Dance In The Vampire Bund

[Kraco]

So satisfied with the silliness:

Episode 5 - Coalguys



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Not a bad episode by any means although I wonder how much more Shafty the weird camera angles and zooms are going to get before this is over.

Anyway, what really interests me is that who the candy girl is, what are her aims, and who is she working for.

[Ryllharu]

Not a bad episode by any means although I wonder how much more Shafty the weird camera angles and zooms are going to get before this is over.

I can't believe they are starting this crap again. This is like a huge step backwards for SHAFT. Being their usual selves with all the stills and close up shots of mouths, an eye, or even just the background, it feels like it is detracting from the vivid characters and setting of the series. The quirky charm works excellently in comedy series, but here it just feels like someone who always takes photos at 45° angles because it looks “artsy.”

Now with this episode, they are starting to return to their even older roots. Parts of Moonphase, another loli vampire show, were nigh impossible to watch. There was supposedly action, but between all the stupid color filters, angles, and stills, you had no clue at all what was going on. When the vampires showed up to attack Akira and Yuki, they returned to this.

They had made great strides in animation stylistically since Tsukuyomi Moonphase. They still kept their signature touches, but they were refined and when used properly, quite powerful. They started backsliding with Bakemonogatari. There were excellent spots in that show, not quite up to the level of ef, but up there. On the other hand, there were plenty of crap episodes cobbled together from still shots and shots with the characters partially or mostly out of frame.

Bund is a complete return to what they should have left behind. The art hasn't been anything spectacular, the framing has been...passable, but the lighting and now color filters have been atrocious.

tl;dr

Shaft sucks. Bund is a return to poor art direction, and it is really starting to detract from my enjoyment of the series.

[shinta|hikari]

I agree completely. Shaft seems to be riding their popularity with other series that have done well with this style. Unfortunately, this simply does not fit this show at all. It just seems like they are trying to maximize profits by reducing animation budget.

The style fits Bakemonogatari, since 90% of the show is simply dialog, making it really boring to watch without the stylistic rendering, but Bund has tons of action and is quite generic in nature compared to the former. I complained about Bakemonogatari's action scenes before with the missing scenes that did not make it because of time constraints (it was added later in the DVDs) for the same reason.