zaShunina understands my annoyances
*Contains Spoilers*
So I finished the series Kado: The Right Answer a few days ago trying to binge through my enormous backlog of anime in my queue. While I give the anime some high praises for its realistic idea on how humans would deal with extra-dimensional beings, there was one occurrence that bothered me throughout the series.
I watched the first episode, episode 0, which features how the main character, Shindo Kojiro, is an expert at negotiation and business dealings. After he receives a proposal from his boss to close down a metal processing plant to buy out the land for new businesses, he notices their current metal products could potentially become super metals. After visiting with other agencies and science centers, he brings together a team that successfully makes new super metal material to bring in a new revolution of business and prevent the closure of the plant. This episode establishes Shindo’s extraordinary ability as a master negotiator, which makes him one of the central figures for the plot of the series. Episode 0 shows every character, main and non-main, as normal drawn anime. Everyone is hand drawn with the normal animation expected in an anime.
And then in episode 1, we get this:
What the hell is going on here? I had to rewind the section where Shindo is on the plane and gets swallowed by the giant cube three times to double check what I was seeing.
WHY ARE THE MAIN CHARACTERS CEL-SHADED WHEN THE BACKGROUND CHARACTERS ARE HAND DRAWN?!
I don’t understand why they made it like this. It looks completely out of place and somewhat ruined the cool vibe I received from episode 0. When the main characters are moving around with the background characters, the main characters look like they are from a horribly animated cel-shaded game. The movements are too stilted and shoddy. Hell, the background characters seem better animated than the main characters. However, when the sets of characters are separated, the discrepancy slightly fades.
The cel-shaded animation of the main characters looks quite nice when they are next to each other. Since the story and character development were well done, I sometimes forgot that i was looking at a 3D main character. I believe 3D cel-shaded animation has a ways to go until it’s smoother than normal hand drawn animation. It just doesn’t look as good, especially when it’s only drawn for the main characters.
UGH! It looks so weird. I still can’t get over it. I could understand if they chose to make every single character cel-shaded like in Ajin: Demi-Human. It doesn’t look strange in that anime because every character, main and non-main, is cel-shaded. But they had to go and make it look so odd. I will give credit where credit is due: the inside and outside of the giant cube, Kado, is incredible. It looked like I was on a psychedelic trip every time I gazed at its animation.
Does this rant mean I hated Kado: The Right Answer? Of course not. I had an enjoyable time watching the entire series (except for the ending; it took a slight 180). The main draw for me is how realistic it portrays what would occur when something not from this universe appears mysteriously out of nowhere. All of the government agencies and media companies acted in a practical response to how to deal with this amazing event and the gifts Yaha-kui zaShunina granted the human race. I thought it was also cool how they were able to accurately and safely move the giant cube miles away from the airport to the lake. All of the characters were enjoyable to watch, and I actually wanted humanity to use these gifts by the end of the series and become some kind of hyper-species. But I knew as soon as Saraka Tsukai gave her big speech about how earth and our universe are amazing on their own, I had a feeling my outcome for the series wouldn’t pass. And then all of the sudden the cool and mysterious god-being becomes an enemy, and then Saraka also turns out to be a god-being and I’m all, “WTF is happening?” And then, out of nowhere appears Shindo and Saraka’s child who ages to a teenager in some kind of subspace and just squashes zaShunina like a bug. I didn’t particularly like that ending for the series. I was hoping it would be more like Gate where the characters on both sides of the portal come together and work with each other instead of battling it out for supremacy. What can I say? I like happy endings.
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