×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

World Trigger
Episode 5

by Gabriella Ekens,

Well, that was anticlimactic. Last episode left us with the impression that this week was going to be the big continuation of the battle between Kitora, Yuma, and the Neighbor, but Yuma just uses some trion-based chain powers to drag it into the lake within the first five minutes. I remember the conflict being more drawn out in the manga. I wonder what happened to prompt this change. (I suspect it begins with b- and ends with -udget.) No matter the reason, it's still a letdown, and World Trigger continues to be an action-adventure show with remarkably little action. Otherwise, this was our introduction to Jin, Border's Neighbor-killing ace and resident cool guy. You can tell Jin's super cool because he wears hideous backwards sunglasses and sexually harasses his coworkers. Jin's also the guy who rescued Osamu from a Neighbor attack a few years back. Now Osamu's got a crush, causing him to stare at Jin throughout the longest and most poorly animated board meeting in history.

Board meetings at Border are so boring, they should be called BORED meetings. In fact, the organization should be called BOREder, because they do not have the budget to animate things, which makes the show pretty darn boring. The guy who's in charge of Border is consistently drawn with his jagged tough dude facial scar intersecting his hairline in a way that makes it look like the fakest thing ever. You could peel it off like a band-aid. I can't believe that people agreed on that design and drew the scar that way in three different shots. It looks so bad I'm harping on it because it's characteristic of the sort of lazy, bad decision-making that's been plaguing the show. (Upon further research, that issue with the scar was also present in the manga. How deep does this madness go?) Yuma overuses the duck face again, Osamu overuses the glasses glare, and even Jin seems to have caught that triple-line-eye disease from Yuma. These tics are so overused that they kill the characters' expressive potentials. The glasses glare in particular is typically used to show that a character is ominous and has something to hide, so why is it being used so often on audience-transparent ultra-empath Osamu? Comparing this show to something like Kill la Kill, that series played its cheapest-looking moments for comedy and knew how to imbue the least actual animation with the greatest amount of personality. The best thing about World Trigger animation-wise is that the show's mere existence means that some animators are getting fed.

Of course, the show also has some hardcore shot lingering. I kept thinking that Crunchyroll had frozen while I was watching, but no. The camera just kept lingering on Osamu's face between lines of dialogue for seconds at a time. The story continues to be the only potentially redeeming factor, but so much of this episode was spent in frame-linger stasis that hardly any story even got through. Kitora is nicer now, Jin is a maverick who lives on the edge, and Border is giving Osamu a cautious pass. Beyond that? I watched this half an hour ago and I'm already having trouble remembering what happened in that board meeting. Scar guy told some of his underlings to keep an eye on Osamu while the rest of them were painted as really sketchy future villains. Did that really last ten minutes? "Pure internal politicking" episodes don't have to be this bad. I think part of the issue here was timing. Comparing again to a show like Attack on Titan, its internal politics episodes didn't start until there had already been two or three action smorgasbords. Nothing similar has happened in World Trigger, so I have no curiosity to get to the heart of Border.

Ugh, I can't stop coming up with issues. This episode was also where the soundtrack got noticeably bad. The show's "ominous" theme is just five notes being played over and over for minutes at a time. It's really irritating. That summarizes most things about this episode, actually - "it's irritating and boring." I'll just stick with that.

Grade: D+

World Trigger is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.


discuss this in the forum (70 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

this article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history

back to World Trigger
Episode Review homepage / archives