Hisone to Masotan, the flying review

Welcome everybody, if you have already been here thank you for coming back, if you’re new thank you for stopping by.

Today I’ve got something really interesting to say but let’s get a couple of things out of the way beforehand:

1) Pictures are not mine as I changed sd card and stupidly lost my screens in the process.

2) As always my opinion is extremely personal and might be, at least partially, inaccurate: I started watching this anime in April and finished it in late September; I might have disregarded some things thus not being as objective as I would have liked to. Apologies in advance and whatnot.

3) As always spoilers will be underlined in order for you to spot them easily.

Enough chit-chat let's rock!

Hisone to Masotan.

It's been a while since I last wrote about it isn't it? Way back to April 2018.

What happened in between?

Let me explain.

Normally a 12-episodes anime series gets fully published in more or less 3 months or one episode per week. "Hisone to Masotan" flow has been quite bumpy since inception: It would get uploaded once every 3-4 weeks, until it wasn’t...

Why?

In July something even more peculiar happened: As per above the anime got stuck after episode #8 (on animeX and on Animeworld) and I was like: "Jeez animeX! Why are you doing this to me? I'm enjoying the show, why did you axe it?"

One month later the series was fully issued on Netflix as one of their original productions, which makes me think that they were the reason behind the axing of the show: Official Netflix properties cannot be streamed outside Netflix without consent, although I'm still not able to reconcile this with the fact that the first 8 episodes appeared on Animeworld.

Now let's take a closer look at this product, shall we?

General Information
Hisone to Masotan is an anime series created and animated by Bones (great company that also created Mob Psycho 100, FMA, Soul eater not! etc...) directed by Hiroshi Kobayashi and written by Mari Okada.

Observations

The plot is not very convoluted but not too straightforward either, it looks like slice of life for the first half or so, then the true plot/obstacle reveals itself. Characters are straight A+: They change their course of thought and action, and shape along with the plot in a very dynamic and ‘lifelike’ way. More on that later; the last episode is strange, here is why:
1) Cinematographically speaking is pretty average because we come upon the same sort of structure of almost any other last episode in anime.
2) It is interesting because, I mean, it is the last episode, it is always interesting
3) The biggest screw up ever is the ending which, once again, is unrealistically happy

Even more interesting is the fact that this anime appears to be focusing on being suitable for all ages because:
-Gore is totally absent
-It never indulges into displaying blood/splatter/dying characters and such.
-Pseudo-nudity is not showed.
However themes are sometimes explicit and may be of difficult understanding for kids.

Plot

Hisone Amakasu doesn't know what to apply for after high school so she decides she wants to be useful to her country instead, by enrolling in the Japanese self-defense force, although after a while she will discover something that at first she won't be able to control/understand. She somehow finds out that the national Air Force employs camouflaged dragons to protect itself; after this shocking top-secret revelation, she eventually gets forced by her superiors into approaching a dragon that has rejected every single rider -since after its first- for the last 70 years.

This apparently daunting task is finally the one that lets her become the useful person she craved to be in the first place although, there still are many things she will have to learn about dragons. I’ll revert to that later on.


Characters:

-Hisone Amakasu (voiced by Misaki Kuno)
Her character is IRC (which stands for Incredibly Realistic Character), in that she possesses the credible, well designed, tried-and-true background of most anime protagonists: She wants to do something with her life, decides to act accordingly and ends up being entangled in an impossible situation she additionally feels unfit for.

The ‘Incredibly Realistic’ bit comes from her not being able to make a clear choice, having constant afterthoughts, changes of heart and the perpetual feeling, shared with the viewer, of not having done the right thing. Through these ups-and-downs her character shapes and develops with the plot changing her attitude towards dragons and the Army in general. If at first she is scared and feels out of place, she will in the end gain confidence proving that her character has evolved.

Another incredible asset that makes her character instantly likeable and easy to empathize with, is her absolute earnesty which, compels her to voice what she really thinks about everything, thus positioning her as, not only the protagonist and backbone of the story, but also the principal output to the spectator's thoughts and doubts.

The rest of the characters are like the side salad to a great steak, nobody cares about them, the only one that requires further investigation is Haruto Okonogi (voiced by Yuki Kaji)
Despite what Wikipedia thinks of him (just one line) I really liked this guy mostly for three reasons:
1) He feels more real than the average (he smokes, I've never seen someone in an anime series smoke, with the notable exception of Daisuke Jigen, Lupin III’s charismatic sidekick).
2) Haruto is just some random guy until the 8th episode, whence he becomes instrumental to unty the plot as it should (he is needed for the ritual as he eventually will fill in like some kind of Japanese spiritual minister)
3) He is Hisone Amakasu's lover. Most of the times characters in that position behave illogically for love (see Montparnasse story in 8-9-10-11-12th episodes). Because of that I feel he’d deserve more of his share under the spotlight.

 Graphics

In regards to graphic Hisone to Masotan is composed of, like, a ton of different styles that go from the 'casual and informal' for characters and setting, to 'super accurate' for some details like clouds and sky (including the Kami dragon in the last two episodes, jets and pilots inside the aircrafts in the 3^rd one).

If I had to have to give a 0-to-10 score to the above I’d say:

-Characters and setting: 6

I find this style nice but I'm not a fan of it. I prefer the way Made in Abyss is drawn instead (whereas the style's purposedly tries to feel as real as possible). In spite of this I have to say that Hisone to Masotan has reached its goal of making me bond with its big-eyed characters without nose and Masotan (the dragon) with its smooth and gentle lines.

-Clouds, sky,weather: 10

Incredibly beautiful! The anime team shows its craft at rendering every weather, lighting, time-of-day, condition. Each illustration is incredibly detailed and very pleasing to look at, somewhat reminiscent of Miazaki's work on ambiental setups (any movie) or Your Name; of course, we’re not quite there yet but still some very serious and effective work has been put into it.

-3D: 3

As I probably have stated elsewhere I'm not a great fan of 3D animation, it makes everything choppy because frame-rate has to be slowed down thus lowering the overall quality of experience. I wouldn’t be able to comment on the quality of tridimensional modelling, but as far as my experience as a spectator is concerned I didn't like it, at all.


Soundtrack OP and Ending.

Soundtrack is great, top notch quality. Orchestration, themes and an excellent sync allowing the music to play without covering characters voices, contribute to a very pleasant aural experience. Nonetheless all is not golden as the score somethimes appears to play a tad randomly hence turning a moment of tension in a jolly one. I think this glitch depends on the fact that most of the songs on the soundtrack are either sad or happy therefore, the team had to work with something like 5-10 hyping songs that are less than half of all the songs in the OST disks, that's kind of unfortunate. Here you can find the complete soundtrack.

 I consider the Opening to be pretty average but it might just be me as I usually prefer the english/jap which lyrics I understand. (Right now on my phone I have Sky Parade the ending of Grandblue Fantasy on repeat. If you missed the review click here to learn more). I however appreciate the hard work: There still is an orchestra playing in the background and the singer is not bad at all (although I don't like her/his voice that much).

From an acoustic point of view the ending is the craziest sh*t ever. I still didn't get if the song is in French (!) which would anyway not feel out of contest to me, since the plot somewhat touches  the argument of World War II in the European theatre, and the dragon (Masotan) previous name was  Montparnasse. You can listen to the original version here (thai subs because whatever...) and here’s the same song by a french native speaker, you'll spot the difference almost immediately.

How the plot was untied

The plot is coherent and contains major twists that make it incredibly interesting although, as mentioned earlier, its ending is kind of a bummer: I thought I had finally found the perfect, realistic, politically uncorrect, sad final as opposed to the all too pervasive ‘...they lived happily ever after..’, but all my hopes were shattered by a lame scene in the last 30 seconds.
What do we learn from that? Never trust the storyteller because he might very well twist his story till the very end.
You can't get how embittered I am for this ending. Or can you? Did I mention I did not like this anime ending? God I wish it was just for once sad but real. Did I mention I did not like the ending of this?

Conclusions

This is a 12 episodes series and if you watch it now you won't have any upload-time issues (as I did). I can tell you from the tip of my heart that you should really watch this anime. It’s not a graphical masterpiece but it is cute, it does not have the best OST ever but it gets the job done. You should see this for its original plot and IRC design.
The ending will maybe ruin your day and maybe not. It surely ruined mine tho’… did I ever mention in this review that I did not fancy the way this anime ends?

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Until then

Peace and
See Nya