All spoilers must be tagged!Damn, dead as hell in here, huh? Weird, I guess anime's kind of mainstream enough by now that it's kinda out of the purview of your federated lemmy nerds. Motherfuckers care a whole lot about linux and leftist politics, shit's crazy.
Anyways, I found this episode to be pretty good, pretty decent. Unlike a couple of the past episodes, I didn't notice any real stand out sequences of animation, like in the episode where laios goes into the painting, and they have the building joke where he eats a bunch, or the episode with the cockatrice, where they do a double reflection in the cockatrice's eye, in a really impressive shot. Mirroring the artistic progression of the manga's author and artist, I feel like this series is maybe a tad amateurish in terms of direction, like when they have the joke where they zoom in on marcille's face, and then you can noticeably tell that they've literally zoomed in on the image, as it has compression.
But still, it feels like, at least with the shots I'm seeing, there's a good amount of freedom animators are getting in terms of artistic direction, maybe, which kind of gives the series a good energy overall. For this episode, I'd maybe think of the shot with the squid over senshi, and that sequence, as being the most impressive of the episode, but it doesn't really stand out all that much relative to the rest of the series.
I've read the manga, so nothing here is a surprise to me, right, but at the same time, I kind of find it weird how much, in hindsight, a lot of the series at large is just the author kind of like, wheel spinning, and how late the plot actually kicks off and picks up. How much of the plot just sort of, is episodic, and then cuts in for maybe one or two episodes, and then cuts back to being a dungeon crawl. You can definitely tell this is, maybe not her first solo work, I dunno, but you can tell how it's kind of rough around the edges and lacks a lot of clear plot direction here.
The pacing feels weird, for a group of people who are kind of trying to rush down the dungeon as quickly as possible to save someone. It doesn't get super insane at any points, right, but it does strike me as the mark of kind of amateurish plot direction, maybe. Without totally outstanding animation all the time to save it, and without being surprised by the novelty of the different takes on fantastical monsters, and, more impressively, the groundedness of those designs, I kind of find myself without a lot left.
Of course, none of this is actually a real downside, because that's just not the focus of the series, really. There's not a large focus on action, there's not a large focus on like, a complex plot, the series is just kind of supposed to be a cute comfy dungeon crawl where we see some cool stuff.
I think I also kind of find the senshi-marcille character clashing to be a little bit repetitive as a character beat, and it's not really funny enough to me to carry it, except for maybe when senshi has his kind of sperg rage moments, and sunwong cho gets a moment to do some voice acting. I think some very basic, like, plot direction for that, would probably entail marcille showing senshi that magic takes work too, just in a different form than cooking-
spoiler
but such a thing never happens in the manga, from what I remember. Something that could maybe benefit from a hard, or at least slightly more fleshed out, magic system than what we see in the manga, which, iirc, is basically nothing, we don't get much on it. This manga in general strikes me as very reminiscent of witch hat atelier, and something like that, on a smaler scale, could really help out the magic system here, and thus, the interpersonal dynamic between marcille and senshi. I do seem to remember it getting better as the manga goes on, though, so maybe it resolves at some point.
I would say that I think a lot of manga kind of, has characterization baked into internal trains of character thought, that aren't necessarily included in lots of anime, and I would say that a lot of manga gags that will work for a chuckle or two, because of a crazy, hastily drawn expression, don't really end up working in anime, since the appeal is how unprofessional the image can look. If you don't include that stuff, or if you include it poorly, it ends up draining your anime characters of a lot of their characterization. I think dungeon meshi, as an anime and as a manga, is doing that pretty well. It stands out relative to other stuff I've seen, anyways, in my admittedly limited experience.
Despite my complaints, I'm still gonna watch it, of course. It's not really required that an anime adaptation necessarily adds a lot, compared to a manga, since that's kind of the whole point of an adaptation, right. It's just a medium shift, but I do find myself wanting a little more overall, as a manga reader. Not a lot of replay value, in this one, for me, is what I'm finding.
I dunno, I'm definitely interested to know the experience of a new, fresh anime-only watcher, for sure.