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Watched the Conclave-Mendoi sub of Episode 8.
The sakuga of this episode fully epitomized what I increasingly feel would be my summary for the Art Direction and Animation sections of my eventual Final Critique for this series; utter visual beauty accompanied by animation inconsistency, respectively. C'mon, SHAFT, you can draw skies that rivals KyoAni's in utter brilliance of sakuga, but your Kei remains static while sitting on Hirono's moving bicycle?! And that's not even factoring in the weird timing for the mouth movements; if you don't have the budget to draw mouth movements correctly, at least take a leaf from KyoAni and copy their "talking-anything-but-the-mouth" technique, please.
Strangely enough, I'm no longer bothered by the Shinbo-WTFness; it's really fitting in very nicely at this point, and I'm more bothered by the lazy animation which crops up every now and then.
And as for the story....after Miyako's gut-wrenching freakout in the previous episode, the Hirono-Miyako-Kei story thread takes a backseat to its usual love-triangle setup. In its place, the Chihiro-Renji thread takes prominence....and how well it does it. If I didn't know better, I would say that the end of the episode was classic KEY/KyoAni unexpected-hammerblow style. Props to minori, and props to SHAFT. That was fantastic, and not least because of the stellar performance of Chihiro's voice actress.
This episode easily scores a 9, the last point forfeited because of the lazy animation issue.
Increasingly, I'm beginning to feel that of all the animation studios out there, SHAFT is becoming the biggest singular competition to Kyoto Animation currently, with all other studios not even close to these two. They've scored a coup over the current golden boy with the superior SZS over the latter's Lucky Star, and their ef ~a tale of memories~ is the only thing that's even close enough to nip at CLANNAD's heels this season. If they solve their lazy animation issue, I think that they'll then become real competition.
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