For those of you seeing one of my Gallery posts for the first time, I’ll just be sharing my screencaps here. Crow and I talk all about this episode over on Crow’s site. So if you want to read our review, and why wouldn’t you, mosey on over. You can find it right here: https://www.crowsworldofanime.com/posts/rezero-season-2-episode-29-that-should-not-have-worked/
If you also happen to get up this morning and think to yourself “it’s a really nice day but it could use some more Re:Zero screencaps” – well aren’t you just the luckiest fellow! I happen to have a whole bunch for you!
My Crunchyroll has been sort of temperamental lately and I have seen drops in quality of the playback. Particularly on Wednesdays for some reason. I don’t know if it’s because everyone is watching this show and it’s clogging up the servers.
It’s not impossible. It is by far the most popular anime in a season where everyone is stuck indoors and desperate for entertainment. I could see it happening.
Sadly, what it means in practice is that a lot of my screencaps ended up all fuzzy looking. Sorry about that guys. When I locked it on the highest quality it kept getting these split second freezes that just got on my nerves way too much. I just finished an anime on Netflix and I gotta say – that’s a great player.
This episode was entirely Subaru’s test and the visuals went all out to really let us know that something was off. First the colours were desaturated and the image was grainy. Like in an old photograph. hat way we know those things aren’t really happening or at least they’re not happening right now.
Then the entire thing had a blue green filter and tons of random dutch angles were thrown in.
I’ve spoken about green light before but this is a good excuse to rehash it. Green is the colour of nature and comforting and warm when used in backgrounds, however when a green filter s applied over the image it has the opposite effect. It takes everything unsettling and just wrong. Artificial. It’s used to create tension and a sense of mild dread or discomfort in the audience.
I also wrote an entire post of dutch angles but we all know the bottom line. When the image goes all diagonal something ads gonna happen. Or the protagonist is drunk…
Then the outdoor scenes, and there were quite a lot, are all overexposed. This too much light effect has so often been used to illustrate death in movies that it’s directly where my mind went. Like Subaru is in some weird after life limbo. And considering the nature of Re:Zero, that doesn’t sound all that far fetched.
There’s not that much visual diversity in Re:Zero. It’s a pretty straightforward production so it was fun to see just how much the episode insisted on the visual shorthand of something being wrong here.
I also thought it was cute that Subaru has his mother’s eyes but not exactly and his father’s hair but not exactly.
Oh and if you missed it up top, the actual review is right here: https://www.crowsworldofanime.com/posts/rezero-season-2-episode-29-that-should-not-have-worked/
