Aniplex has released clean original versions of the Magi artwork from last month's anime mags. They're pretty low-res, but maybe they could be useful for avatar material. I dunno.
Blonde guy's teeth are ENORMOUS. The more promotional art I see for Magi the less I like the character designs, but that still means nothing in the face of the hype.
Director - Takeo Takahashi (Spice and Wolf)
Series Composition - Naruhisa Arakawa (Spice and Wolf)
Character Design - Masashi Kudo (Bleach), Hiroaki Karasu (Dog Days)
Chief Animation Director - Hiroaki Karasu (Dog Days)
Art Director - Toshihiro Kohama (Spice and Wolf)
It seems Claes is another girl that is eager to please her handler. As things tend to be, Raballo does not show the same affection. This episode is a looking glass into their relationship, grouped with the episodes preceding.
Though the old man's
change of heart
didn't present itself in an effective manner. He loses his temper,
gets informed on the procedures of experimental conditioning and then, in short work, shares a "heart-to-heart" with Claes. One after another with little breathing room in-between.
Claes'
forgetting of Raballo
was yet another marker of a possible consequence that arrives with growing
a relationship with a girl under the project.
There is something to lose.
The character can only
remember a fatherly figure now and a "library" key in her possession.
It's not one of the stronger episodes, but it has established Claes and her current position as a
caged hamster for Social Welfare
well enough.
I'm unsure of this as well. In the moment, I thought
Social Welfare Agency took him out. It has stayed underground this whole time and this case was the first (shown to the audience) of someone leaving the particular organization. However, despite his prior ignorance of the brainwashing process, I believe he would be knowledgeable of how certain things are done within circles like Social Welfare. In short, he wouldn't be dumb enough to attempt it unless he had a death wish.
They're not drawing inspiration from teenagers on Pixiv. The character designer is actually a Pixiv artist. Pixiv is pretty much the industry these days.
They're not drawing inspiration from teenagers on Pixiv. The character designer is actually a Pixiv artist. Pixiv is pretty much the industry these days.
Pixiv has a ton of amazing artists, but for every one of those there are several bad artists that just endlessly regurgitate the same garish modern anime fashions or just have generally terrible design sense. Just look at what the community spits out when company mascots like C.C. Lemon are crowdsourced to Pixiv. It's generally not pretty.
There really is no better plotted multi-season serialized TV show. It's incredible that JMS was able to make everything work, despite the production issues such as actor switches that inevitably arose.
Yeah, he had outs for everyone, but even then, there are some weird plots that are just dropped for the sake of cast changes - like Talia. It was neat how he worked out cast changes from the Pilot to the first season though. The people who got to see a Vorlon were "disappeared". Convenient, that. lol
All that said, War Without End is probably the greatest fulfillment of the "serialized television" promise though. It answers questions set up in Season 1 (There is a hole in your mind), it sets up the present (Who are you? What do you want?), and it shows you exactly what happens in the future in between the S5 "finale" and Sleeping in the Light (while also showing how G'Kar's dream of choking Londo to death comes true). It's one of the only time travel episodes that is legitimately awesome and has far reaching consequences for the entire series (as opposed to most shows that just hit the reset button after such an episode). So, so good. lol
What amazes me the most is that he even had a backup plan if Season 5 never happened. The Deconstruction of Falling Stars would have made for a fine series finale even if he never got to tie the rest of the stuff up with the final planned season. And yet he STILL got to do it anyway. It's crazy luck + really good long term planning.
Deconstruction was written at the tail end of season 4 when they were told that they were getting picked up. It's more amazing that Sleeping in the Light was filmed as the s4/series finale and that they could just save it and move it to season 5 without having to change anything (although it's weird that Lochley disappears, but they're not going to reshoot the entire episode just to account for that change).
The original plan anyway, was to give the entirety of S4 to the Shadow War and then S5 to the Civil War, but they accelerated everything to make sure they got the whole story in just in case. It's why S5 feels like just a weird stub of a season, setting up a lot of the plots that would be found in the novels (Telepath War, Drakh-tauri War), but being a bit unfulfilling in terms of resolving anything by the end of the season.
Speaking of Deconstruction though... that academic debate in the beginning is pretty rough. I suppose even back then he had the pundits he could mimic and copy, but it was also so very heavy handed. JMS likes to speechify... the problem is, he's not as witty as Sherman-Palladino or as frenetic as Sorkin, so many times, it comes off as cornball.
(Also, why would the monk have a ranger uniform and why would he pull it out to stroke it at that moment?
It only serves to tell the audience who he is, but I mean... it's silly outside of that context.)
Director - Takeo Takahashi (Spice and Wolf)
Series Composition - Naruhisa Arakawa (Spice and Wolf)
Character Design - Masashi Kudo (Bleach), Hiroaki Karasu (Dog Days)
Chief Animation Director - Hiroaki Karasu (Dog Days)
Art Director - Toshihiro Kohama (Spice and Wolf)
