Hóseki no kuni

This TV show has a very novel and engaging theme, excellent CG animation that takes your breath away during the action sequences, beautifully fitting atmospheric soundtrack and a story full of mystery. It sounds exactly like the anime you have been waiting for like a dog begging for chicken, and it aims high. I would have been perfectly happy with it, but what can I say – the more polished the audiovisual experience, the more appalling the screenplay. Also, along with it the incredibly badly written characters. led by a whiny, incompetent main heroine, whom I would humbly venture to nominate as one of the most irritating and poorly written anime characters of all time, they behave, pardon my French, as if they had had a lobotomy, and their behavior and statements often have little to no internal logic. What was obviously meant as the heroine’s character development is in fact no smooth evolution, but merely a 180-degree change in behavior with the snap of the main screenwriter's fingers; it comes completely out of the blue from episode to episode and feels completely implausible. The main heroine’s original goal disappears after a few episodes, and instead she keeps engaging in completely idiotic bullshit, which does not seem to bother any of the other characters, and just when it looks like there is about to be some kind of plot twist, the last episode concludes the season without any sort of catharsis. So basically, almost nothing is achieved in those 12 episodes. If you take the whole anime as some eye-candy companion to the original manga, then there is nothing to worry about in terms of rating this, but woe betide you if you try to think more deeply about the plot, the rules of that world, and try to find any logic in the characters' behavior. As much as I hate to admit it, there is a total victory of form over content here and I must award a sad 3 stars. This is a parallel situation to the anime K Project a few years ago and its hugely wasted potential to become one of the best anime of recent years. What a shame. (28.07.2019)