I won’t lie guys, this week has not featured my favourite Granbelm episode. I go into exactly why that is over on Karandi’s blog. This said, just because an episode may not be my favourite, doesn’t mean the visuals are horrible.
So what did Granbelm look like this week? Let’s find out:
The majority of the episode did take place in Granbelm which was much more green than purple this week. Green has been Nene’s colour (while purple in Shingetsu), so maybe that’s why. The episode did focus mostly on Nene this week.
The only glimpses we got of the “real” world were in the opening arc where the alliance set ups were explained. Is it just me or does Kuon (white hair) look somewhat off? The proportions aren’t quite right or something. I found it very distracting.
You know, every week I arrange these screen caps in chronological order. You get a real visual sense of the episode. You can clearly see how certain images fit together and are part of the same scene, how later scenes may call back to them and where natural breaks in the visual narrative occur. That’s usually how I go about creating my groupings.
I just sort of had to pick a cap to stop at because this week’s Granbelm just looked like a random assortment of images. And yes, all those pictures are in the order they appeared in the show. That single flashback screen cap does belong right there. Also, there’s a reason there are hardly two caps in a roll of the same character, the editing was pretty jarring.
And the climax was mostly about Mangetsu and Nene. Although looking back at these images, I realize that most of the episode was.
I will say the flashback was effectively touching and the greyed out colour scheme and wide screen aspect ratio all worked well to create a nostalgic and dramatic feel. But other than that I can’t say I found any of this week’s Granbelm that impressive. Let’s hope I have a better gallery next week.
I’ve been less and less impressed by this one since the pilot. What initially appeared promising has just devolved into something that feels really generic. It’s not horrible, but it wasn’t interesting enough to keep me from getting distracted and not caring enough to rewind and see what I missed. Because of this, I decided to go ahead and drop it. It’s just not for me.
For me it’s the other way around. The first episode felt messy and unfocused. I preferred the school set slice of life episodes which are probably the most generic the show has to offer. It’s the more unusual mecha aspect that I’m having a lot of trouble connecting with. Fore me, the Granbelm Universe in just too underdeveloped for me to properly care.