Another fifteen minutes of hate

Well, okay, not "hate" per se, but like last week, I found myself not being able to get more than 15 minutes through the first episode of another series.

This time it was "Fushigi Yugi", which I suppose is an innocuous enough title. It was reviewed as a "predecessor to 'Twelve Kingdoms'"; you know -- school-girl falls into alternate fantastic reality, and all that. But from the get go, unlike "Twelve Kingdoms", it was full of those silly comedy cliches that I rather dislike. And while I've been better at getting past that sort of thing, I could pretty much tell that, even if this one had a decent story eventually, I really wouldn't particularly enjoy the journey to get there. So I decided not to waste my time with it. Oh well. That's the point of sampling these, after all.

Also in the "not hate per se" category is disc 3 of "Texhnolyze", which I've already complained about previously. I really want to like this series, as it's got a glimmer of a complex story and an interestingly detailed little universe, but it's really just one big drag otherwise. The whole thing is dreary, without letting you connect with it's dreariness. It's characters are probably complex on paper, but on-screen they're just so many dead-weight puppets with pretensious dialogue. And I have a hard time getting past just how inadequate, and sometimes outright hamfisted, the animation is handled. No life at all. Neat soundtrack, though.

I can't help but imagine what my reaction would be if the exact same script, heck, the same voice talent and character/scenic designs, were handled by an animation team not so stuck in the manga world. Mashimo, Anno, Kon, Wantanabe -- just picturing the possibilities of how they would have approached this material drives even more of a wedge between what it is now and how I imagine it should have been done. Oh well.

There's still 3 more discs of this to go. I'm not all that certain I want to bother, but like with the gap between the last time and this viewing, I'm sure I'll probably start to think "well, it wasn't all that bad now, was it?", and just go ahead and rent another one. Which means I'm probably not done complaining about it yet. *sigh*