Something weird has happened to the animation. It's blurry. I mean, it's really REALLY blurry. From the little experimentation I've done on the images, I believe it is intentional. If it were a simple issue of them running out of money, forcing them to animate the whole thing at super low resolution and to scale it up to put on the DVD; scaling it back down would make the images sharp again. But these images don't become sharp even when scaled back down. My best guess is that they used Gaussian blur with fairly large radius. Why would they do this? Probably to drive me nuts... as if I'm that important. I really don't know, but maybe the intent was to make the episode seem surreal. It does jump around a lot, both in time and in plot. I have trouble figuring out what's going on already due to my lack of knowledge about the novel, so tricks like this don't help at all. Even so, for some reason, it wasn't too annoying. My left brain was surely annoyed, but my right brain somehow told the left brain to shut up and watch. I think it's because Akiho (voiced by Chiba Saeko) is so... adorable. And I mean that as a mere audience.
It was never a high budget animation to begin with, so they do use a lot of other tricks to cut costs. Focusing on simple objects like beakers, cup ramen, and model UFO while characters talk in the background, and using real photo backgrounds modified to fit into animated world are some of the examples. Those things never bother me as long as the character drawings are carefully done, but I don't want to see any more of the blurring stuff. It blurs out the character drawings, which I imagine is pretty well done.
