I've been getting tired of soulless drawings in anime lately.
Watching some of the older shows like Fancy Lala made me realize even
more how lacking current shows are of artistic value. Honestly, I'm
getting tired of anime. If the trend of soulless animation continues,
I'll probably be able to get myself a new car soon. Either that or I
can cut some time off my 15-year mortgage.
Anyway, Haibane Renmei was one of the very few recent anime I had high
hopes for. It's not soulless, but it's not really up to my
expectations, either. The scene where Rakka's wings come out was very
impressionable, but the overall animation is too blurry. Even though
it's 16:9 anamorphic DVD, I see no benefit from the gained resolution
as the original animation doesn't seem to have it to begin with.
Of course, there's nothing better to buy, so I'm certainly going to
continue collecting the series. At this point, the only other anime I
have high hopes for is Nanaka 6/17. Even then, I'm apprehensive
because the cast is almost completely different from the cast of the
CD Drama.
Image (Quality 11 JPEG!): To show you that there isn't enough detail to benefit from anamorphic encoding, right half (see red marker) is scaled down to letterbox resolution (720x360) and then scaled back to full resolution. There is very little loss of information since there wasn't much information to begin with. On the other hand, it has rid itself of a lot of the MPEG artifacts during scaling process. Funny, the artifacts wouldn't even be there to begin with if Pioneer Japan did a better job at it. Oh well.
