Now where was this Geno Studio all this time? Granted, their work on the excellent Golden Kamuy is no slouch, but the animation here, which is consistently stellar, is some of, if not their current, best work, and I especially love the small details. This feels like a Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli film in a lot of ways - from it's aesthetic to it's themes to even the film grain and somewhat shaky camera that brings to mind old cell animation. It's a visual feast, and while the anthro lead character isn't gonna do it for everybody I like her design quite a bit and she's a really fun character.
It also helps that it doesn't go the easy ending here, implying that it's gonna be the long haul - the dark side is seductive and this episode shows how powerful that seduction can actually be. And yet another killer lightsaber design to boot, between this and The Village Bride I am clamoring for a katana esqe blade in canon that isn't the Darksaber. Excellent.
Totally ninja...really plucked at my heart strings. Reminiscent of my long hours with Naruto: Shippûden.
I was worried at first when I saw, "the furry with big eyes," but that knee jerk, and racist, response quickly abated as I was drawn into her Dickensian story of strife, and compassion (evidenced first by her friendship with a droid).
The irreconcilable split between Sisters was tragic (there was no vice or impurity in the Family members which caused their separation, and it evoked a deep sympathy in me).
I wish this one was a movie. There is a lot here and the runtime is hamstringing the this story as it doesn't have the time to really dive into depths of its questioning of evil.
Gorgeous animation, stunning action, and I can respect how it doesn’t go for an easy ending, but the constraints of time are really felt in this one. It can’t sell the bond of family between these characters enough to really help it land.
The first episode in this frankly, fantastic, series, that just didn't work for me at all. Didn't enjoy the style, or the furry, or the rushed story. The most interesting part of the world - the Empire ravaging the planet for resources - was glossed over far too quickly. A shame, as the rest of the series has really been stellar.
You know, these Japan planets would work just fine in canon, as Filoni's shows have had at least two of them before... uh, the furry less so...
It was maybe one of the weakest episodes in regards to story and voice-acting, but visually it was easily the one that looked the most like something from a full-length animated movie. The cinematography was great and the color, lighting, and grain made it feel very organic and beautiful like something shot on film instead of digital.
This one just didn’t quite fit together. Some parts were nice but the whole was just not great
A traditional Japanese family adopting an alien rabbit girl gives me warm, fuzzy feeling inside, and subsequently, it breaks my heart when family drama eventually arises.
But as much as I like the story, this feels very rushed. Not in terms of animation or voice acting (both of which are superb), but in the story beats. It feels like they condensed an entire season of anime into nineteen minutes. It's a good story, but there's too much of it to fit in one episode.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-09-23T17:18:06Z
[6.0/10] Easily my least favorite of the show so far. This one had the most conventional designs, with giant eyes and busy looks abounding. It also had the sort of constantly-breathless, half-shouted approach to the line-reads throughout that took me out of the moment emotionally rather than drawing me in. Plus the dialogue itself was pretty bad, with characters announcing their emotional states or motivations or exposition without any sense of naturalness to the conversations.
What’s frustrating about that is that the bones of this one are good! The idea of a mixed family, where the Father supports the Rebellion, one daughter supports the Empire, and the other daughter just wants to keep her family together is a cool idea. The political disagreements made personal is a good vein to follow (something Star Wars Resistance did well, of all shows), and the stakes are obvious when it’s an intra-family dispute.
But the characters are just so simultaneously flat and over-the-top that the good ideas are wasted. Personalities change on a dime and we hop across years in an instant, with major plot developments happening just as quickly. That’s a little inevitable for big stories told across nineteen minutes or so, but it’s done particularly clumsily here.
The visuals don’t have much to recommend them either. There’s some superb backgrounds and sense of place for the bucolic planet being harvested by the Empire, but the actual character movements are stilted and stuttery, and even the big climactic lightsaber fight lacks a certain oomph.
Overall, this is the clear lowlight of the bunch thus far, and hopefully it’s an outlier in that regard.