TV Series Review: Grimm

As I mentioned two weeks ago with Once Upon A Time, when the fall crop of American tv shows premired it seemed like everyone was expecting one or both shows to kill each other, taking sides, and that's not what happened. I've been watching a bit of Supernatural recently and that seems more Grimm's "rival" than Once and frankly Hulu had the right idea of trying to promote each show to viewers of the other and they've both gotten renewed for a second season so it seems like it all worked out. However, while both of them ended on a cliffhanger for the second season, one of them did it better than the other....

Grimm

Summary: Nick Burkhardt is a police on the homicide beat in the Portland Police Department and is more than a little surprised when his aunt, the one who raised him after his parent's deaths, shows up on his doorstep and tells him that he is the latest in a line of "grimms" people who can see the supernatural as it walks among us. Soon enough Nick is seeing strange creatures everywhere he goes and his life has taken a dangerous turn.

The Good: While Grimm certainly borrowed themes from dozens of classic fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Rapunzel, it had interesting takes on them and many times it didn't even use a fairy tale as a basis for the story and instead introduced just a legendary creature instead. Since the vast majority of fairy-tale inspired stories I've seen lately have been merely retellings this was nice and I especially enjoyed the aforementioned two stories for their creativeness. On the more human side of things, I've joked that if Once had all the female leads that Grimm was lacking that Grimm seemed to make an effort to have multiple People of Color characters with large roles that weren't stereotypes. Actually, Hank (Nick's police partner) and Monroe (a "blutbad" that Nick ends up becoming friends with) were much more likable characters and Monroe at least seemed like a more well-rounded character as well (although considering how uneven Nick's character "growth" was and how even his actor wishes that he would be a bit more active next season that's not necessarily saying much).

The Bad: Once also ended on a cliffhanger but where that one gave some closure to that season's "arc" this one provided a completely out of the blue twist with no foreshadowing, one so sudden I was convinced that this show was going to have a 23 episode season instead of 22*. Also, in the end this show didn't have an over-arching arc/theme to tie together all the episodes together (which shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer regularly employed to create a sense of cohesion) and since this is a story ideally every episode included should have fleshed out the characters, a plot, the setting (or been a red herring about one of these) and I could point to each episode and say "that is the reason why this story was included." It's true that television isn't always that tightly scripted but thinking back I really can't tell why a lot of these episodes were included since they did nothing overall and I didn't get that nice pay-off in the last episode of seeing a story through to the end. The show has created a good sized cast of major and minor characters so I can see why those characters all got so much screen time but again, in the end there wasn't even a reason tying together the whole season so I still feel like all that time carefully building up that side cast was all for naught.

The Audio: Much like Once (and apologies I've had so many comparisons to it, this should be the last one), while Grimm did have some distinct themes, both for the opening/ending credits and in the background, I can barely recall any of them only about two weeks after the show ended and that's not a good sign. I don't recall any specific instances where the music didn't fit the mood reasonably well (and I would have recalled that) but perhaps I've just been spoiled by all of the anime and movie soundtracks I've heard which are much more memorable.

The Visuals: The story was filmed as well as set in the green city of Portland and loves to show off it's scenery with many scenes shot in the woods and it does look rather pretty. But the big thing about this series is the copious amount of CGI is used to morph the actors into the various creatures which by and large seemed to work well. It helps that the characters generally look monstrous for only a few seconds at a time, both for the fact that there's less time for the audience to think it's weird and so they can spread out the budget overall, and again I would say that overall the effects were well done (except the part where Monroe sometimes looked more like a deranged ape than a were-wolf but oh well).


So, I will not be catching the second season of this show when it airs (I believe the trailers said late summer, August perhaps?) since in the end the first season didn't go anywhere and that cliffhanger reaaally ticked me off. Plus, I have multiple seasons of Supernatural on Netflix plus friends to discuss it with so if I want normal-ish people hunting down supernatural baddies I'm all set!


*the best comparison I have is that it's almost the exact same twist as the ending of the first season of Tegami Bachi/Letter Bee which only worked because I had read past that part in the manga so I knew what was coming next.

Anime Review: Rental Magica

Another Nozomi show that has recently been streaming on youtube and this time they were streaming it in chronological order which actually made me interested. I read the reviews for the DVDs back when they came out and the general consensus was that there was no reason to watch the episodes out of order, unlike Baccano! or debatable-y The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimaya where it added something to the story, and previously Nozomi had only streamed the show in the broadcast order. So it was October, I was looking for even more horror/magic shows to watch and this seemed like an alright choice.

Rental Magica

Summary: Itsuki Iba is the young new president of the company Astral, a company composed of mages who rent out their services to resolve various problems. The company itself has a few problems, they never get the big jobs, several of the characters have troubling pasts, and Itsuki has a magical eye that will one day kill him but overall they manage to stay upbeat no matter what comes their way.

The Good: Lately it seems like all the magic in anime is of the same kind (or at least compared with all the YA fiction I read where I am constantly surprised at how creative authors and characters can become) so it was nice to see a show put in some effort into having radically different types of magic. I especially liked the ghost girl's poltergeist magic, I'm sure supernatural experts would say that it's all wrong but it's so unusual to see a ghost character, much less one that does something more than just talk exposition, that I liked her. 

The Bad: The last episode in the show was an odd one to end on. It would have been a weakish filler episode but as a last episode it made no sense, why didn't they end just an episode earlier after a multi-episode arc? The opening credits also spoil that arc a bit for some unknown reason which is always frustrating, it kills any bit of suspense you might have about it. I also found the love triangle the series tried to develop very cliched (I've seen plenty of much more unlikeable male leads suddenly have girls fawning over him but that doesn't mean it never stops baffling me) and wish that had either been cut from the story all together or toned down. Finally, I wish there had been some more connection between all the different arcs (the single episode stories and the multi-episode arcs alike) since a story needs connections to feel cohesive and this anime just didn't have them.

The Audio: There were some episodes where the opening song was in English for some reason, I'm pretty sure it wasn't for the later broadcast episodes and I didn't think that those episodes were really special ones, and again the ending credit song is shown over a still image instead of the real end credits. There isn't a region 1 dub for this show (I honestly don't know if there's any English dub for it) and the Japanese voices were okay. No one's really stood out, it was all just solidly average just like everything else about the show.

The Visuals: This isn't a show you watch for the visuals. Sure the designs are consistent and there was some effort made to make all the different types of magic look different but there's nothing exciting or new about any of it. No odd color schemes, unique character designs or super detailed work to keep my attention, I even used the fight scenes as a chance to change my thread or grab more fabric for all the sewing projects I was working on which sums up the series as a whole, nice enough to have on in the background while I work but nothing that commanded my full attention.

Honestly more than anything else this show made me want to go back and re-watch Ghost Hunt (which has a vaguely similar premise) which is both a good thing (I really like Ghost Hunt) and a bad thing (apparently I liked it much more than this show). So not planning on buying this one anytime soon, sorry guys, it just didn't do enough for me. 

Anime Review: The Mystic Archives of Dantalian

Only a couple more summer shows left to review, I think the number of summer shows I have reviewed speaks volumes about just how much free time I had this summer (or how I had time to read a 300+ page book each week to review). Like many other shows airing this summer, I checked out the manga before the show aired (the manga and the anime are both based on a series of light novels which may be finished) and funny enough the manga engrossed me more than the manga for Kamisama Dolls or Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth did yet out of those three series the anime version was my least favorite.

The Mystic Archives of Dantalian (Bibliotheca Mystica de Dantalian or Dantalian no Shoka)

 Summary: Hugh Anthony Disward (Huey) has returned from the battles of World War I to discover that his grandfather has passed away and that he has inherited his large estate and title and so returns home to check it out. Once there he finds his grandfather’s ward, a young girl named Dalian who isn’t quite whom she sees and has an interesting connection to the Mysterious Archives of Dantalian that Huey has spent years searching for.

The Good: Most of the time the lead character(s) in a show are the protagonists because they are the ones who do things and move the story along which is a good thing, it's a very boring story if you are simply watching things happen to characters. Huey and Dalian are more observers than doers however yet they don't feel like dull characters, they have interesting chemistry together and the plot of each episode still moves along well. Huey is also not the dumber-than-the-audience sidekick that often comes up in mystery(-esque) stories and it's refreshing to see a character be completely unfazed by whatever happens and be able to deal with it easily. 

The Bad: A show, no matter if it’s episodic or plot heavy, needs something to tie together all the individual stories and show just why these stories were the ones focused on. It seemed like Dantalian would do this based on the opening, there are several other bibloprincesses and their key-keepers shown so I thought they would help tie it together but nope, they showed up too late and their presence didn’t do anything for the story. There is no overarching theme or connection between the episodes, except for the first and the last ones they could probably be viewed in any order, and like Blood-C I only watched it every week with the hope that it was an anime with a slow start and that I would enjoy it more by the end which sadly did not happen. 

The Audio: It’s probably not the first time it’s been done but this is the first time I’ve heard an anime theme song in Latin which was interesting, partially because I didn’t even recognize it was Latin until I saw the title (I’ve studied Latin for three years but the singer just sounded so different from Church Latin songs). The ending song might have been a nice one but the imagery freaked me out enough, more on that below, that I just skipped through it to the preview most times. Nothing about the actors voices stood out to me, they worked but they just worked, I didn’t feel like they gave the show any extra emotion or such.

The Visuals: There were two things about the art in Dantalian that interested me. First there was the fact that Danlian’s character design was actually changed quite a bit (the image at the top of the page shows the anime designs, here are Danlian and Huey's manga designs which I believe are closer to the light novel's designs)which I’ll admit was a change I liked. The other interesting thing was how there were a lot of photographs with a filter over them (a bit of grain/noise, maybe a blur as well) used as backgrounds. Gainax is known for doing strange things and I could see this trick working really well for a horror series but in the end it felt out of place here. The ending sequence was really freaky however (live action almost Dali-esque imagery) but it had no connection to the series in the end so I was rather confused by it as well.

The show was a swing and a miss for me sadly and it sounds like a lot of the structure it was lacking (that I thought it needed) is a holdover from the original novels which also don't have a very structured central plot line. I would read more of the manga if I could find it (even if I think manga! Dalian is much less cute) but for the moment I think I'll spend my time reading and watching other shows. For those who do want to check it out however it can be found streaming on crunchyroll (originally it was streaming on NicoNico but if you don't have a subscription there you can only see the first episode).