I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so disappointed in an anime as I was with the last Kara no Kyokai. Not because Murder Speculation Part II was bad — it was very good. But it seemed to me to be the weakest installment in the series. Quick thoughts:

• This is Kara no Kyokai on drugs, and the depiction of drugs in this movie is… unrealistic. Even to someone such as myself who’s never done anything more illicit than a glass of wine.
• I understand than Mikiya Kokutō is supposed to be good at figuring stuff out, but damn, that guy must have seven dots of investigation on his character sheet. He manages to figure out who the serial killer is, find where said killer is living, locate a hidden cargo container of mary jane; and the only investigating we see him do on screen is talk to a single drug dealer.
• Paradoxically, he’s sort of dumb. There’s a great deal of foreshadowing in this film that something bad is going to happen to him. And he’s warned, explicitly, by pretty much everyone with over a dozen lines of dialog in this show, that if he keeps going on in his investigation, no good will come of it. And, sure enough, something bad happens.
• Sever spoiler in Al-Bhed, Decode only after watching: Ra’c cdyppat eh dra pnyeh! Lmaynmo, ra’c cdyppat eh dra pnyeh vnus ruf taab dra gheva kuac eh, oad cusaruf ra ZICD mucac yh aoa yd dra aht? What the hell is up with that?
• And the ending… could not be more cliche if it tried.

Mind you, the action sequences are good, the art is as solid as ever, Mystic Eyes of Death Perception are an even more amazing super power, and the villain is interesting if creepy. But compared to any of the other movies, it’s a good step or two below.

So, I’ve seen two more episodes of Bantorra since the last time I posted. Thoughts:

• Hamyuts Meseta is the best villain ever. And despite the over-the-top evil-crazy of the Church of Drowning in God’s Grace, she is the villain. Also, at this point, it’s clear that the two are not unrelated.
• This show is so someone’s RPG campaign gone awry.

Completely unrelated: Watched the first half of the Statos 4 OVA. I’m not sure I want to see the TV series based on the the production quality, but is kind of “so bad it’s good.”

I don’t typically watch anime as it comes out, because I have a backlog of some hundreds of DVDs to watch, several online series, some thousands of episodes. Nonetheless, one the shows being released on Crunchyroll, The Book of Bantorra, definitely has my attention. First of all, the series will make good source material for an Exalted session — the characters are over the top. Even more amazing is the plot twists, which come at a steady pace. Looking forward to the next episode tomorrow.

Quick note: Google just had an announcement regarding their 2009 year-end zeitgeist. Coming in at #8 on the entertainment list: “anime online” — it’s known that Google at least occasionally uses the level of search queries for its own strategic planning, and YouTube recently announced automatic translation of captioned videos. Google has very good, although far from human, translation capabilities; this is just SPECULATION, but tossing anime onto Youtube with captions and letting big G handle “localizing” it into the languages of the world would be a cheap if imperfect way of getting a global audience for any show — the cost would consist of the wages of a single person to convert the script into the right format and clean it up a bit (maybe not even that with the right software in the future), far less than even a single human translator for a single language. This is something that other companies, like Hulu and Crunchyroll, cannot do as easily, so it might be something that will show up in time.

The Zeitgeist list is at http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/press/zeitgeist2009/index.html