Click pictures to enlarge them. Spoilers ahead so please be cautious. ;;; uh... most of the episode was BGM + past of Haru without any dialogues. They just go through the childhood memories to teaming up with Kushima. There's no real story here, other..글 전체보기
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At last! After moaning and complaining my way through the last few episodes of Real Drive due to them constituting nothing more than filler, we finally have something to get our teeth into with episode nine of the series.Although this show really does seem to enjoy talking unintelligible jargon with the best of them at times, the crux of the episode was an upgrade to The Metal which went horribly wrong for reasons unknown. Thanks to some quick-thinking by Souta's father, who happens to be in charge of such upgrades and work on the software that powers The Metal, a complete system failure is prevented, but even the brief outage caused by his actions brings chaos to all and sundry, and causes those at the top to ask for him to be used as a fall guy.On a technical level, this episode finally poses some of the interesting kinds of questions that I've been hoping for from this series since the very start. For starters, there's the concept of a future world so totally reliant on the Internet (or a variant of it), that even a brief outage would cause billions in lost income and throw the entire world into complete and utter chaos for its duration. It's an important lesson that so often gets forgotten, that an over-reliance on technology (no matter how supposedly fail-safe) can be a dangerous thing. Also mentioned briefly is the question of what should come first in such a connected world - The safety of the populace, or the ethos and principles of that network. It's the kind of question that gets brought up frequently even know with talk of filtering or censoring the Internet, so again it's a very intriguing point to consider.Away from that, the introduction of Souta and Minamo's father brings all of their family life into sharp relief - Little is really explained about anything, but the tension between Souta and his father and particular is palpable, adding another more personal dimension to this episode at least, and I'm sure it won't simply be left at that.While this may not have been a hugely exciting episode for most, I was personally thrilled at the thought-provoking nature of it, with the episode managing to bring forth these interesting points for consideration without ever ramming a particular opinion down your throat or becoming preachy - The concepts are simply floated out there to be thought about or discarded as you wish. The animation for this particular episode was also breath-takingly detailed, which again added a great deal to the realisation of this future world. In short, episodes like this make me glad I perservered with Real Drive - Give me more of the same please!
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I've been quite critical of the last couple of episodes of Real Drive, with the series drifting away from Haru's story and the intriguing possibilities of the show to instead deal with designer sunglasses and an Internet for dogs - Hardly the kind of high intellectual drama you'd expect from a Masamune Shirow affair.Unfortunately, episode eight doesn't really get us back to what I would consider the point of the series, although it does at least prove to be a little more entertaining, offering up a future vision of the ghost stories which are not far shy of an anime cliché of their own. Of course, the ghosts of Real Drive aren't in fact ghosts at all - In reality, they're little more than a temporary Internet file that hasn't been deleted. While I got a little kick out of this episode bringing the concept of distributed computing (a la SETI and Folding@Home) into the world of the Metal in a new and predictably capitalist way, that was only a very thin veneer over what was otherwise a slightly shallow episode - Entertaining enough, certainly, but once again a long way short of some of the standards set earlier in the series, leaving it once again to find the 'filler' stamp liberally applied to its proverbial forehead.If I may table a suggestion for a future episode of this series, I think it would be wise to see Haru diving into the mind of the script writers, to see if he can find where all the decent plots have gone. Sure, this modern ghost story gets marked up compared to episodes about sunglasses and dogs online, but that's hardly a resounding endorsement of a series that could (and should) offer so, so much more.
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And that one thing is: DOG MOE. But not just ANY old dog. A dog IN A SHERLOCK HOLMES HAT. My thoughts exactly, Nyamo. He can even take a bath! NINJA DOG! Kid tested, Nyamo approved! So, yeah, episode 7 of Real Drive (I’ve taken to referring to it as Real Nyamo with my friends, if only because Nyamo is awesome) was [...]
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Click pictures to enlarge them. Spoilers ahead so please be cautious. Blind beauty eh? Another decent episode. Quite an interesting point of view. I never thought getting the sight back would work negatively, but I guess it is possible that one might f..글 전체보기
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Click pictures to enlarge them. Spoilers ahead so please be cautious. Not as good as pervious episodes, but not that bad either. I felt that Kushima was rather cold towards Ichinose, even considering the reason behind it. Just because he stopped playin..글 전체보기
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So, I got the chance to get a very poor low resolution version of Telepathy Shoujo Ran. Some people who have a personal encounter with me knows that I can tolerate a series without much graphical excellence. In fact, some series with great graphics has never caught my attention: Real Drive being one of the [...]
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I had once asked where all the fat chicks are in anime, and it turns out that someone has answered my prayers inquiry. It turns out they’re all in a show created by Shirow Masamune, Real Drive. *Ahem* Their waists are still a bit tapered, but their faces, waists, and thighs are all greater than average for [...]
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We dwell on Minamo in this episode as we see her past in Australia, her assignment to look after Haru and her rollerblading power-saving exploits! She can also appear to “hear” the Metal, otherwise this show is just making shit up as it goes along. So I’m massively behind on everything at the moment, and [...]
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It always makes life interesting when an anime series exceeds or otherwise confounds my expectations, but what the Hell was this?! An episode of Real Drive where the client is a dog, only he's not a dog but a human in a dog's body, and there are lots of dogs and they have cyberbrains and they all connect to a special dog Metal with some kind of dog paradise and the guy wants to merge his conscience with a dog because he likes them?! I'm sorry, I think I need to go and lay down in a darkened room for a bit....Okay, that's better. Yes, episode seven of Real Drive lets us in on the shocking news that in this series world there is an Internet for dogs. Yes, dogs. Said dogs also have some kind of nano machine-controlled cyberbrain which gives them basic language skills, but apparently this isn't enough for some dog owners, who feel that the whole master/servant relationship between human and dog is all wrong, and that the only way to correct this imbalance is for the owner to merge with his dog inside the Metal to become one.Leaving aside the rather ridiculous premise of this episode, the thought of humans merging minds with their pets and the way it was described by the focus of this episode just plain creeped me out. I mean, I love animals as much as the next person, but going to that kind of extreme seems a little... wrong.After an intriguing first few episodes, I have to confess - I'm disappointed by these last few episodes of Real Drive. Filler or not, there are myriad fascinating topics that could be discussed and brought to life by the world depicted in this series, so why is it limiting itself to overly sentimental episodes about book reports and cutesy (yet still played with a poker face by the script writers) stories about a dog Metal? Perhaps I've simply been expecting too much from the series, but for something created by Masamune Shirow the recent choices of subject matter have seemed rather flippant and a far cry from the kind of deep subjects we've seen from Ghost in the Shell and Ghost Hound. So, come on guys, enough of the nonsense, let's get back to some semblance of a real and eventful storyline.
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