What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

I just binged through all of Lookism. I guess it's technically not anime since it's a Korean production, but it's close enough.

It's another title that I ended up watching in spite of it not being terribly good as a whole. But what it does well, I think it does pretty spectacularly well. And I'll admit that one of the major reasons why I wanted to watch it was because it was done by Studio Mir, and I have been thinking for the past few years that Korea was long overdue to make their own domestic animated series to get international attention (outside of shows meant for young children, that is). Especially with those Crunchyroll produced adaptations of Webtoons properties which were produced by Japanese studios.

The production on this show is really fantastic. The animation looks pretty great, if a bit choppy, but the quality of the art doesn't ever feel off. When they want to draw someone to look especially nice, they look absolutely gorgeous, with lots of attention to shading and texture. They do use 3D animation on some of the characters and in most episodes it looks utterly fantastic; most of the time it really feels like they're still hand-drawn. The 3D backgrounds also look amazing; it's sometimes disorienting when they move the viewpoint on them because they do such a good job of looking like matte paintings.

The music is also really good throughout; it does do a good job of staying in the background but there's always these nice little touches that make them stand out a little if you listen for them. And while it's not quite as techinically impressive or as creative as you'd see in most anime productions, I really love the opening sequence. It turns out that rotoscoped dancing is always visually interesting, and all of the basics like color choice and composition are done so well that it has a timeless sense of quality. And finally, the jokes almost always hit hard. Timings are perfect; there are cartoon-like embellishments, and they are also spread relatively thin since the show is supposed to be a melodrama.

And now for the bad parts. Perhaps the worst thing about it is how it portrays bullying; frequently, with a lot of detail, tons of violence, and in ways that hit you straight in your ego. It's not bad enough that the main character gets bullied by everyone for just about every reason until he gets access to his 'pretty' body, they introduce two more characters to get bullied as well. There's just too much violence in this show altogether; even when the main character gets pretty and popular, he still gets in fights! The characters in general seem to have a weird lack of agency in the plot, and because of that it's not really clear what the author is trying to say to the audience most of the time.

Also that CG work that I was praising so hard earlier? For some reason the final episode isn't nearly as good as it is in the rest of the series. I assume it's probably because it's used so much harder in that episode.

The crazy thing is that I just read the first chapter of the original manhua and it looks like the producers did a lot to clean everything up. If you think the main character looks cartoonishly ugly in the show, he looks subhuman in the manhua. Though weirdly enough, they make his mother look much, much older. But the manhua goes on much further in plot than the 8-episode show; quickly skimming through one of the more recent releases it looks like the artist's style has settled to look more like what the show is going for and honestly it looks like the plot goes on to something much different than introspective morality play I was expecting from reading about the story concept.

TL;DR: Lookism has many pretty shapes, colors, and sounds.