[Categories: Anime Reviews]
Allison to Lillia: the end of the line at last
It’s with no small amount of relief that I’ve completed the epic disappointment that was Allison to Lillia. I feel as though the characters are now put out of their misery: when they are so lively and engaging it feels like an act of cruelty to even watch them go through such an embarrassment of a storyline. Another way of looking at is is that when I eventually reach the end of Code Geass I can sit back with the final episode, safe in the knowledge that I’ve already experienced true trainwreck television. In a very literal sense.
“Oh rly?” “Yes, rly.” “No way!”
Since I haven’t after all actually finished Geass the term ‘trainwreck’ is little more than an over-used buzzword; at this point though I can still understand the feeling of disappointment the R2 haters among you must have felt. On the plus side it means I’m more likely to enjoy Lelouch’s final outing since, with the final two arcs of Lillia taken into account, it probably can’t be any worse than what I subjected myself to this week. How did such a promising show go so wrong?
The ending is, even by the series’ own standards, really, really bad. I’m sure Jeremy Clarkson could come up with some scathing and amusing metaphor (e.g. “if this anime series were a car it would be a Trabant,” in that it runs for ages but is held together with plastic and string) but the best way to imagine it is your disbelief not being so much suspended as dangling from the gallows and croaking out its last dying breath.
I’m used to the infamous Allison to Lillia Plot Holes™ but I can’t really see the point in listing every plot point or event that is either poorly explained or is devoid of logic altogether. Hanners went to the trouble of blogging the entire series, so you can read those posts at your leisure; a brave and worthy justification for episodic blogging if ever there was one. Suffice to say the last two arcs don’t improve on the previous ones in terms of being laughably unconvincing.
What I was scratching my head over was how an anime series based on a popular series of books by a reputable writer and produced by a studio that has barely disappointed me since, well, forever could turn out to be such a dud. The artwork and music are decent, the animation isn’t top-notch but if perfectly decent for a B-list title; the background to the story is immersive and fascinating. The thing is, the plotline of a TV show isn’t made by a small group of people. There are a lot of animators, artists, actors and technical staff involved; any one of whom could have put their hands up during production and said, “Hang on. I don’t get it.”
I don’t want to sound like I’m exaggerating when I say that whoever worked on the storyboards and/or continuity may not have actually known what they were doing. The underlying ideas were fantastic but it must be the execution of the details that made it a succession of implausible plans, flawed logic and unexplained events; the script wasn’t exactly bad I guess but the characters did come off as being pretty dumb at times. There were likably dumb though, because it felt like one of those films where a talented actor or actress stars in a B-movie because their agent is incompetent and looks a bit lost right from the first scene.
Was it down to a lousy director and storyboard planner? Or were the original novels substandard? Since I haven’t read them for myself I have to go on the impressive sales figures and reject my theory that Sigsawa is great at short stories (Kino for instance) but can’t write longer ones. The fact that they’re light novels may mean that the stories were short on detail and heavy on dialogue - it may be that the reasoning behind certain aspects of the story weren’t explained fully, resulting in plot holes. This alternative theory lets Sigsawa off the hook (despite the Kino anime being made up of more philosophical and less action-orientated self-contained stories, I still can’t believe that he’d fail as spectacularly as this) but still doesn’t explain why the A&L production staff didn’t fill in whatever gaps there were in the original text.
If the novel doesn’t explain how Travas can get two armed men out of a jeep and jump aboard from a moving train, you sure as hell ought to come up with a convincing reason of your own. Similarly, no right-minded adult could possibly accept the idea that more armed men, this time on foot, could keep up with a speeding train. It is utterly unacceptable: no director could be as stupid as to let that get past his office door so I can only assume that the show’s producers thought their audience is stupid, which is worse somehow.
I guess the flames start here
The fact is, the storytelling of this series is so clumsy and sloppy that it has to be down to laziness on the studio’s part. Recap episodes and bad animation can be attributed to scheduling/financial issues or labour outsourcing but bad writing throughout the show’s run smacks of a lack of thought and care at several levels of production; which is a shame when, as I pointed out earlier, the characters are fun to watch and conceptually is marvellous. I can only hope that the novels get a translation (by fans or a Western publisher) so I can enjoy the adventure as its writer intended; in the meantime I’m reduced to wondering what could have been…and taking small comfort in remembering how I watched a REAL trainwreck anime.
Posted on November 29th, 2008 @ 4:47 am
Confess! You watched it to the end because you ENJOYED watching seeing what they’d do wrong next, right? Right?
I’m reminded of Peter Schickele’s introducing the fictional composer, P.D.Q. Bach. “Every once and awhile we turn up a new PDQ Bach manuscript in a monastery or attic, and every time we do we get a feeling of anticipation, a feeling of exultation, a feeling that this new piece can’t possibly be as bad as the last one.
But so far …”
Posted on November 29th, 2008 @ 9:55 am
Well, all I can say (aside from thanking you again for the link to my own thoughts on this show) is congratulations for actually finishing this series! No doubt fifty years from now, the survivors of Allison to Lillia will be gathered in a single place in front of the world’s media, and rewarded handsomely for their bravery and perseverance in the face of terrible anime.
The ending to the series really did take the cake though, it was almost as though they realised that they’d made a complete mess of everything up to this point and figured that if they topped it off with something even more ridiculous then people might forget about episodes involving crashing a plane full of orphans into the sea for political gain. For a brief moment I actually thought they’d gone for a brave ending in killing off a major character… How gullible was I? I must have forgotten what I was watching.
Hannerss last blog post..Ga-Rei -Zero- - Episode 7
Posted on November 30th, 2008 @ 5:13 am
Wow, I totally forgot I finished the show until you jogged my memory with the screenshot of the train XD
I didn’t find the entire series that bad, but honestly speaking I never expected anything above B-grade cheesiness the entire time anyways. That and watching most of the second half raw meant I just sat there listening to the seiyuu that I liked and letting the blatant plot holes and speech fly over my head.
Yet I still managed to feel short spurts of warm fuzziness watching the characters and the somehow ‘homely’ feel of adventure throughout the entire run. Of course while watching the show my brain’s lulled into that sense of not needing to expect much hence losing the need to criticize, but afterwards a blog post like this will jog me out of that state unfortunately. Perhaps as you say, all the missed potential can be salvaged from the written work.
Posted on November 30th, 2008 @ 10:22 pm
@Peter S: yeah, it was the same morbid curiosity for “how bad can this get?” that makes people watch Eurovision..that and the fact that Terry Wogan is LOL. Thanks for bringing up Peter Schickele BTW - a quick Wiki reveals he’s some sort of classical Weird Al Yankovic!
@Hanners: I’ll see you there!
@Issa-san: the warm fuzziness and homely adventure is probably the real reason why I saw it through to the end, to be honest. Fingers crossed for a novel translation, eh?
Posted on December 2nd, 2008 @ 6:17 pm
I admire you for following the series to the end. I’m afraid I gave up about two episodes into the Lillia part of the story — I kept gathering episodes, but then, a couple of weeks ago, I realized I’d never watch them, so I deleted the lot.
It seems like such a shame. Allison was a wonderfully dynamic character, and Will a suitable foil. Too bad they had to be dropped into such dreadful plots.
I picked up the first few novels. One of these days I’ll tackle them. I fear that Keiichi Sigsawa may really only be up to the fablistic short-story form (of Kino’s Journey), since, surely, the anime doesn’t depart too far from the novels? My one ray of hope was an early blog-commenter on some blog who said, after the first story-arc finished, that the anime had butchered the novel.