Tag: Greg Johnson

[EXPRESSO] Pacific Rim: The Black (Season Two) (2022) | Kaiju Kult

Well, look’s who back, a series that i honestly even forgot existed, but they did announced this second (and final) season, guess that branding helped.

So yeah, while i didn’t hate the first season, Pacific Rim The Black was kinda the perfect example of “Netflix anime”, as in, it looks like anime, it’s produced by an anime company and japanese directors, but you could tell it’s written by non-japanese staff.

Which isn’t necessarily an issue, but you just can tell right away and it creates this slight disconnect, and due to that once again it’s hard to say for whom exactly this is made for exactly, given it’s still made in okayish but still janky 3D CG (and the specific “3D CG anime jank” of Polygon Pictures output), which is kinda offputting for most of the self-proclaimed “anime enthusiasts”.

But on the flipside, it’s not that bad, it’s honestly alright, it’s entertaining enough and this one picks from the point where the first season started having some interesting worldbuilding and character development, and manages to make the plot have some purpose (though it kinda has to, since this is the final season), introducing a death cult of Kaiju worshippers.

It’s an actual improvement over the first season, the writing it’s still nothing impressive, but it’s better, though despite being just another 7 episodes, i did wonder if it was ever supposed to be longer, as some resolutions and events happen very quickly, almost abruptly so.

Again, it’s alright, but as the idea of anime series based on Pacific Rim makes a lot of sense if you think about it, it kinda let you wish it had better animation and a slightly longer lenght.

Still, for a spin-off “western-ish anime” series that didn’t need to exist in the first place… it’s decent.

[EXPRESSO] Pacific Rim: The Black (Season One) (2021) | Netflix Kaijus

For whatever reason, Netflix perseveres in commissioning 3D CG anime based on popular franchises, despite them often not looking good and anime fans notorious knee-jerk reactions of disgust towards 3D CG anime.

So while we wait for Godzilla Singularity Point (which looks notably better), let’s give Pacific Rim: The Black a shot, because Legendary really wants to make this one a franchise. This specific entry (written by Greg Johnson and Craig Kyle but co-directed by Masayuki Uemoto, Susumu Sugai and Takeshi Iwata) follows a couple of siblings that find a Jaeger called Atlas Destroyer and go on a journey with it, after their parents never came back and kaijus destroyed Australia.

And you know what, an anime series spin-off is a shoe-in for Pacific Rim, but once i saw the PV, i realized why most people won’t bother… and yes, it’s animated by Polygon Pictures, which means the robots and monsters look fairly good, but the animation for the people – sporting nicely drawn character models – also has this stiff, uncanny, robotic feel to it. And this honestly doesn’t look much better than the Blame movie or the Godzilla anime trilogy Polygon Pictures also made for Netflix, while this style of “3D anime” has vastly improved in quality over the last few years.

Shame because the giant mecha battles against monsters look good and are fun, but the humans characters or the plot surrounding them aren’t that interesting, and sometimes their animation is just crap. The script, while unremarkable, tries to add something new to to the Pacific Rim universe, but it’s kinda of half baked attempt as it starts getting better only at the very end of this very short first season. Overall, it’s… alright.

A second season has already been greenlit… but i still wonder for whom exactly.