Shelf Life

Miracle

What's the opposite of gestalt? Blassreiter is somehow less than the sum of its parts. The CGI elements, character designs, and direction are all independently well done, but the elements all come together like a train wreck… a really bad train wreck with lots of casualties, including the plot.

In the near future, in Germany, a machine-based virus is turning humans into monsters. This isn't explained clearly in the show, at least not in the first few episodes, so I'm basically going by the explanation on the back of the box. Sure, it's terrible when a show has too much exposition in the first episode, but Blassreiter goes too far in the opposite direction, and fails to explain the virus for several episodes. I was never sure how widespread the machine plague was. Is it only in Germany? How many victims have there been, exactly?

The first episode is set at a motorcycle race, where an infected dead body fuses with a motorcycle and wreaks havoc on the track. This monster is clearly out to kill humans, but another good monster appears to fight it off. Meanwhile, a famous biker named Geld is crippled in the chaos. To make a long story short, Geld gets infected with the virus and starts fighting against the bad monsters to help humans.

The motorcycles, monsters, and vehicles are all rendered in detailed CG. I don't like CG/2D animation blends unless it's done really seamlessly, like in Tekkonkinkreet. I hate it when 3D animation just screams out that it's 3D. On the whole, Blassreiter's CG effects are technically well done for a TV budget, but somehow it feels like the CG team is just trying too hard to be cool. They actually make it less cool. To achieve a truly cool aesthetic, they need it to look effortless, but they've somehow done the opposite.

The show's character designer was also trying too hard. Geld joins some kind of unexplained government-based monster-fighting task force. All the members wear really ridiculous spandex outfits. I know they're supposed to look futuristic, but it's hard to take any character seriously with a heart-shape cut-out on the chest their wetsuit-like unitard (and a dude wears this). It's as if the character designer was making too much of a conscious effort to be cool and edgy, and went over the top into the realm of lame and cheesy. One scientist character has neon-green streaked hair that's laughable and distracting, rather than stylish and futuristic.

Geld has a hard time staying on the side of humans, and eventually a coworker on the monster squad gets infected and there's a lot of double-crossing. The box set ends with premonitions of some sort of robot apocalypse. Unfortunately, the robot apocalypse scene is ripped off wholesale from The Animatrix. What the hell? Was that blatant plagiarism?

The dub is well-done, with a lot of heart and a lot of fun extra swearing thrown in. I didn't really hear one stand-out performance, but the dub actors really gave it their all for the material. A commentary track by the American voice actors is included for the action-packed 12th episode.

The high angst level of the series must have provided good meaty parts for the actors. Unfortunately, I found the high drama and angst cheesy and hard to identify with… kind of like On Deadly Ground starring Steven Seagal, which makes me laugh because I can't take it seriously.

Despite the commentary, despite the good dub, despite the high budget, Blassreiter is still a really crappy show.[TOP]

As for Shonen Onmyouji… sweet Jesus, this was boring. This may have been a Rental Shelf, but the dub was lousy and none of the characters were memorable.

Abe no Masahiro is living in the shadow of his legendary grandfather, Abe no Seimei. Both are onmyouji; a kind of Heian-era wizard/astrologist tasked with keeping normal folks safe from the supernatural. Seimei was a real guy in history, whose onmyouji exploits have since become folklore and made into drama series and fiction. You might remember him from Onmyouji, a 2001 live action film based on manga, and Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, which happens to have some of the same Japanese voice actors as this show.

Masahiro is referred to as "Seimei's Grandson" by demons and humans alike, which drives him crazy in that Edward-Elric-being-called-short-running-gag way that's supposed to be funny and just isn't, and it gets less funny the more often the joke comes up. Which is often. I started to wonder why this show just wasn't about a young Seimei to begin with. We rarely see Masahiro's father, so much so that I started to wonder about his parents. Didn't his dad have to go through the same thing?

Masahiro starts off a little like a Shonen Jump protagonist. His grandfather is the greatest onmyouji of all time, but Masahiro lacks his ghost-sensing second sight. You know Masahiro has the genetic/magic talent to become a great onmyouji, but how will he do it? It's unfortunate, but after a while, I really wanted to see a fighting tournament to pick up the pace. Maybe because this is based on a light novel series, there are never fighting tournaments or duels.

Things suddenly take a turn for the gay when Mokkun, a little mononoke demon thingy/sarcastic sidekick, reveals his true form, a.k.a. Guren, a shirtless hot dude who has sworn to protect Masahiro. (This fujoshi element is also reminiscent of Shonen Jump nowadays.) Bamboo pointed out the penis monster they fight in an earlier Shelf Life.

Some of you in the forums may recall that I dislike shows involving invisible demons, but Shonen Onmyouji's monsters have an immediate and visceral effect on the real world, which I appreciate, and Masahiro gets his second sight back almost immediately.

At this point, the plot wanders around a little. Some foreign devils (literally) are attacking a princess named Akiko and Masahiro falls in love with her and takes a lot of damage protecting her. Who knows why, because Akiko is really lame and annoying. She feels guilty that Masahiro keeps getting hurt, so she stops telling him about the ongoing demon attacks. It really puts the entire kingdom and her own life at risk, so I couldn't like her character at all.

In fact, I didn't like any of these characters. Masahiro is such a paint-by-numbers "I'm going to do my best!" protagonist that I couldn't bring myself to care about him. I only liked Guren, and he spends most of the series as Mokkun instead of shirtless and handsome. Guren is a shikigami, one of twelve powerful god-like creatures. The shikigami have really cool character designs, but don't get enough screen time. Meanwhile, some of the lesser demons look like a poor man's Pokémon.

Mokkun's English dub voice is kind of annoying, with this weird made-up accent. The Japanese vocal performances for the entire show are by fairly famous voice actors (Guren is Katsuyuki Konishi, Kamina in Gurren Lagann) giving good performances. This is in sharp contrast to the English dub, which is weirdly bad for this day and age. Many of the incidental characters sound like amateurs reading straight off the page. Seimei's dub actor makes him sound like hick (and an annoying hick at that). Akiko in particular gives a whiny performance that brings down the entire show.[TOP]