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REVIEWS

• 

  Sirion

  49/100
  A Great Premise And Visual Quality Annihilated By Terrible Storytelling And Characters

  A GREAT PREMISE AND VISUAL QUALITY ANNIHILATED BY TERRIBLE STORYTELLING AND CHARACTERS

  __MINOR SPOILERS MAJOR SPOILERS HIDDEN__

  ---

  STORY

  
  The premise and the first episodes trace the beginning of a political war plot between these 2 factions but too soon, although still sufficient, the general story veers towards the classic space battle shonen,  SPOILER <span class='markdown_spoiler'><span>with the common monstrous enemy that threatens the end of the world.</span></span>
  But the critical point of Moonrise is not so much in this partially disappointing change of direction but rather in the terrible way of telling it. From the first episodes, although with potential, a strange management of the timelines is noted: flashbacks, flashforwards, timeskips, jumps back and forth are too pressing, disconnected and that ruin both the immersion and the initial characterization of the characters. If this situation of time jumps noticeable from the beginning remains a "secondary" flaw until halfway through the series (because the plot has potential, there will be time to stabilize things etc.), from a certain point onwards the narration takes a really bad turn. Too many elements to explain begin to be added, too many characters are not yet well defined, too many plot twists that prove useless in the long run but above all the number of episodes available in which to explain these things begins to decrease. In the first half, although limping, the story is interesting enough to involve the viewer in asking questions and theories, but the excessive "wanting to bite off more than one can chew" progressively removes any emotional involvement until it becomes a series of "I watch and hope that at a certain time someone will explain something". Too much time wasted on useless concepts, and too little time given to well delineating the cornerstones of the story such as Sapientia and the SEEDs, which are almost never talked about despite their key role because the focus must be: kidnapping the strong character, helping and saving friends, stopping deaths etc.
  The series ends with an incalculable amount of unanswered questions, which in a Sci-Fi weigh even more, an ending without head or tail for most of the characters but above all the feeling that the authors wanted to do something that they are not capable of doing.
  <img width='1000' src='https://i.imgur.com/UbyV91E.png'><center>
  ________
  ___</center>CHARACTERS<center>___
  </center>The characters suffer from the terrible storytelling perhaps even more than the actual story. In the first half they do not seem very characterized and remain in stereotypes but they give an idea of ​​a cohesive group (talking about those of the team) and secondary characters at least sympathetic. When chaos takes hold however they also fall into confusion, strange interactions, relationships difficult to understand. As said above, they ignore the key topics of the story such as Sapientia, including the villains, and this leads to never having clear their objectives and to empty their actions of meaning.
  The relationship between Rhys and Jacob is one of the critical points of the series. Their relationship is in constant oscillation between love and hate, especially because of Jacob's incomprehensible actions, and this leads Rhys to often be inconsistent, hateful and impossible to frame.
  A significant interaction of the problems of the series is in the early stages between Zowan and Georg. SPOILER:
  <span class='markdown_spoiler'><span>In the 3rd episode Georg leaves some money to a homeless man, irritating Zowan as if to say that he shouldn't be full of himself of being rich. Zowan then runs away in rage which results in Eric's subsequent death while going to look for her. After the incident Georg and Zowan meet to clear things up but the conversation that would probably have highlighted Zowan's problems regarding the matter is entirely cut and in a short time they all go back to being friends. Result? The argument seems without context and the whole situation seems to be ridiculed in a "Eric died chasing a person angry because a friend gave money to a homeless man", in short, bullshit.</span></span>
  
  Even the villains suffer from very little uniqueness and some of them like Wyse Crown you don't even understand what they're doing there.
  
  Many plot twists related to the characters are weak because no information is ever given about them and it's difficult to empathize with them.
  <img width='1000' src='https://i.imgur.com/OmTbzvN.png'><center>
  ___________
  ___</center>ANIMATION AND MUSIC<center>___
  </center>Qualitatively the series does not disappoint and presents 18 solid episodes but above all very consistent in terms of animation. The fights are dynamic and intense. The excellent success of the action aspect also comes from a satisfying musical management, with Sci-Fi music very in theme and that elevates the key moments of action with emotion. The art direction is also of excellent quality, which is very important in a space setting.
  The CGI is of an excellent level for Wit's standards and is never distracting or annoying to watch.
  Excellent how it does not fall into the error of "overanimating" the 1st episode and then going downhill, you can see that it had an orderly and well-made production. The highlight is definitely Yasuyuki Ebara's episode 10, and I believe it is his first role as ED in his career (apart from episode 3 of the same series). Chapeau
  <video muted loop autoplay controls><source src='https://i.imgur.com/ovDTV2F.mp4' type='video/webm'>Your browser does not support the video tag.</video><center>
  _____________
  ___</center>CONCLUSIONS AND QUESTIONS<center>___
  </center>In closing, Moonrise certainly starts with a great premise but the serious writing flaws affect the developments and characters too heavily, leaving a sense of incompleteness in many elements and the feeling that, managed in a different way, it would have been a story that would have had its say, maybe not to be a pillar of animation but still an enjoyable series. I leave here at the bottom a series of questions and plot points not explained (or that I missed, in which case I invite you to DM me to report the mistakes)
  They are all Major Spoilers so open at your own risk:<center>
  </center>__SPOILER__
  <span class='markdown_spoiler'><span> 1. What exactly is the role of the General. We know that he is part of the Moon Chains, but since when? Recently? For some time? Was he already a spy before he even became General?
  
  2. We know that SEED1 was born for space exploration, and SEED2 as its replacement. But what purpose would all the other SEEDs have? Why did Sapientia develop a deadly jellyfish?
  
  3. Why is Mary the core of the jellyfish? They don't tell us that she was developed in a laboratory so she's a normal human. But did she acquire this power? Was she born with it? If she acquired it (perhaps from a jellyfish in episode 7-8) why her and not the others?
  
  4. Why is Mary's presence so necessary to control the jellyfish if Jacob is the SEED capable of amplifying and blocking the other SEEDs? Was he not a good fit when writing the script? Was another character needed? Question 5 follows
  
  5. Why is it that if Jacob has this power, is the protagonist and we have his POV for almost the entire series, it seems like the entire story revolves around Mary?
  
  6. Why is SEED3 in a hidden cave who knows where and Rhys seems to be the only one who knows of its existence and location in the entire Earth army?
  
  7. Why is it that if Sapientia has developed all the SEEDs or knows practically everything about everyone, it gets fooled like an idiot by Phil who introduces the butterfly SEED at the end of the series? Especially when he uses it dozens of times throughout the anime
  
  8. Rhys knocks out Duval and Zowan in one of the last episodes to be able to hack SEED3 without them getting in her way (who said they would get in her way?) but to do that she had to get out of the cell. How exactly did Georg plan to get her out on his own?
  
  9. Why did they have to put that shitty ending where Phil sends the request to Jacob on Pokemon Go after dying? Did they have to do the mysterious nonsense ending?
  
  10. Rhys hesitates and gives up shooting Mary at the end (before being forced by Sapientia). But why was she emptying his magazines on her 1 minute before? And why does Jacob stand by and watch while she shoots Mary when he has all the time in the world and the cloak of speed to stop her?
  
  11. Why does Jacob hide throughout the series that he knows Phil from his companions even in situations where it wouldn't cause any problems for anyone?
  
  12. (One of those where I'm most doubtful I missed something) In the end, who was the mole in their team, that they mentioned in the episode of Inanna's illness? I don't think they've talked about it since then, as if it wasn't important anymore.</span></span>
  
  _P.S. I am not a native English speaker, so I apologize for any mistakes_
  <img width='1000' src='https://i.imgur.com/wkLLUnc.png'>~~~

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• 

  CosmicCuune

  50/100
  A perfect example of wasted potential due to bad writing.

  This show is extremely annoying because it constantly invokes the trope of characters not communicating key information to create conflict. In fact they constantly withhold information from the audience, and only the audience, when all the characters involved know what's going on.
  I kept on watching because I wanna know what's going on but guess what, they simply don't tell you all way till the end. The more I watched the more questions I had, and then the show was over, leaving me frustrated and wishing I never watched. I liked the characters and wanted to know how they would react to information not communicated to them but guess what, they never found out either, or at least not on-screen.

  I love to scrutinize si-fi settings and this show seems like it wants to be somewhat hard si-fi but utterly fails at it. As other reviews have pointed out for example, they have programmable matter that can transform into weapons but they mostly just transform into normal guns that shoot normal bullets, so why even bother with this setting, it doesn't seem to serve any purpose in the story compared to a normal gun holster, but it's more stupid than that. For they specifically mention in the show that mass is conserved when it comes to this programmable matter, ok so I guess bullets cost them this ultra high-tech material which is dumb enough but wait till you hear this, THEY DISCARD SPENT MAGAZINES! Yep, it's empty so might as well toss it on the ground.

  Ok first of all, if you have programmable matter why does the gun even use magazines in the first place? Surely bullets can be supplied without a magazine or any external ports because it's programmable matter!? Secondly why not you know, keep the fucking magazine so you can turn its mass into more bullets?

  They even get a space ship that's supposedly entirely made of this programmable matter and can transform into other vehicles at will, which sounds really cool and has amazing potential for some action scenes right? Guess what for basically the entire show it's just a normal armored bus that drives the cast around. What even is the point of this si-fi super material gimmick?

  Speaking of vehicles, this show has some of the worst looking space ship designs ever put to anime, they don't even look like they belong in the show because the 2D animation is good, even great at times but we get these.... extremely amateurish 3D models of what are supposed to be space ships, it's just awful.

  Believe it or not the actual story is not predictable at all, not in any detail, because nobody would predict things like two characters with a serious misunderstanding, who have hours and days together, but somehow they don't communicate what their misunderstanding is, so the problem does not get resolved, and they keep fighting the next time they meet. You might then think ok maybe the broad strokes are more predictable then? Well no because one of the biggest threats in the story showing up half way into the show, is never explained in any way. The show is over and I'm still not sure what's that about. The only predictable thing about this story, is you can easily tell who's actually the bad guy all along just by reading the synopsis, because other things that happen in the show are either out right unexplained, or because two characters won't communicate key information for no reason at all, causing a misunderstanding.

  
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• 

  TheAnimeBingeWatcher

  50/100
  Tow Ubukata is the most interesting bad writer in the anime industry.

  Tow Ubukata is probably the most interesting bad writer working in the anime industry today.

  If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, well, it is. You can accuse Ubukata of many things, from overuse of Proper Noun Macguffins to contrived asspulls to character motivations that flip and flop on a dime (and also, you know, domestic violence that one time). One thing you can't accuse him of, though? Being boring. I don't think I've watched a show he's written that's been anything less than magnetic, even as it trips over itself and ruins its best ideas with shoddy craftsmanship. Who else would follow up Psycho-Pass by saying, "Okay, but what if the Sybil System could judge itself and what kind of plot would make that happen?" Or decide the best idea for a RWBY spinoff was trying to make its awful racism subplot actually work? Or whatever the hell was going on in Bye Bye Earth? The dude's work just has ambition. And I'll take that kind of messy. overconfident face-planting over a thousand bargain-bin isekai any day of the week.

  By those standards, Moonrise is probably the most "normal" anime Ubukata's been involved with for a while. You won't find any of Bye Bye Earth's sheer surreal mindfuckery here, nor the awkward clash of an already existing IP forced into another writer's style. It's just a straightforward space opera about Politics and War and Classism and all those good things, with all the flashy animation Netflix and Studio WIT can afford. And as such, it's probably the purest example of Ubukata's strengths and weaknesses as a writer I've seen. Big ideas, awful pacing, information presented in all sorts of confusing and out-of-order ways, surprisingly clear-headed in the themes it's exploring even as its convoluted plotting makes it hard to care. It's a big dumb popcorn spectacle that works when it's showing off the animators' sheer talent and falls flat the more plot threads it piles on. And honestly? I can't be too mad about that.

  So here's the premise: it's the future, and humanity has finally started colonizing the moon with the increased ease of space travel. Unfortunately, we've also delegated most of our species' desicion-making process to an omniscient AI called Sapienta, and it becomes clear pretty quickly that its "objective" decisions made for the supposed good of mankind have no issue letting huge chunks of that same mankind suffer and die for "the needs of the many." Thus, the moon's population has been suffering under oppression for many long years, stricken with poverty and fascism and forced control from an unfeeling machine program that sees their misery as a dispassionate side effect of running an efficient interstellar society. Which means it's time for the people of the moon to rise up (Eh? Get it? Cause it's the name of the- yeah, you get it), under the leadership of the amusingly named Bob Skylum, and start a revolution for freedom from Sapienta's tyranny.

  Our protagonist, however, isn't involved with any of that. At least at first. Jack Shadow's down on earth, after all, and he's living a spoiled rich kid's dream life, getting wasted and gambling his days away with no sense of greater purpose. But then the moon's rebellion breaks out, and the collateral damage from the destruction of a giant space elevator includes Jack's adoptive parents, his home, and any semblance of the life he once knew. On top of that, a mysterious message makes it seem like one of his very old friends is part of the Moonrise movement... and if that's true, then this revolution is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone suspected. So Jack joins the army- along with some of his rich friends and the girl he refuses to commit to a proper relationship with- to track down who's behind this mess and get some good old-fashioned revenge. Only, of course, it turns out things are even more complicated than they expected, and not just because of how convoluted the storytelling gets.

  But make no mistake, the storytelling IS convoluted, and Moonrise's fatal flaw is just how bad it is at communicating information clearly. Like, let me run you down the first few episodes. After a pretty straightforward episode 1, episode 2 spends half its time on an extended flashback to Jack's life before meeting his adoptive family, which is a huge lore dump with big implications for the nature of the war... but doesn't actually tell us why this lore stuff matters until many episodes later. And then episode 3 has a big timeskip past Jack and his friends training to jump right into their time fighting in the army, expect then episode 4 flashes back to their time training so it can try and make you feel sad about a guy who just died, expect we don't even see who died until the flashback ends and we return to after the timeskip halfway through the episode.

  Woof.

  Thankfully, the show is mostly linear from there and never hits you with a time-jumping wombo combo like that again. But that's a really dumb, needlessly confusing way to structure the beginning of a story. It makes you grope around in the dark for information you feel like you're supposed to have about characters' motivation and worldbuilding, but that information only arrives after the moment it would've been emotionally satisfying. And that, sadly, holds true throughout Moonrise. Time and again this show holds critical pieces of information out of reach, cheaply trying to build suspense by just not telling you what the characters are trying to do or how much you should expect them to know. But when you don't tell the audience basically anything, it doesn't just make it hard to understand what's happening until after the fact, it makes it hard to care. Why should I care about any of these twists if I wasn't given the necessary context to understand what aspects of this world or story they're even twisting in the first place?

  And that's especially bad for Moonrise, because this is NOT an easy-to-follow plot even laid out straightforwardly. It's got artificial life-forms, giant sentient amoebas, robot hiveminds, and all sorts of wild sci-fi nonsense complicating its war narrative. It all basically shakes out once you have the full picture of what's going on, but trying to understand it while you're neck-deep in it makes you feel like your head's spinning. This also means the characters get pretty lost as well; for all the time I spent with Jack and his crew, I could tell you very little about any of them beyond surface details. Who's more on Earth's side? Who's more sympathetic to the moon? Why? How do they all relate to each other? I don't know, and I'm not sure Moonrise does either. Jack especially feels stuck between two different characters Ubukata wanted him to be; a sheltered rich brat forced to confront the harsh reality his privilege blinded him to, or a furious revenge-seeker who risks destroying himself in his quest for blood. At times he's one, at times he's the other, and never do they feel like parts of the same person. Which, considering he's our main character? Not great!

  Thankfully, what IS great is the spectacle of it all. Director Masashi Koizuka clearly relished the chance to spread his wings after carrying Attack on Titan for so long, and he makes this space opera as over-the-top operatic as possible. The swooping camera, the hyper-dramatic lighting, the scores and scores of spaceships, the anti-grav capes that let the hand-to-hand combat feel just as kinetic and propulsive as the best of AOT, it's all breathtaking. Episode 3 in particular is nothing but wall-to-wall action, and I doubt a single other episode this year will match it for sheer sakuga. I normally shrink from the "turn your brain off" defense- if it's so dumb you need to stop thinking to enjoy it, then it's not worth spending time on- but god damn if I wasn't happy to turn my brain off and holler like a madman whenever the fighting kicked up. Give this team an actual coherent script to work with and there's nothing they won't be able to accomplish!

  Ultimately, I had fun with Moonrise, and I even appreciated its perspective at points. At its best, this show is very sympathetic toward the plight of the oppressed, and it understands the moral necessity of standing up to authoritarianism even when it comes with a cost. But Ubukata's writing just isn't coherent enough for those themes to be more than window dressing, a thin layer over a mess of hodgepodge tropes and awful characterization (I didn't even mention the shitty love triangle, because of course there's a shitty love triangle). It's a show that's fun to watch when it's firing on all cylinders, but also one that won't leave any lasting impression a week after you've finished. Does that make it the worst thing in the world? Nope. But Ubukata is clearly trying to create works of art that are worth sticking around, and I just hope one day he refines his craft enough to make that a reality. Because I would definitely prefer to live in a world where Moonrise ended up the next Gundam, or Legend of the Galactic Heroes, instead of a mostly enjoyable piece of junky, disposable Content(tm).

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