nineties CLAMP without any of the magic their shows always seem to capture. It doesn’t help that its obviously a shoujo show that’s trying to appeal to a male audience a la EscaFlowne. Anyway, your mileage, as always, may vary. This is after all just an opinion, and you know what opinions are like…