|
I suppose I'll be burnt at the stake, but well, this thread is made to give opinions, and after seeing the whole serie, I certainly have such an opinion.
Bakemonogatari has some nice cleverness in it, and a very striking artistic direction.
Sadly, that's about anything I felt it actually HAD. The desire to "be artsy" seems to be the only substance.
Despite all the apparent high artistic level, and the extremely weird and dream-like general tone I found that the actual plot was surprisingly predictable and clichée. At the core, it's just some very classical harem anime. Probably in a self-conscious manner, though, considering how often the show attempt to demonstrate that it's aware of it and point the numerous tropes present (the very mediocre and boring hero that nevertheless make every girl fall in love with him ; the archetypes each girl represent ; the "monster of the week" organisation, etc.). But despite being pointed and invoked, all the tropes are being played completely straight, making them no more interesting. Everything was very predictable, nothing really surprised me past the third episode.
The characters have seemingly pleased a lot of people. I found them nearly all completely boring and uninteresting. Hitagi, which seems to be very popular, didn't do me a thing. I actually found her more annoying than anything else. The famous ep12 fell completely flat for me. Not a shred of emotion in it reached me - and I'm usually a very easy target for this. The romance, despite being (overly) detailed and explained and dissected, feel nevertheless coming completely out of the blue and very artificial.
The girl treats it as some kind of schedule, the guy is just the boring usual nice guy without any personnality that follows along passively, and I'm supposed to believe it's a nice love story. Again, all these dysfunctionnements are POINTED by the show, so they're very obviously used on purpose. They still don't feel any more interesting to me, and don't make the love story any more alive or believable.
Be it the characters or the plot, I feel all is "explained" to me, but nothing actually "touched" me. Description without emotion.
The artistic side has the same problems. It's artistic, yes. It's in fact SO artistic it becomes frankly obnoxious and pretentious. Just too much of "hey THIS IS ART !". I'd call it "artistic wanking" if you get my meaning. Little of it actually participate to the story. It just feels all to give it a particular cachet and somehow gets the worth out of it.
All in all, Bakemonogatari felt like a very average serie that thinks itself being much more, and is irritatingly pretentious as a result.
It ends up making me feel the exact opposite of the intended effect : in place of thinking "wow, this has depth when you look at it", it made me feel "how, it wants to feel deep, but it's pretty shallow when you look in it".
I'm still split on between a 5 or a 6. It's definitely good in some departments, but I simply was bored through most of it. I'd put a 6 if I had to judge the work put in it (boring, but really artistic) or a 5 if I had to judge how I just felt seeing it (it's artistic, but cold, lacking any emotional involvement, lacking depth and generally not very interesting).
That's it, sue me.
|