Meanwhile, in a show with a completely different art direction... The overall premise of the episode was actually a pretty cool idea; there's an infestation of bookworms in the house, and Huey and Dalian stumble upon some that actually eat stories instead of paper, so they have to go inside the story to save it. The problem is in the execution; we never actually see any of that and instead are dropped directly into the book world and left to WTF at the sudden fantasy setting until the show gives an off-hand explanation at the end. I'm actually really interested in how they managed to go inside of the story, but I guess Gainax wants to start trolling now rather than later. I think that if it had been done differently, I probably would have really liked this episode, but as it is it just didn't work for me. Others can feel free to disagree. From what I've been reading around the internet, it looks like the episodic nature of the series is just how the original material is, so there's not much to be done about that, although I'm still hoping for some kind of mini-arc wrap-up. Also, apparently there's some disagreement between the original series author and the editors about where the series should end. All of this makes me think that Gainax is just doing whatever they feel like, including greatly lowering the level of detail in this episode. Not that the animation was horrible all the time, and there was a reason for it; however, the change never said "storybook" to me. It just looked lazy, particularly some of the backgrounds. I guess after all of the great animation in this series so far, I've been a bit spoiled and didn't want anything to change. Also, apparently even people in the book world know who Dalian is. I'm not really buying that her existence is a secret anymore. In any case, it looks like we're back to the usual format next week... I think. This is Gainax, after all. Images from NicoNico.com.
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