When pigs attack
(This review contains
spoilers!)
Despite the animation issues it
clearly had, I enjoyed the double-length first episode of Alice to Zorokou. It introduced the major characters in a fun way,
and established a strong bond between the title leads quickly and easily.
This episode more or less serves as an
example as to what the show would be without that bond. Nothing really happens
over the course of the twenty-two minutes, making it feel like we’re already
treading on filler in the second week of the series.
Sana is still at Zorokou’s place, but
he has to work, so he leaves his granddaughter to look after her. The
granddaughter is named Sanae, so that definitely won’t cause any confusion
between the two girls. Seriously, they added one letter to the name of the lead
and decided that was what they should name their new character. You couldn’t
have been a tad more creative?
Anyways, this episode is essentially
nothing but Sana and Sanae getting to know each other, doing normal everyday stuff
like making pancakes and summoning a horde of pigs. It’s all very cute, but I
can’t really say I found it interesting. It just kind of felt like the show
didn’t have enough content for twelve whole episodes so they just extended the
meeting between the two girls. Zorokou only shows up briefly at the beginning,
middle and end of the episode, but without him in a major role the entire thing
seems much more lifeless. It seems I was correct in my guess last week that the
heart and soul of the show lies with him, because without him everything just
felt dull.
The only thing of note this week is
that we get some backstory for Sana and why she left the research laboratory. While
we still don’t know exactly where she came from or how she got her powers, we
know now that she’s spent most of her life there but didn’t understand human
language or interaction until she met the twins we saw last week. We also know
that she left because they’ve created some kind of monster in their basement,
so that’s pretty interesting.
Onto the animation, the amount of bad
CGI is thankfully reduced this week. There’s still a handful of really badly
rendered looking effects in the same frames as the characters, but it’s nowhere
near as egregious as it was last time. Unfortunately, the characters still look
pretty ugly overall. I’m guessing that the budget for this series was very low,
because the animation on the characters is slow and not very fluid. While I
like the overall art design, the animation isn’t smooth and the characters definitely
look like they need more polish. It isn’t as dreadful as Sagrada Reset’s awful androids, but I feel that these overall
aesthetic problems might turn away potential viewers. It’s hard to keep someone
hooked when they don’t like what they’re looking at.
Overall, while the second episode of Alice to Zorokou wasn’t bad by any
means, it definitely didn’t impress either. Taking Zorokou out of the equation
was a big mistake on the writers’ part, and his granddaughter was starting to
border on annoying by the end of the episode. The animation still isn’t easy on
the eyes either, but I am glad that the CG’s been reduced. While the show is
still in its early stages, I think it’ll be in Alice’s best interests to start up the main plot quickly before the
viewers stop caring.
FINAL SCORE
5/10
Average
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