I'm sorta using this as a typing test as I adjust to my new keyboard but whatever.
Carole & Tuesday -1
This was fine. I don't think it was particularly great, nor do I think it was particularly bad or even mediocre. It's still sort of hard to get a gauge on this show, on multiple levels, as the long series running time means they're going to have to fill the down moments with a lot of content and I didn't see much in this episode to indicate the quality of that. We know the first cour is about Carole and Tuesday before they hit it big and the second cour is after their breakthrough (so the usual band breakup due to sex/drugs/women). So what they'll do with future content aside, this episode served as a fairly good look into Carole and Tuesday's lives, as well as their personalities. That's really the priority for any series, especially one so character-driven like this will be. In that regard, I think the show did a good job of making me care about the two for the time being. Tuesday bullying was entertaining, I hope Carole continues that trend in later episodes. I also like Angela, who looks to be the antagonist, as she looks to have her own emotional problems.
I've watched this episode twice and the second time I was more impressed with the storyboarding than the initial go around. Take for instance the above scene, the jump cut and visuals juxtapose her initial thoughts. There were also some minor foreshadowing/in-episode references like Angela being in that
Durian soda commercial and later Carole gives Tuesday
a Durian soda.
The big problem with the series I possibly foresee is the production values. This looks to be on the lower end for BONES, which is surprising as this is supposed to be their anniversary project. I have to wonder if Mob Psycho's scheduling overlapped with this, resulting in this show getting shafted. Both the character animation and background art is sloppier than what I know BONES is capable of. For example, when Carole wakes up, her animation is stiffer than it should be. Also the skateboarding scene feels lacking as that feels like the scene when an unnecessarily flashy sakuga scene occurs. You can tell the priority was the music performances but that doesn't excuse the rest of the episode not being up to snuff. This is probably the worst premiere Watanabe has put out, from a visual standpoint. Both Terror in Resonance and Kids on the Slope had gorgeous first episodes, not to mention stuff like Cowboy Bebop and Space Dandy. We'll see if this is true for later episodes when the musical performances start becoming bigger components of the show. I'm hoping it's not just a case of only the performances getting the focus and all character animation.
The other problem is the background art being sorta ass. There are definitely scenes where the art looks nice such as
Tuesday's bedroom but too much is mediocre at best, especially shots involving the cityscape. It's lacking in both interesting geometry but also detail. In the above two snapshots, the first one is from Carole and the second is from the Mofu Healing anime. The detail in the later is much higher and feels like a real city compared to the first. That's sort of surprising as Watanabe is usually better in this area. The background art in this episode looks to have been done by a combination of Studio Blue (KyoAni's external background support studio) and Studio No Border (
new studio by Thomas Romain). The art director for C&T is Ryō Kono, who is also the art director for Mob Psycho, which again makes me wonder if the internal priority for everyone at BONES was Mob.
The UI work though was absolutely gorgeous so there was at least something decent about the background visuals. I don't really have much else to comment on outside of that, other than the ED is somewhat underwhelming as I know Norimitsu Suzuki is capable of much more, for reference go look at the
Star Driver EDs. It's only an ED though so whatever as the brunt of the animation team seems to be working on some insane OP done by Bahi JD. So decent start but I definitely can see this crashing and burning for possibly multiple reasons.
Edit: I also forgot to mention that the high level English singing voices is going to be extremely distracting. I hope they use the actual singers for Carole and Tuesday's English dub voice actors as the jump from
Miyuri Shimabukuro to
Nai Br.XX is vast.