Bakemonogatari Ep. 2

The prettiest anime of the season ups the ante by showing some skin (not depicted in entry) and avoiding (for now) jumping the shark!

I’m going to let the visuals do the talking for a bit here.

Bakemonogatari is still complete eye candy, the use of quick cuts from interesting angles and the abundance of mixed media really work well. The story is also picking up; the conclusion of this arc gave a cool, Twilight Zone kind of vibe.

The end of the episode, however, is oddly out of place. After carefully managing light and color, and playing up the witty banter between Senjougahara and Araragi, the show suddenly floods the closing scenes with bright white, blurring and bleaching the animation, and Senjougahara instantly becomes friendly and tractable. The quality of the character animation also suddenly drops, and Araragi’s tsuntsun sisters are introduced in a pretty half-assed way.

I’m hoping that Senjougahara, and the show itself, just had an out of character moment, and she’ll be back to laying down wicked burns in creepy shadows by episode three. But the proliferation of female characters with close ties to Araragi spells ‘harem anime’, a turn that would rob the show of a lot of its appeal. This is all conjecture though, don’t abandon hope yet!

One last complaint: the OP in the first episode seemed well-suited to the show, and since Shaft is known for putting care into the OPs and EDs I predicted that the boring ‘credits scroll over a still’ model would be abandoned this week. Well not only did they stick with the oddly upbeat Supercell song over the boring still, they also changed to another merry little tune for the OP and replaced the vampire action shots with CG staplers. Cute reference to the events of the first ep, but I prefer the darker look. Again though, it’s too soon to predict doom, as the studio is known for changing up their openings and ending multiple times per season (watch the evolution of the Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei OPs).

For my money, Bakemonogatari is still far and away the best anime of the summer, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it can maintain the quality of its art and dialogue for the rest of the season.