mightymothra

I was extremely delighted to stumble across Star Fleet, aka X-Bomber. What a thoroughly entertaining, fun, creative show, whose rough edges only add to the charm. Alongside Captain Scarlett, X-Bomber makes a very very strong case for Supermarionette as a medium, and makes me mourn for its unceremonious passing as a genre back in the 90's. Thunderbolt Fantasy has been an encouraging return for it to mainstream, but I fear we'll never see a series like Star Fleet again.

In short, this is an 80's space anime about a transforming mech battling cartoonish villains. It's a tokusatsu series in a lot of ways, with all the fast-paced creativity that implies. The battle scenes kick butt and use real practical effects in wonderful ways. I cannot recommend this one enough.

I'm a pretty big Godzilla fan. I liked the goofy 60's stuff, I liked the somber original, the heisei and millennium movies were largely a delight, and I loved Anno's Resurgence.

So I'm really pleasantly surprised to find that Singular Point is a very, very "Godzilla" show, with all the myriad of highs and lows that entails. Overall, I loved it, but I loved it for the same reason I loved Godzilla vs. Biollante or Final Wars or Godzilla vs. Hedorah... they're unashamedly goofy, they take themselves completely seriously, they have an insane cast of bizarre characters, and ultimately, the core plot collapses into a big dumb monster fight.

And brother, that's what Singular Point is.

SP is very lovingly made in that it embraces all the Godzilla-movie weirdness - it loves its source material and makes no effort to polish Godzilla down into something more edgy or "cool" or audience-pleasing.

It's got pretty much all the usual suspects - Big G, Rodan, Baragon, Hedorah, etc - but they're all re-imagined in some way to better fit into the story they're doing. In general, the design changes are really fun. I particularly love Jet Jaguar, from the MST3K-famous Godzilla vs Megalon, who they turned into a rink-a-dink mecha piloted by a crazed old man and his low-rent mechanic company. As the show progresses, they become sorta street celebrities for their tussles with various kaiju, and it's fun seeing this big hunk of junk get torn up as they cobble together one solution or another. And I loved the "city celebrity" angle for this tiny robotics company, it's very charming.

It is very much a Godzilla-movie formula, too, for all the highs and lows that brings. The cast is your standard insane collection of like, incidentally-psychic guy, genius hacker girl, goth, himbo, crazed inventor, hyperintelligent quasi-sentient dog A. I., skeevy CEO, model father politician, and so on. When it hits the halfway point, you get your standard assortment of experts in a million different scientific fields coming in to deliver truly absurd technobabble about how Baragon's mind exists in a hyperspace dimension where 6 = 9, allowing him to see into the future and deflect bullets before they're fired, etc.

Kaiju carnage doesn't really ramp up till Ep 6/7ish, which, once it happens, is all done very well. The military assault stuff is dope without getting tedious, the various battles are always fun and varied and look great, there's a lot of kaiju forms popping up to keep it fresh, and visually, the environments really go hogg-wild with color. I can't stress enough how nice it is to see a Godzilla property with some color and vibrance to it again.

Animation looks very good, which is a surprise since it does use CG for the kaiji and mecha stuff. I think the texture work is just good enough that it blends very well with the hand-drawn material, which I would say looks fantastic.

I'd say to its detriment, it's also an anime, in that, it will spend an enormous amount of screentime flooding the audience with technobabble concepts that flat-out do not matter in the long run. By the end of season 1, the plot has gone full JRPG story, and though you could sit there and probably pick apart the story to FF7 or Chrono Cross and have it make sense, here, it's a real head-scratcher. I'm disappointed that the show both did not pay off the technobabble stuff it was so obsessed with - opting instead for your standard magical deus ex machina - but also that they didn't have a particularly great giant monster fight at the end to make up for it (as it the Godzilla movie tradition). The final clash is okay, but, for all the buildup, eh.

Overall, I loved the show a lot, it's very Godzilla, but, sometimes, charm aside, I wish they could successfully tell any kind of story. One day.

Never in a million years expected a Castlevania series to be anywhere near this good. The story is great, the characters are all well-rounded and interesting, the action is fantastic, and I'm truly impressed by the voice acting. There is a warmth and depth to the characters very rarely accomplished in animated series, that makes each scene a joy to watch.

Season 2 especially is, scene for scene, a very enjoyable watch. I could watch Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard plumb the depths of ancient dungeons for days. I could watch the court drama of Dracula and his vampires for entire episodes. It's all very impressive.