Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [Week 46]

I've been digging through my collection of old anime over the last few weeks -- particularly looking for fun lines, screenshots, etc. to post over at !animepics (and sometimes !fangmoe or [email protected]) -- and I'm paying a lot more attention to the actual art in anime as a result. I recently watched Ghost Stories (with it's famously unfaithful dub), for example, and there's a lot of just fun images if you're paying attention to the artwork itself. I mean, that probably sounds like it should be obvious -- it's anime! it's visual art, right?! -- but before I started this I was usually watching shows and movies for the story and characters primarily and just taking in the art as an aid to enhance the storytelling rather than really paying attention to it in its own right. This slightly more active viewing approach has been a fun alternative to just riding along with the plot.

As part of that, I've just finished watching Wolf's Rain a few hours ago. I've had the DVDs for years but never got around to watching it -- so I finally did. I knew of it from an old friend I used to talk to on AIM (yes, from waaaaay back) who really liked the ED. I didn't actually know much of anything about the show going into it besides that one song, so, that was interesting... The one sentence summary, if you haven't heard of it, is basically: a group of wolves that can alternate between wolf and human appearance go on a journey in search of Paradise in a bleak, frozen, post-apocalyptic dark fantasy-with-tech setting.

Does anyone know WTF happened during production? There were FOUR back-to-back recap episodes in the middle of it -- plus four OVA episodes to make up for that, I guess.

I've got a few screenshots from the show that I'll be posting in the coming days -- as well as a composite of a panning shot of a character that I thought would be fun to try to edit back together. I ended up writing some custom software -- and refreshed myself on a numerical technique I haven't used in a long time -- in addition to using my image editor to make it.

This past week I have not had too much time to watch anime, but managed to keep up with a couple airing shows.

• Frieren once again outdid itself with what is my new favorite episode of its run. It was so good that I rewatched it and made a second top-level comment in the episode thread about it.
• Eminence in Shadow had an interesting episode this past week. As a source reader, my reaction seems to differ a lot from anime-only reactions that I have seen. There were some serious bits of the story left on the cutting room floor from Episode 6 that source readers haven't been happy about. I just hope that they were cut in order to give us something special later in the season like they did at the end of season 1.
• Helck continues its backstory exposition dump. I like backstory as much as the next viewer, but you know what else I also like? Story. About a full third of the show's runtime has been this single flashback sequence explaining Helck's past. I really think that instead of a solid 5-6 episode flashback chunk, it could have been interspersed with the rest of the story (see Frieren for a good example of how to mix backstory and story).

Finally, speaking as a recently appointed moderator for the community, I just want to thank everybody that has been involved with this community since we essentially brought it off of life support. It's growth has been great to see and I have been very happy to see the positive interactions here after the drama surrounding the defederation incidents in recent days. It would have been all too easy to start steering conversations in negative directions towards individuals involved, but I haven't seen that at all in this community.

If you have any questions for me, either speaking as a moderator or just as a random internet person, I am happy to answer here.