Moondrive is the oddball of Genius Party. It’s a full fledged comedy, much more than Shanghai Dragon was. It is really silly, and I got a great laugh out of it. The director of this one is a genius of aesthetics: Kazuto Nakazawa, who people may remember as the director of Comedy, one of the biggest visual masterpieces of the past decade. He also did the key animation for the OP of Ergo Proxy and the second OP of Blood+, the character-designs for Ashita no Nadja and was the animation director of Samurai Champloo. This is one guy who knows how to make things look good.

And it shows in Moondrive as well. The visuals in these fifteen minutes were absolutely fantastic. Don’t expect anything like what you saw in Comedy, but instead this time he went for a dark and gritty setting set on top of the moon. The character-designs are full of style and incredibly imaginative, and the animation is incredibly quirky: it knows exactly how to capture the comedic tone of this series, it’s quirkish and made to make you laugh at the black humour of this short movie.

So yeah, in terms of story and symbolism this short doesn’t match up to the other parts in Genius Party and a few of the jokes are rather predictable or repetitive, but the rest of the jokes and quirky characters really make up for it. This is another reason why I’m such a big fan of these collection of short stories: you’ll never know what’s going to turn up next, and you’ll never know when a short is going to make you roll on the floor laughing.

The character-designs in this show kept bugging me. For some reason they looked different from usual anime, but I can’t exactly put my finger on why. It’s definitely something with the line art, though. In a lot of series, they’re shaded and coloured along with the colours around them, but in this series they’re all the same dark colour, and this series does nothing to mask or hide it. But then again, there are plenty of other series with the same, so that can’t be it. This effect especially stands out at some of the far away shots, where the line thickness is exactly the same as with the close-ups. The effect gives off something very old school, which combined with the modern CG shading and background art gives off a very down to earth feel for this series. It’s a very nice style for this series, although it is a bit of a pity that the animation budget isn’t as good as it used to be. The creators thankfully haven’t resorted to an increase of still frames, but the amount of distorted faces has increased drastically.

Anyway, about the rest of the episode: you can see that this series has changed A LOT since the Ein arc. While this of course is nothing new, it really doesn’t happen often for a series to have a really, really dark start, and then become much lighter in their atmosphere. There’s this warmth between Reiji and Cal that wasn’t there when Helen was still involved. Even when the characters are feeling down, it feels nothing like the tension between Ein and Zwei when they still were a team.

This episode was mostly light and quiet, but well worth that awesome climax of this episode, where the character-development really came together, and Reiji couldn’t shoot directly because he suspected the sniper to be Helen. He was about to both take revenge on the guys who killed Rose, complete a mission that would cause a lot of benefits for Inferno, but after being shaken up by Cal, the news that Helen might still be alive has really struck him. And ZOMG: Ein indeed is alive! I’m interested in how she survived: I could buy Reiji, but she was shot through the heart. That’s not something you can survive easily, can you?

Anyway, Cal obviously has the downside that she’s only been introduced a few episodes ago, and the majority of this episode therefore felt surprisingly light, but DAMN: seeing her crying when Reiji nearly got shot really was adorable. It was an excellent performance from her voice actress.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
A surprisingly light episode with some lacking animation, but chockful of character-development.

This series just continues its string of downright excellent episodes. This episode was much more about the characters than the mystery, but that’s also one thing that this series stands out at. The reunion between Oz and Alice was nothing short of adorable, and made the rather annoying cheese of a few months ago well worth it.

Alice, Gilbert and Oz work really well as a lead trio. All three of them try to fill in, for better or for worse, to fill in for each other’s flaws and weaknesses, and when you have such a setting as with this series to play with, it works really well.

We also learned something new about Break and his chain: it’s a chain, made to negate any influences from the Abyss, and so a chain made to hunt other chains, and for some reason this power is similar to that of Oz and B-Rabbit. This episode also reveals that Vincent is indeed trying to make Break do something: bring Alice’s memories to the real world. Since Break’s powers are very hard to beat in a fight, he indeed seems to have resorted to just manipulating the guy. This episode also showed that Break isn’t perfect, and flawed just like all the others. Now we just need to see some flaws of Vincent, but there’s no doubt that those are going to appear when we get a bit of a bigger look into his mind.

The end of this episode also had a nice little twist: why did the horse just take Alice and Oz with it, and leave Break and Gil behind in that collapsing dimension. Break was smiling, so there obviously had to be something else that saved them, but why was this so important for Sharon, and why the heck did she teleport them in the middle of a big meeting involving Oscar?

Also, I’ve stopped caring about the bad animation by now. This series just looks so damn good that I don’t mind the cut corners in the animation.
Rating: ** (Excellent)
An excellent character-based episode, after last week’s major plot twists.

I’m not sure what exactly it is, but Basquash has really been missing something lately. I know that I mentioned the lack of the chaos of the first few episodes and all, but there’s got to be something else… Still, despite this I definitely admit that this episode was a step into the right direction. There’s a lot of potential in this series’ second half if the creators pull it off right.

This episode started off with me facepalming at the complete rip-off of Gad Guard’s space cannon, though. I knew the two series were similar, but not in this way. While a simple rip-off is of course fine at times, and hardly unavoidable today with so many stories already created, the thing that bugs me the most is that while Gad Guard’s space cannon had a lot of hidden meanings and played a major role in the main storyline, Basquash’s Moon Cannon simply was a big cannon that transports people to the moon. Without any context, it suddenly becomes a whole lot less awesome.

But still, I have to admit that I liked the pathetic disguise of Mister Perfect, the show’s “new” hero. Very subtle indeed. On top of that, the princess got to meet her sister again, and I like the relationship between the two of them: her sister doesn’t hate her for leaving, and instead has understood that Flora has some very good reasons to follow Dan.

And then the actual trip to the moon. It was here where the mystery finally deepens a bit, and the moon indeed has more than just is advertised. For some reason, the unlit parts are filled with strange looking mechas, and for some reason a giant hand appeared and bounced the lead characters back to earth. Does this happen with every single cannonball that gets sent to the moon, do the moonpeople have some sort of grudge against Dan? Did the Moon Cannon people remotely adjust the trajectory of the cannonball to prevent intruders from getting to the moon? Or did the resistance caused by Dan, Iceman and Flora’s crazy attempts to climb on top of the cannonball and then into it create enough resistance to change the trajectory of the cannon ball so that it ended up in territories it shouldn’t be in, and therefore was bounced back.

I really hope it’s not the latter, since the cannon ball launch just broke every single law of physics imaginable…
Rating: * (Good)
Nice cliff-hanger.