Well, so I finally managed to find this Korean animated movie: Yobi - The Five-Tailed Fox, otherwise known as the impossibly named “Chonnyonyeouu Yeouub”. At first sight, it’s yet another children’s adventure: mystical girl (in this case, a fox spirit) meets regular boy, the two fall in love, the two fight some sort of evil, ended with a Deus ex Machina. However, this movie makes up for the bland premise through its execution, and not just because of its nice graphics.

First and foremost, it’s a really enjoyable movie to watch. The cast of characters is full of quirky characters that at the same time don’t exaggerate their quirks, yet deliver them with subtlety. A lot of the movie is spent on diverse characters, just having fun, and the movie-budget animation did wonders in making them come alive. While it’s not the best animation you’re going to see in a movie, it definitely does the job in portraying lots of non-verbal communication between the different characters through their gestures and way of moving, and that was for me without a doubt the most enjoyable part in this movie.

Also the premise is also about the only thing generic about this movie. It’s a shame that all family-movies seem to need to follow these same rules (especially that deus ex machina ending remains annoying), but outside of that you can see a lot of creativity in the storytelling: the situations the characters are put in are very imaginative, the locations have a lot of ideas put into them, and the background art is absolutely gorgeous in their portrayal.

There are problems with the animation at times though: the characters’ expressions sometimes look a bit too much like clay figures at times, and you can see a bunch of lazy frames in which the characters are drawn cell-shaded in CG. And granted, at times some events are introduced a bit too sudden, and we still don’t know why Yobi finds humans silly, yet she walks around in a human form most of the time. Overall, it’s perhaps not the best movie to come out of Korea; they’ve done a story better with Oseam, and better-looking graphics in Wonderful Days, but nevertheless Yobi is a very enjoyable family movie with an excellent characterization.

A very solid episode this time, and instead of the chaos of the past few episodes, it was surprisingly slow-paced as it showed the aftermath of what happened in the previous episode, as well as develop the current storyline even further.

The past few episodes also completely changed how you should look at this game that Battler and Beatrice have been playing. Looking back, Beatrice’s plan right now is indeed pretty clear: she had the scenario of this mysterious person killing everyone but five (including him/herself) of the Ushinomiya Family + Staff, and she twisted those events around to make them seem like magic with some sort of illusion. Apparently she thought that as long as she did this for long enough, the ingenuity of this mysterious killer would go unnoticed and Battler would be forced to accept that witches are real. It indeed seemed like a nice, though one-sided plan at first, but like the past episodes showed: there’s no way you can get a raging bull to shut up, just by yelling at it.

However, with the new Beatrice, this is completely different: why would the new Beatrice want to bother faking the deaths when she can just as easily kill people herself? Is this world perhaps a copy of the original world where Meta-battler came from, or something similar, and the witches have the power to play with the rules just as long as they match what really happened? We now know that Beatrice did everything in order to be accepted in the outside world as a witch, which indeed seems to signify that she had no powers in the world Meta-battler came from but instead of the worlds she created herself, and of which Eva-Beatrice is now a part of.

However, at the same time I wonder: remember how in the first episode, Battler’s father said that he was probably going to get killed the next day. Back there, he knew that something fishy was going on, and he was going to die, however there’s no sign of that here, even though this arc is supposed to focus on the adults. That means that not just the order of victims is different for each arc, but even before that they differ slightly… In any case, I also liked the extra bit of info on Battler’s parents: this episode really gave a bit more character to them, since they’ve stayed pretty much in the background until now, being immediately killed off and all.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Oh and regarding spoilers, my patience has run out right about now. DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE EVENTS THAT HAPPEN AFTER THIS EPISODE. From now on, if I even suspect an Umineko-related comment to have spoilers of the visual novel I will mercilessly delete it. This of course doesn’t go for most people, but every week there seem to be one or two people who can’t resist to ruin the fun for those who haven’t played the games yet. Even when properly marked, it’s really hard not to look at them, and I unfortunately don’t have the software here for proper spoiler-codes.

If you want to talk about the Visual Novel, doesn’t it make sense to look for a forum or blog that discusses the Visual Novel instead of the anime?

Gokyoudai Monogatari

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters live together while their parents are away in America.
Well, I guess that not all kids’ shows can be surprisingly good this season. Gokyoudai Monogatari could indeed have been a cute story about two very young siblings (my guess would be that they’re both six or seven or something), if it wasn’t for the completely nonsensical scenario. Let alone that two kids that age are fully taking care of themselves, but the entire episode was full of the most ridiculous situations that didn’t make any sense at all: in the first half of this episode the lead duo gets chased by some sort of evil camera crew for no possible reason, while in the second half the boy gets chased by some sort of angry dog. Everyone really behaves in a completely implausible fashion that I guess is trying to be funny, but fails completely in the process. It gives off the impression of being rushed, and that the creators didn’t really think through the script. Catchy soundtrack, though.
OP: Nice enough. Surprisingly well and fluidly animated.
ED: This is the type of song that the kids who watch this today are going to hate once they grow up.
Potential: 0%

Thriller Restaurant

Short Synopsis: Our lead character visits a supposedly haunted restaurant building.
I must say, the kiddie shows this season are surprisingly good. This obviously is compared to most other kids’ series out there and I don’t mean in the way of the WMT, but in the same way I’d much rather watch an episode of Thriller Restaurant or Kiruminzoo than Fairy Tail, for example. If I had kids and this somehow got translated I wouldn’t mind showing this to them, because it’s a pretty nice horror-series for kids: it has a surprisingly good soundtrack, it knows how to build-up. It’s got a small touch of Japanese culture, and you can see that some actual creativity went into it. It’s not perfect. At a certain time one of the lead characters got possessed in too much of a Gakkou no Kaidan way. In essence, it’s just another grade school adventure, but if you compare it to some of the other shows that kids have to sit through these days, and it definitely stands among the better ones.
ED: Ghost disco… yeah. My biggest surprise is that it’s actually surprisingly good, especially considering the crap music that gets marketed towards kids these days…
Potential: 30%

Himitsu Kessha Taka Tsume Countdown

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is trying to take over the world.
Well, I guess that we’ve found the worst show of the season with this show. Here they take a series that would have been best as another one of those 3-minute series, and stretch it over 20 minutes of them. The show basically talks about two story-lines: one consisting out of strange shapes with stereotypical personalities who fight crime for no possible reason, and the second is about some sort of evil organization that’s trying to take over the world for no possible reason. The end result is an endless string of pointless and unfunny dialogue combined with the worst possible animation that I have ever seen. It’s trying too hard to be funny, it’s full of randomness just for the sake of randomness, and feels like a really half-assed attempt at creating an anime.
OP: Really dull J-pop, but at least there’s a nice visual direction.
ED: One of the only things about this series that doesn’t suck. At least there’s creativity here.
Potential: -70%