Well… what can I say…?

Wanwa the Doggy is… different. It’s… I’m still not sure what it is; all I know that it was really, really weird. The one who brought us this abomination was Shinwa Ohira, an animator. He worked on the animation of various big-hitting movies, but also on stuff like FLCL, Gosenzosama Banbanzai, Gundam and a few television series here and there. But none of it really matches up in terms of weirdness to… whatever the hell it was that I just watched.

The best way to describe these thirteen minutes are as a very bad acid trip. Shinwa Ohira just continues to throw weird stuff at the screen throughout the entire 13 minutes of this short, one scene more nonsensical than the other. I guess that it was about a kid’s worries as his mother is having a baby, but even children don’t have that kind of imagination.

The animation was as good as usual : there was a lot of movement, and you can see that the creators used lots of imagination for nearly all of the visuals here. Just don’t ask where the hell this inspiration came from…

And so, we’ve finally moved on to the second part and the point at which the two FMA-series have turned completely different. At this point in the original series, the creators were busy to turn Lust and Scar into nice characters. Brotherhood instead makes the setting a whole lot bigger by introducing a Chinese-inspired country that lies next to Amestris, which is apparently what the country that Ed and Al live in is called. It also shocked me how small their country actually is, especially because there are several other huge countries that surround it, including a huge country called Drachma (as in… the Greek currency?).

Anyway, this episode introduces a bunch of new characters from ChinaXing: Scar ends up with a young girl who can heal people and her miniature panda, while Ed runs into one of the country’s many princes along with two of his bodyguards, who are searching for the Philosopher’s Stone as well. This episode was mostly filled with their introduction, and a fight scene between those bodyguards and Ed and Al (which happen to be an old guy and a teenaged girl by the way… not exactly the most logical choice for bodyguards for a prince, are they?). It was a pretty fun episode, but nothing special.

This episode also had a new OP and ED, though both of them aren’t really my tastes. I’m not really a fan of J-pop and J-rock, and these two songs didn’t make it any different. For me, they didn’t really set themselves apart from all of the other OPs and EDs out there.

Rating: (Enjoyable)
Introduction episode for the characters from Xing. Finally this show is 100% different from the original series!

Okay, so this season I’m going to be blogging Canaan. It’s supposed to be a short series, and I’m not going to be expecting the most amazing things from it, but instead what I want from this series is the things it did well in its first episode: fun and well directed action scenes. For that, it’s going to have to correctly develop and characterize the cast, have a storyline that provides interesting and creative situations and a setting that’s dynamic enough to prevent from all those scenes from looking the same.

Canaan doesn’t seem to be a true adaptation, but rather a sequel. This is a plus, since the creators now aren’t bound by the length of the original source material, and instead can go in their own way and plan the story over 13 episodes accordingly. With this, they should be able to wrap up everything properly.

I haven’t read the original source material, and I don’t really think that I’m going to do so in the future. I’m not sure for how many others this goes, but I do hope that the creators take account of the ones who are unfamiliar with 428, rather than assuming that everyone already knows everyone’s back-story. And at the same time they’re obviously going to have to include this back-story, without boring the ones who did bother to read through 428.

I’m interested in the director, because this guy did Sword of the Stranger, which was a great movie in terms of action. If he can apply the same thing here for Canaan, it’s going to be a pretty enjoyable series while it lasts. The guy behind the seres composition wrote scripts for Simoun, has written the progress of series as True Tears, Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club, but unfortunately also a bunch of mediocre series, most notably Vampire Knight… I hope that with Canaan, we get to see his good side. And hey, the music is done by the composer of Noein and Phantom. That’s a plus too.

In this episode, we learn that for some reason, Maria and Minoru are now targeted, because they photographed something they shouldn’t have. Probably those strange infected people back then. The nature of the disease still is a bit of a mystery, because this episode shows an old guy with that strange mark on his face who can safely move in the open air.

My biggest fear right now with this series is that the creators are overplaying the chemistry between Maria and Minoru a bit. I can see them getting annoying quite fast if something doesn’t happen.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
Nice enough action sequence, but nothing special yet.