Black Magic is another one of those movies I had no expectations of, and yet turned out quite entertaining. Don’t get fooled by the title: the story has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of magic. Instead, it’s a science-fiction action-flick. Sure, the movie has a lot of flaws, but fortunately it has enough good points to make it worthwhile.

The thing that made this movie for me was how refreshing the characters feel. Every single character is in the movie and becomes involved for a good reason. I especially liked how everyone in the military has a personality and is more than just a walking paper-bag, like you see in so many other anime. The villains for this movie, although you’ll never get any good development or depth from them in any single way, do have good reason for their actions, and they’re so much better than “bad guy X who wants to either destroy or rule the world”.

But yeah, don’t expect the plot to make sense at all times. The movie tries, but when the main character comes into action you’re going to wonder how she survives. There’s also absolutely no character-development and the movie gets less interesting as it nears its climax. Something which should have been the other way around!

Incidentally, Masamune Shirou seems to be behind Black Magic M66. While I haven’t seen his other works of Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed, I doubt that this is among the best of his works. Thankfully, though, Black Magic knows exactly what it is: an action-flick. It never attempts to be deep; it never attempts to emotionally connect with the viewer, it doesn’t try to be 100% believable at all times. All it wants is to entertain the viewer for 40 minutes. Well, mission accomplished.

After looking at the promo-art, it’s easy to label ef as another of those harem-series. I too, at the beginning, wasn’t really motivated to continue with this series. Still, ef proved quite early that it doesn’t care about stereotypes. It’s not even a harem: it’s just a story about one love-triangle and one tragic couple. On top of that, this production has been supervised by Akiyuki Shinbou, which provides excellent graphics that actually symbolize the story, and the music is absolutely terrific. Even those who aren’t into romance can give this series a try.

But the thing that really makes this series is the dialogue. It’s deep, it’s detailed, and it’s meaningful. Neither the characters nor the story are that special for this series, but the dialogue makes everything so much better than if it were written by a lazy writer who only cares about his pay-check. The first half of the series basically builds up and fleshes out the characters, while the second half drastically increases the dramatic tension, and with great results.

There lies my problem with this series, though. ef has an excellent middle part, but I’m a bit iffy on the ending. This series seems to want to go out with a bang, while I think it would have been more appropriate to have let it end more peacefully. The twists near the ending feel forced, and just there to get a happy ending together. I would have liked to see an approach more similar to that of Hitohira: just have one big climax, while the rest of the series either focuses on building-up or the aftermath.

Still, I consider ef as one of the best visual novel-adaptations I’ve ever seen. There is a lot of crap amongst this genre, especially the eroge-adaptations, but ef ignores this and delivers a moving story between multiple couples. While there were a few side-characters who lacked development, the others were just as deep as the main ones. If you don’t plan on watching this series, then at least try to get your hands on the soundtrack, because that one for me has been the best soundtrack of the season.

Ayakashi

I originally classified this series as a Mushiuta-ripoff. Humans can be possessed by Ayakashi, which they can fully control but they must watch out not to use their powers too much otherwise they’ll die. Just replace “Ayakashi” with “Mushi” and “die” with “lose your soul”, and viola. After watching the first episode of Ayakashi, I wholeheartedly encourage you that if you want to get a taste of the premise: go for Mushiuta. The cast of Ayakashi is horribly bland and full of stereotypes. I also feel like it’s trying way too much to be shocking and dramatic: it’s only been one episode and people have already been slaughtered by cute school-girls and one guy got his nose cut off and his eyes poked out, for very weak and shallow reasons. I honestly don’t see any potential in this one, and the ugly character-designs also don’t help much to increase my opinion. You won’t see me recommending this one.

Kimi ga Nozomu Eien - Next Season

I watched the original Kimi ga Nozomu Eien a few years back, before starting this blog. The concept was great, though I didn’t really like the final episodes. Therefore, I like how Next Season is going to attempt to show a different ending for this series, this time from the Haruka-route of the original game. So far, I like it. The romance is well-developed, and the episode builds up pretty well for the twist at the end. I do have some criticism, though. It feels like this OVA is really made for the fans of the game. I have no idea what events in the series happened and didn’t happen. What changed Takayuki and Mitsuki so that they broke up together? The facial expressions also feel inappropriate at times, which distracts from the ongoing storyline.

Macross Frontier

I do want to note that this is the first time I’ve seen anything of the Macross-universe. It’s the same as with Gundam, Patlabor and Matsumoto Leiji: these franchises are just so big, that it’s going to take a lot of effort to catch up with everything. In any case, this episode literally shined with all kinds of flashy graphics, but I’m not yet impressed by the plot. It still has enough potential to become interesting later on, but the first episode was very much like an the first episode of any other average anime, where our main character suddenly has to protect someone and picks up a special weapon that happened to be lying around. The main character is another high-school student, as well, which doesn’t really work in the series’ advantage. The graphics are impressive, though. Now let’s hope that the plot won’t be sacrificed for it.