Ultraman

I still have an episode to enjoy. Overall, I liked this series.

The animations are a huge success. They are apparently composed of images from several competing technologies: for instance, the explosions during the fights or the halo of flames enveloping sometimes Ultraman are radically different from the almost-static plans of civilians. This mixture is elegant.

On the other hand, the dialogues, the voices as well as certain plot twists, sometimes quite naive, indicate clearly that the targeted public is rather young, even very young. Not exclusively, but essentially.

Try it... and you might want to adopt it!

I'll admit, I'm not really a fan of anime but this show made an exception. I was fully aware the show was anime but since it's my first time watching Ultraman I decided to give it a chance. The story is pretty good, the fight scenes are fun to watch, good characters and it's overall enjoyable from start to finish. I hope we could get a second season because I do want to see more but we'll see. Overall it's a good show

It is necessary the last episode to appreciate the huge potentiality of the whole story despite of the bad storytelling where the behavior of the characters is not always congruent in their expressions. Another kind of defect deals with dialogues in both the Ultramen and enemies facing them as well, which often appear rather childish and trivially emphasized. The narration involves the main characters always in their Ultramen duties neglecting their ordinary lives almost entirely. Sometimes dialogues suffer from audio alteration and in some rare scene they are completely missed, at least in the transposition of my language. The name of the protagonist is often boring repeated as if the other characters have no importance. I have to see the last episode again to understand the plot better.

Ultraman shows that GitS SAC S03 is in good hands and Kamiyama is clearly back to his usual form after a one-out with Cyborg 009. IG technically adapted 7,5 volumes in 13 eps. but the story underwent occasionally major changes and streamlining, the revamped female lead is now an real character for example, so pacing isn´t a major issue. This is actually an improvement on the solid source manga and most of the CG work is fairly impressive for a TV budget. Extensive mo-cap was used and is clearly noticeable in the very fluid DMC style action scenes. Sign me up for S02 of this Christopher Nolan/Zack Snyder style gritty reboot of a 60s children show (!?!). This ain´t a complete joke btw. as the next manga arc has a 9/11-ish alien attack on NY.

I'll preface by saying that I've never seen the original Ultraman TV series and only ever seen a single Ultraman movie at a film festival before watching this series.

Overall I enjoyed the show, the story kept be interested from the first episode and the animation style feels like a unique mix of different kinds of CG. The action sequences were better produced than the drama ones where the animation felt clumsy and unnatural. Although I did like this take on the suits, felt reminiscent of the Guyver animated series.

The audio dubbing in English was not very good, and I just got the feeling that the voice actors didn't make the roles their own, just felt amateurish. The subtitles in English were also inconsistent with the dubbing. After watching several scenes from the first episodes with both on, I felt the dialogue of the English dub was more idiomatic, so I decided to go with the dubbing instated of the subtitles for this series. In the end I wouldn't recommend this, the dialogue got overly simplistic with little nuance or depth.. but maybe that would have been the case either way.