Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Dropped: Zettai Boei Leviatan--Cute Dragon Girls Do Boring Things

Zettai Boei Leviatan Screenshot 1

Hana Kana as a fairy is easily the best thing in this show. Too bad the rest of it is not as entertaining.

Zettai Boei Leviatan Screenshot 2 Zettai Boei Leviatan Screenshot 3

After watching three episodes of the characters accomplishing nothing aside from beating some badly animated CGI bugs with a thermos of tea, I think it's safe to say that my initial asuumption was wrong. Zettai Boei Leviatan is not a fantasy action magical dragon girl anime, despite what the premise and the OP would have you believe. This is a slice-of-life fantasy show that happens to have magical girl transformations. That's fine. Life in an alternate universe is almost always an interesting topic for disscussion. However, this show is what puts the "almost" in that sentence.

Zettai Boei Leviatan Screenshot 4 Zettai Boei Leviatan Screenshot 5

Everything is just so boring. Like I mentioned in my first impressions post, the show seems to be going out of its way to make its situations more generic, or to diffuse any potential that a scene might've had by going in a weird direction. For example, in the most recent episode, they journey into the belly of a gigantic black dragon to get an axe back. (No word on what the difference between dragon-people and straight-up dragons is supposed to be... The reasoning seems to be "because fantasy.") This is a pretty interesting setup... until one of the girls makes a comment about the dragon's uvula that sounds like it could be a dick joke. And in the second that I wondered whether that was intentional or if my mind was in the gutter, there's a shot of the dragon blushing. I'll let you put two and two together. A few minutes later, the girls debate cooking the dragon's giblets because they are hungry. And so on. Riveting stuff here!

Zettai Boei Leviatan Screenshot 6

To be honest, I'd probably be much more forgiving of this show if it just put a little effort in. Everything about this feels like the staff went, "Meh, somebody will watch it." The animation is sloppy, the bare-bones story is snore inducing, and the characters are a collection of stereotypes with nothing to distinguish them because they're too busy being bland. Even the little bits of fanservice are lazy (ex. "scales" are apparently the same thing as nudity). Zettai Boei Leviatan unfortunately serves as an example that not all "original" anime is good; it can be just as generic and pandering as anything else while forgetting to be entertaining somewhere along the line. I don't think I'll miss it.

Images from Crunchyroll.com.

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