(L) Ghost Hound

[MrProphet]

Originally Posted by Deathkillz

Mind rape...

Spoiler:

Oki so i have absolutely no idea what happened...but one thing i know is that some of the animation was just horrible...

eg


grr...

For Pete's sake, that's not a GIF, there is no animation there.

Animation is when something MOVES. You know, the word "animation", the one that comes from Latin "animare" that means "to give life".

A still image does not move. A still image has no animation. Still images cannot have horrible animation or great animation, or any other kind of animation.

[Deathkillz]

Well i would make gif to show how it ANIMATES but god hates me and i hate mkv files (fine fine ill refer to those as "images" then - happy?)

if it ticks you off that much here, the time frame where it happens: 08:07 - 08:15 (plus - minus some).

[MrProphet]

Originally Posted by Deathkillz

if it ticks you off that much here, the time frame where it happens: 08:07 - 08:15 (plus - minus some).

Ri-ight. Or maybe... just a hunch on my part... you don't know what the hell you're talking about and you just used "animation quality" instead of "drawing quality".

Here it is: 7:55 to 8:20

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5DBDP5-Qs

WOW, just look at those dreadful flapping mouths and moving hands! Sends shivers down my spine!

[Deathkillz]

Ah yea drawing designs, thx for the correction :3 (shame about my limited vocab )

But if you think its fine for the quality to be slacking just because it isnt a "significant" scene then thats you, it does send shivers down my spine to see the drawing quality jump so drastically (and rather off putting - while i consider myself as one of the most oblivious person to change in designs, this was just too much).

[Klashikari]

Err... with the clip demonstrated, it is clearly badly drawn but also badly animated.
The plan is still and far away, the lips movements are barely visible.

what is the big problem is probably the mechanical look of the movements and the facts they are perfectly the same over and over again.
At least, it isn't "that" bad, compared to the drawing issues.

That part is seriously budget...

[Sonhex]

Intriguing and engrossing first episode, even if nothing much happens at all. The sound direction in the first ep is quite something though. I don't think I've heard the use of static and subtle white noise to represent emotions effectively before. Overall it's quite an unsettling experience, even uncomfortable at times with a palpable sense of foreboding and impending horror throughout. It's hard to second guess what could happen. For example, I honestly thought that creepy therapist guy was going to turn into a monster or something, but this isn't that kind of show.

The other thing that impressed me was the depiction of the dream process, the disembodied eyes in some black flickering beyond, the eerie lights and indistinct forms and the ever present featureless sound. It's an exceptionally well thought out attempt to capture the dreaming experience. I guess Ghost Hound is all about questioning where daydreams end and waking nightmares begin.

I do wonder where this will do though, it has the right uneasy atmosphere for a supernatural drama, but without a compelling story it might just be a weekly mindf*ck. I wonder how much of the monster hunting in the OP we'll actually see?

Regarding that dinner scene, I think it was meant to be mechanical and insipid. Family dinners can be like that. And that scene served to show how such a regular uneventful situation is so fragile when a family has such a terrible tragedy in their history. A single comment can shatter the normality. I liked how the mother's eye started twitching, as if she's barely holding on to her sanity, finding solace in her rituals; religious and domestic.

[monir]

Tense atmosphere in the thread. Was the first episode that good? Just looking at the short clip posted by Mr. P makes me desperately want to watch the first episode. There are shows that actually uses "bad" animation to connect certain points to the audience. Reading Sonhex's post and considering the type of show this is supposed to be, I believe most of the aspects surrounding the overall animation will have an intended purpose.

Anyway, keep it clean whether it is educating or learning.

[WanderingKnight]

Just a bit of a question... How difficult is the Japanese in this show? I'm used to technical-heavy Masamune Shirow-based shows, so the question is, how technical is the language used? I'm starting to be a bit afraid that fansubbers won't be able to catch up with the series, and I'm extremely anxious about the show. But if there's too much technical jargon, it will be really difficult for me to understand it from the raw.

[7Th]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

Just a bit of a question... How difficult is the Japanese in this show? I'm used to technical-heavy Masamune Shirow-based shows, so the question is, how technical is the language used? I'm starting to be a bit afraid that fansubbers won't be able to catch up with the series, and I'm extremely anxious about the show. But if there's too much technical jargon, it will be really difficult for me to understand it from the raw.

Not really technical jargon... at all.

[Kaoru Chujo]

Okay, I'm on the "pro" side here. The OP was one of the best I've seen. The show's drawing, animation, backgrounds, visual and story rhythms, voice-acting, and sound design -- the basic esthetic of the whole show -- were superb.

And it is not so far-out artsy that it can't be understood enough to be pleasurable, which is more than I can say for a lot of arty shorts. There is a story there that already has a strong trajectory. And compared to Ghost Hunt, this was far more creepy and potentially scary than anything I saw in the half of that show's episodes I watched.

I do understand why some people might not like scenes like the dinner table, but as far as I was concerned the animation there was excellent, even if the drawing was a bit odd. I thought that whole part worked well. It and all the scenes in the house told us so much about the emotional situation in so little time. The animation/drawing there reminded me somewhat of The Girl who Leapt Through Time and Noein. In other places, the way they animated people's expressions was brilliant, I thought.

As Mr Prophet says, whether this will end up "hitting a home run" or not is still not clear. But the bat has struck the ball firmly, in my opinion.

[WanderingKnight]

Not really technical jargon... at all.

Gah, you forgot to tell me that most characters speak in a really strange-sounding country dialect... It's gonna take a while till I get used to it, if I can get used to it at all -_-;

At any rate, I'm amazed by this series. All the auto-hype that I built up around it has finally paid off... I'm already tempted to think it's going to be an excellent series, and I know that, no matter what I do or say, the fact that it's Masamune Shirow, Production I.G., and a Lain-esque psychological drama is going to be a placebo to me. I can't really say anything but praise for the first episode. Animation was excellent. Key animation only failed once, at the dinner scene, but other than that, it was some of the best I've seen in quite a long, long time. And the atmosphere generated is superb--somewhat reminiscent of the dense, oppressive aura of The Exorcist.

I have nothing but love for this show, but I'm already biased in my approach to it. But heck, in my opinion everyone's always biased in their own way when they approach anime, so what the hell.

[Grv]

I've already mentioned the dialect:

http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...9&postcount=85

[Joojoobees]

I think it is funny that this show keeps getting compared to Ghost Hunt. For the record, I really enjoyed Ghost Hunt, but, based on the teaser, I'm thinking Zettai Shonen would be a better comparison.

[7Th]

In the end, seems like I couldn't wait for a subtitled version. So far I'm seeing more potential in this than I have seen in most IG television offerings since Windy Tales, if only for how inherently visual the storytelling ends up being as even without dialogs the nuanced narrative keeps the main grasp of plot at the reach of those without understanding of Japanese... and that's something amazingly valuable in my book. Hell, I even got the fact that three guys are related to a tragedy in the past and that what I believe to be Tarou's sister died and left quite a strain in her family's relationship.

As for the mood, the Lain-ish vibes are there but they're rather understated and the whole thing is amazingly lighthearted in its overall mood. Like a cynic magical-realist take on the slice-of-life genre. Surprisingly, unlike some posters I didn't feel the show as pretentious at all and it even stroke me as one of the most simplistically honest premiers of the shows Konata has composed in his career. Despite not so much happening during the episode you could guess there is a lot of subtext running behind the cast even without any kind of dialog. I also really enjoyed the dream sequences, they were rather nice and even the nightmarish scenes managed to be atmospherically involving without becoming creators of dementia tension.

I have great expectations of this, even bigger than those I had when it was originally announced.

[orion]

Definitely need the subs for this one.

I didn't have a problem with the animation. If anything is wrong, it will probably be corrected for the DVD release imo.

I liked the use of the audio sounds (radio frequency) when things appeared to be getting complicated. A spiritual/murder mystery/slice-of-life anime. Yummy!

Spoiler:

You guys don't think that anything perverted happened to the sister before she died. Her clothes did look a little dishelved.

[Guardian Enzo]

I definitely think Zettai Shounen when I see the lead, but I'll have to wait for the sub before I can tell on the vibe.

[MrProphet]

I don't know why people compare this to Ghost Hunt (in fact, I think I am already getting annoyed by people doing it), but Zettai Shonen is a very good comparison for the visual style with the use of soft lighting and a pastel color palette.

The character design is classic Mariko Oka (Jigoku Shoujo), but don't let that fool you. I thought that the rather typical character look almost underscored the scenes that are just DIFFERENT, like Taro's dream.

The girl in his dream and the animation during his "flight" through the forest were very impressive. I really liked how the 3DCG during the flight scene was melded and cell-shaded not to appear very much like computer graphics. You just know it can't be hand-drawn animation, since nobody would draw such fast-framed stuff, but at the same time it also didn't have that unnatural, plastic feel that fast prerendered animation tends to have. It was almost like, if you paused the scene at any given moment, the image would look like a hand-drawn classic cell.

More than anything else that part has impressed me.

Also, for those you who'd like to know more about what's going on with the main character, read this article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_projection

It's pseudo-science, but it will give you an idea about what is happening and where the plot might lead.

[WanderingKnight]

The girl in his dream and the animation during his "flight" through the forest were very impressive. I really liked how the 3DCG during the flight scene was melded and cell-shaded not to appear very much like computer graphics. You just know it can't be hand-drawn animation, since nobody would draw such fast-framed stuff, but at the same time it also didn't have that unnatural, plastic feel that fast prerendered animation tends to have. It was almost like, if you paused the scene at any given moment, the image would look like a hand-drawn classic cell.

Very true, I was also really impressed by the seamless animation during the flight scene at the classroom. Especially because it really caught me off-guard . It was just a few seconds, but the fact that they took the time to generate a full 3D of the scene proves the high production values this series is having.

[7Th]

The character animation is very Kamichu-ish. Not as sakuga-tastic but certainly with a similar nuance.

[SquirrelLuvsPnut]

I was disapointed in the lack of episode involvment with Ogami. All i can really gather of his personality is that he seems anti-social and easily agravated.