Forum - View topicSnowball Earth (TV).
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Edjwald
 Posts: 3510 |
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Snowball Earth (TV) Source: Manga (ongoing @ 10 volumes by Yuhiro Tsujitsugu) Demographic: Seinen Animation Studio: Studio Kai Genres: action, adventure, comedy, drama, science fiction Themes: artificial intelligence, future, kaiju, mecha, monsters, post-apocalyptic, robots, space, technology Plot Summary: Shy, socially awkward mecha pilot Tetsuo spent his entire childhood fighting kaiju – the intergalactic monsters threatening life on Earth. Out in deep space at the climactic moment of the final decisive strike against humanity's gargantuan enemies, something goes horribly wrong with his mecha, Yukio's new doomsday weapon, the Omnidirectional Infinity Laser. With Earth's last-ditch strategy failing spectacularly, his beloved mecha sacrificing itself to save his life, sole survivor Tetsuo hurtles back to Earth in his escape pod and, eight years later, awakes from cold sleep to find his world inexplicably frozen from pole to pole. Air Date & Platform: April 03, 2026 (Friday) Available on: Crunchryoll Episode Count / Runtime: Pending Trailer [EDIT: Fancy opener stuff edited. -TK] |
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smurky turkey
Posts: 5000 |
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1:
I am not sure about the vibe the show is going for. Content wise we have the plan of forcing sentient mecha's to blow themselves up (not very sensible) and the army having some really bad battle tactics thus resulting in a tragic conclusion (sacrifice, most of humanity being dead etc). All of that is pretty dark yet the focus seems to be on Tetsuo making friends and his social anxiety? At this point I am not sure if the next episode is about fighting baddies with a new mech or slice of life healing. |
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Edjwald
Posts: 3510 |
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Welp, I think one takeaway from this is that if you want to enjoy this anime, you'll have to avoid looking at the logic too closely. For example, just because it would take a genius to figure out the manual instruction guide for a robot in a half hour, does it follow that no one else could ever pilot the robot if they trained for months or years and were told what to do instead of figuring it out? Does if follow that the piloting process couldn't be streamlined over time? Did the battle controls really look all that sophisticated?
Does it follow that an entire planet would make a nine year old boy be their soldier of choice? If there was some premise that the robot was some alien artifact and could only be coded to one person's DNA, and the MC bonded with it by accident... Anyway, just whistle and move on. I don't mind doing that quite as much for this show as I did for Petals of Reincarnation, which had cannibal serial killers and lots of entrail violence and nihilism and so on. That anime clearly wasn't a shounen that could be enjoyed by adults but was primarily written for 12 years olds. I also don't get what the dominant vibe of this show is going to be. If I had to guess, I'd say primarily action with lots of clumsy social interaction comedy thrown in. Not sure if I'll stick with this - the nervous shtick could get old fast, and I don't know that persevering through it will be as rewarding as it was with Gojo and My Dress-up Darling. But I might. I didn't get bored. And while I might have compared this anime to Petals of Reincarnation in terms of logic being sacrificed for plot convenience, I will say that this anime doesn't feel like it was written by someone who got all their storytelling training from watching cool ideas developed by video game cutscenes and glued together by lots of spastic action. It feels like it was written by someone who's read a lot of shonen jump manga. |
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15852 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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The tone is kind of weird, where super bad things are happening with pretty much a groan, while he sees his flubbed social experiences as something worry a lot about.
Also. This might be a case of a cigar just being a cigar. But are the kaiju supposed to be sperm? They look like malformed creatures, and the way they both swarm and push their way into targets makes me think of sperm. But that just could be me. |
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Edjwald
Posts: 3510 |
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I was assuming those wrigglers were what amounted to tadpole kaiju myself, but its not like tadpoles aren't sperm-like.
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4286 |
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I absolutely love this show. Snowball was originally built to be a bomb, not a mech because the scientist father couldn't find anyone to pilot it... this is a reference to someone and something speficfic... but he refused to force his son into being the pilot in order to save the Earth from an unknown alien invasion.
Again, continuing the references to some show, the boy knew that if no one piloted the craft, all of life on Earth as he knew it would die eventually so Shinji got into the cockpit... OK, to cut a long story short, the first episode abridged Evangelion and as someone who found Shinji to be very annoying as a normal teen in extraordinary circumstances, I prefer Tetsuo's awkwardness in seen in a ten year montage from doing this job from 8 to 18 as more realistic as his first mission gave extreme mental trauma but after awhile... Hold on, I only watched the dub. Is the sub a baffling mess? |
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Edjwald
Posts: 3510 |
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I'm cautiously optimistic after the events of episode 2. I mean, I sincerely hope that the guy's not going to be operating a souped-up steam shovel for the rest of the series, but the group of humans that he contacts as potential friends don't seem too bad.
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4286 |
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I'm still loving the series but I'm staying away from the subbed Japanese because that was a mess. They really didn't know how to subtitle "social anxiety" all that well.
Keeping the connections to Anno, another work this series borrows from a bit is Shin Godzilla. Not only do the kaiju look like 2nd and third form Godzilla, they also seem to be evolving. They're evolving into Titans but that's someone else's lawsuit. |
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 3028 |
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Yeah, this struck me that whatshisface was a more annoying version of Shinji and his "dad" was a bizarro version Gendo but the "kaiju" are just out of place. Anyway, I'm not lovin' it, so enjoy in my stead... 
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Edjwald
Posts: 3510 |
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I find him a less annoying version of Shinji - I found that dude seriously annoying. But I watched Evangelion all the way through and got the emotional gut punch at the original ending.
I don't love this show, but I like it. alright. I haven't emotionally invested in the MC - his social anxiety seems kind of simplified - but I'm not rooting against him or anything. I'm not sure if having the budget version of his mecha crutch (koff) buddy back is going to help or delay his journey towards self-expression with organic lifeforms, but it will make for more interesting fights than using a glorified backhoe. I do feel for the survivors of this icy kaiju apocalypse and find the world interesting. I like ice age settings in general as far as worlds go. I also like the female lead well enough so far. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4286 |
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The kaiju are from Anno's Shin Gojira. Episode 3 continues the world building. The people seem to have developed a system for breaking down dead kaiju and running away from live ones but there isn't a defined process of hunting down kaiju. This would imply they are either fighting each other or there's an unknown force fighting the kaiju but not protecting the humans. I'm curious to learn if the frozen Earth is an easily reversed process done by the kaiju or if it's what I expect, the result of a nuclear winter. The evolving kaiju is also something of a question. Maybe I've seen too many mech shows from "kill em all" Tomino but a series picking up after the downer ending, hoping to correct it is more hopeful than I would ever expect. The worst that could happen has already happened and total annihilation is "almost" inevitable at this point so every small victory is a complete win. |
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3822 |
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There's something off about the timing of this show. Every scene seems to linger too long. They have their still shot with a move name, and then it just hangs on the screen for 3 seconds too long. Everything goes into slow motion, but not because there's anything to communicate quickly, it's just slow for no reason.
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Waid Rabby Nadaga
Posts: 24 |
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I'm glad I'm following this show. It's not perfect, but it's a very enjoyable mix of Homage, Comedy and Sci Fi.
I agree that a post apocalyptic snow world is a neat concept for an Anime, and it's one I hope we see decently explored (though I suspect this ice world will be more like Kaina of the Great Snow Sea than Overman KIng Gainer). Its neat to see more Kaiju actionspoiler[as well as the return of Yukio, though FWIW I liked Yukios main mech form the best]. The Kaiju evolving is an interesting idea, and while a prior poster mentioned Shin Godzilla, I'm reminded a bit of Kaiju Number 8 spoiler[Paticularly with the character that appears in the post credit sequence] |
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Edjwald
Posts: 3510 |
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I thought this show's first three episodes were enjoyable enough to give it a chance, and with episode 4 I'm glad I did. I was afraid that I was going to have to spend over half a season watching the MC do a cringing, humiliating, apologizing-for-daring-to stutter routine every time he had to talk to someone like No-Mojo Gojo did for the first 6 episodes of My Dress Up Darling. I really like My Dress Up Darling, but dear God, I still begrudge all the time I spent being intensely irritated by it. But by episode 4 of Snowball Earth, the MC is at least capable of basic communication without peeing himself.
It looks like the female lead has her own backstory as a savior and her own strange version of social skills, and that's cool. The world building is continuing to develop at a steady pace too. So yeah, enjoying it without as many provisos. |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 25599 |
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Episode 4
I'm enjoying this too, but I have a gripe that is probably unique to myself... the escape pod that now houses Yukio's downloaded consciousness seems to be wearing a red Speedo... the type of swimwear we used to derisively refer to as a "banana hammock." It bugs me every time I see it. |
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