Categories
Anime First Impressions

Hanoka – Anime First Impressions

Hanoka 01Hanoka 02Hanoka 03Hanoka 04Hanoka 05Hanoka 06

I got super psyched when I saw a bunch of new anime listed on Anidb for August. They’re mostly OVAs, but one extra TV series was added along with Kemono Zume. Seeing the art for Hanoka got me psyched! The psychitude only lasted until I actually started watching the anime, though…

Hanoka 07Hanoka 08Hanoka 09Hanoka 10Hanoka 11Hanoka 12

Hanoka is being billed as the “first full-fledged TV anime made with FLASH!” Yeah, flash. Y’know, like those annoying websites that don’t work with the browser’s back button? And peanut butter jelly time! Yes, this anime uses that same software. I wonder why this isn’t a web anime…

The anime runs really short: only about 4:30 minutes. In that time, we learn that there’s a war going on with some giant tanks. They look like the Neotanks from Advance Wars!

Hanoka is some kind of engineered ultimate weapon (gee, I wonder where I’ve heard of that before…) and it’s her job to beat up the tanks. There’s really not much plot that’s been revealed; The actual show part only lasted 3 minutes.

Hanoka 13Hanoka 14Hanoka 15Hanoka 16Hanoka 17Hanoka 18

The first episode ends with a cliffhanger! The two guys on the speeder blow up a tank, but then wipe out! That’s what they get for ripping off The Battle of Hoth! What happens to them? Tune in next week to find out!

I guess I should comment on the animation, since that’s basically the gimmick of the anime. Every graphic you see is vector art. So the only thing that the objects in this anime can do is slide around. Unless they draw it explicitly, everything looks very 2D. It kind of reminds me of Parappa the Rappa.

I guess it’s supposed to look good, but I laughed at how bad the animation was at conveying emotion. For a show that looks like it’ll have a lot of emo in it, the future is not bright. It seems more like an amateur production than a legitimate Japanese anime.

Hanoka 19Hanoka 20Hanoka 21Hanoka 22Hanoka 23Hanoka 24

The OP lasted 1:30 minutes. That’s 33% of the whole anime! If it takes up that much, it better be good. And in fact, it is. I’d say it’s the best part of the anime! That’s actually kind of sad… The singer is none other than the voice actress who did Rozen Maiden’s Hina Ichigo. Na no.

Download the OP: “Dual Love on the Planet ~Hanoka~” by Nogawa Sakura

So basically, Hanoka tries to be an original anime and accomplishes that. But it’s not very good. Combine the short running time with cheesy visuals, and you have an anime destined to fail. It’s too bad, because the premise itself seems okay.

Hanoka 25Hanoka 26Hanoka 27Hanoka 28Hanoka 29Hanoka 30

5 replies on “Hanoka – Anime First Impressions”

RAMS, the animation company, is also a seiyuu agency… after running some background check. This this most likely their first full-fledge involvement with anime. I sure hope that the quality would get better… but I have to agree, it’s hard with only 4 minutes running time.

Actually, the raw that I have is 4:05!!
Lol, I will admit that the animation is weird, but it’s not completely out there. Besides, we’ve swallowed some pretty horrible animes lately. The faces do look kind of funny( I maintain that all of the characters are supposed to look grumpy, but come off looking scared), but I doubt that they’ll really get into emotional stuff… After all, they have all of 2 minutes 35 seconds per episode to actually get anything in, so they might just take the easy way out and push as much action as possible.

And what’s wrong with the peanut butter jelly time flash animation?! Haha

Watching this I felt a little ripped off. The thing I understand about anime usually in comparison to other cartoons is that they mastered the art of limited animation a long, long time ago. Limited being defined as the use of limited frames to fake the impression of movment. I don’t get that here. It really seemed like it’s being animated by two guys with a single Mac G4. Audio quality was better than expected and the actors were well chosen but the visual is the important part of this show. If you’re going to work with a bunch of symbols and graphic instances in flash that only rotate or scale they should atleast be drawn WELL, these were not.

I mean, c’mon I’ve seen fully animated things on Newgrounds that are longer and have better visuals.

[…] *NEW* Hanoka 1-2: After reading about this, I can’t say I was expecting a great deal, but since the first episode is only four minutes long, it didn’t seem too much of an investment in time to try it. After you cut out the OP, there’s only two and a half minutes of actual episode, so understandably very little happens- our heroes appear, some giant monsters get blown up, to be continued. I’d like to say the graphics look interesting, but so far it’s more a case of amateur and flat. […]

I dono what you guys are talking about. Conciderinf this was all drawn in flash, these graphics are really, really good. You should try making some really detailed animations in flash.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *