Rewrite: Coulda used more rewriting

To this day, I'm a huge fan of Kanon and Clannad, but none of the other Key stuff quite captured the magic the same way those two did. Little Busters was a massive letdown; it got more boring and muddled as it progressed, its plots becoming more bizarre and outrageous, and more badly paced, with every arc. Refrain was so rushed, so character breaking, and so compulsive about keeping secrets that I almost didn't finish it; when I did finish it, the payoff was not in any way worth it. Angel Beats and Charlotte were closer to the mark; they both also had pacing problems and other bits of bad writing, but at least the characters were likable (actually, Yuu wasn't that likable, but he was at least unique), and the plots, while a little rushed, avoided the bizarre, character breaking awfulness of Little Busters.

I was looking forward a little to Rewrite. The problems with Little Busters, present to a lesser extent in Angel Beats and Charlotte, were writing problems, probably coming from Jun Maeda's personal weaknesses as a writer. But the Rewrite visual novel wasn't written by Jun Maeda; it was written by a team that included Higurashi's Ryukishi07 and Romeo Tanaka of Yume Miru Kusuri and Jinrui wa Suitaishimashita. The one thing that Higurashi, Yume Miru Kusuri, and Jinrui wa Suitaishimashita have in common is good writing. Perhaps not writing with the same magic as Jun Maeda's work, but certainly writing that avoided many of the problems in Jun Maeda's work, such as bad pacing and the introduction of characters and plot elements that never go anywhere. Plus, the art I'd seen had an interesting fantasy look to it that set it apart from the other Key works.

And, to be honest, Rewrite could still turn it around with its writing. I was ready to write it off by around the 20-minute mark of the 45-minute premiere, but it managed to turn things around a little. The early parts of the episode have a real problem with telling instead of showing. For the first 25 minutes or so, the main character, Kotarou, has voice-over narration where he explains everything, just like the boring info dump prologue narration in a visual novel, that was mocked in the first episode of Saekano. A taciturn woman comes over and asks Kotarou to find her daughter, and off he goes—"This is my neighbor. She's rich. Her daughter is my childhood friend Kotori. She wouldn't even be talking to a pleb like me if I weren't friends with her daughter. Kotori, her daughter, who is also my childhood friend, frequently needs to be brought back by me when she falls asleep in the forest, where I'm now going to find Kotori, my childhood friend and the daughter of this rich woman who is my neighbor and the mother of my childhood friend Kotori." Characters will just suddenly appear out of nowhere and start talking, like in a visual novel. Even the music, which is decent if not always well placed, is used just like in a visual novel: it just plays continuously over a scene, without regard to the mood or whether someone is talking. This is all incredibly unnecessary. Pretty much everything Kotarou says in the voice-over is stuff that I could have easily guessed from actually watching the damn show, and anything else was irrelevant and could have been mentioned later, when it actually matters, or been left to be inferred.

So far it looks like the show is gearing up to be a supernatural adventure with moe and comedy moments, a lot like Kyoukai no Kanata. Kyoukai no Kanata had massive plot problems, but the characters were generally good, the art and animation were amazing, and the director knew how to create atmosphere. Rewrite has so far failed at all of those things. It pawns off the creepy mystery that should result from Kotarou waking up to find a girl sucking his blood for a scene of loud yelling and running into force fields. The darkened school hallways want to be the tense, otherworldly hallways where Mai and Yuuichi fought invisible demons in Kanon, but the yelling, running, misplaced comedy, and total crapfest of the animation ruin it. If not for the very moe art style, you'd swear it was made sometime during 2001, what with all the pans over still frames, awkward movements, characters off model, stick figure faces, and awful, awful CG. The last time I saw CG this bad was Silent Mobius; not even Love Live had such badly done CG. In one scene, heroine Chihaya, drawn in 2D, is riding her bicycle away from Kotarou along a curving path done in 3D, and the juxtaposition is so unnatural that it wouldn't look out of place in Inferno Cop. Chihaya doesn't curve so much as momentarily blink out of existence, then reappear riding in another direction.

The art style in the daytime scenes actually looks decent, despite the crappy animation. They have sort of a sun-bleached green and white color scheme, lots of light tones and low saturation pastels. The art style in the nighttime scenes is basically garbage; brainlessly purple-tinted, it wants to be Kyoukai no Kanata or Shakugan no Shana or even Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, and almost is in its better moments, but ultimately falls apart. The character designs are decent, though nothing groundbreaking; they look very much like visual novel characters. Itaru Hinoue was the art director and sole character designer for the visual novel. Her style has evolved a lot, and not always for the better. The Rewrite designs have a few of Hinoue's signature flourishes (Kotori's sunflower hair ornament, for example, and the white, floaty, trumpet-sleeved, nightgown-like school uniforms), but they ultimately look more like Hinoue interpreting designs by Na-Ga than Hinoue originals, and they've become a lot more generic compared to the Clannad characters.

Unfortunately, even the characters are a disappointment so far, which is really shocking to me coming from a team headed by Romeo Tanaka and including Ryukishi07. (The third writer, Yuuto Tonokawa, was a writer on Little Busters, so if it were just him I wouldn't be so shocked.) Kotarou lacks any definition as a main character. Sometimes he's wacky, sometimes he's competent, sometimes he screams a lot, sometimes he still screams a lot, sometimes he's an idiot, sometimes he's canny. Chihaya, who has had the most scenes so far of all the heroines, is poorly realized and inconsistent; in her first scene she's a ditz, in her second scene she's sort of a tsundere, and in her third scene she's suddenly best friends with Kotarou and Kotori. (The last one might have a reasonable explanation in the story, though.) Also, her and Kotarou's first meet was an awful cliched accidental panty flash where Kotarou remarks on the pattern he sees on them thus making a terrible first impression and getting her mad. Kotori seems to be the mischievous one; the other heroines have only had one short scene each, so we hardly know anything about them except what Kotarou tells us in the voiceover narration. Trying to introduce all the heroines and also start the main plot, even in a 45-minute episode, was probably a huge mistake, and this one we can blame at least partially on the anime writers, though I'd like to mention that both of the Fate/Stay Night anime, which are based on the most ridiculously long-winded and bloated source material this side of Moby Dick, still manage to have decently paced first episodes that don't cram in pointless five-minute appearances by five main characters and then decide it's time to start the plot.

I was extremely disappointed in Rewrite. I hope the writing and characters do get better; the plot summary on Wikipedia sounds vaguely interesting. But I don't know if I have the stamina to get through it. And the crappy animation (geez is it awful) probably isn't getting any better until the Blu-Ray release. Since there are quite a few shows I'm interested in following this season (Amanchu!, Sweetness and Lightning, Orange) and quite a few more from previous seasons that I'm catching up on (Gochiusa Season 2, Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Himouto! Umaru-chan), I don't think I have time for Rewrite, especially if it's going to turn into another debacle like Little Busters.