I enjoyed KLK but I thought it didn’t live up to the promise of the first episode, which was one of the best things I’ve seen. (I rewatched it the next day which I’ve never done before). I liked the characters and art style, but the plot and themes weren’t that interesting.
To expand a bit, Kill la Kill feels very self-consciously retro, an homage to a very ’90s style of anime that’s much more cartoony than today (it owes something to Needless which I looked up and found to be more recent than I expected—I can only assume that was itself a retro effort?). There’re a lot of exaggerated visual effects (think heads expanding to 10x usual size), limited animation tricks (cyclic eating motion, speed lines); a few of the visual touches are quite clever clever (using a square aspect ratio for the sepia-tinted flashbacks) and it obviously looks a lot better than the animation of the era it’s echoing, but I’m not sure how it objectively stacks up against modern style. The plot is deliberately ridiculous and over-the-top, and the show’s pretty heavy on fanservice (admittedly integrated closely into the plot, but it still feels like a lot of gratuitous nudity). As well as Gurren Lagann it reminded me of Mysterious Girlfriend X—different genre, but the same retro fanservice style.
The overall impression was reminiscent of Grindhouse—“ok, you’ve crafted an excellent pastiche of this old style—but actually we abandoned that old style for a reason”. I found Kill la Kill very fun to watch at the time, but it hasn’t stayed with me since.
Kill la Kill is excellent. Watch if you liked Gurren Lagann (at least some of the same people were involved), although I think it’s better.
I enjoyed KLK but I thought it didn’t live up to the promise of the first episode, which was one of the best things I’ve seen. (I rewatched it the next day which I’ve never done before). I liked the characters and art style, but the plot and themes weren’t that interesting.
To expand a bit, Kill la Kill feels very self-consciously retro, an homage to a very ’90s style of anime that’s much more cartoony than today (it owes something to Needless which I looked up and found to be more recent than I expected—I can only assume that was itself a retro effort?). There’re a lot of exaggerated visual effects (think heads expanding to 10x usual size), limited animation tricks (cyclic eating motion, speed lines); a few of the visual touches are quite clever clever (using a square aspect ratio for the sepia-tinted flashbacks) and it obviously looks a lot better than the animation of the era it’s echoing, but I’m not sure how it objectively stacks up against modern style. The plot is deliberately ridiculous and over-the-top, and the show’s pretty heavy on fanservice (admittedly integrated closely into the plot, but it still feels like a lot of gratuitous nudity). As well as Gurren Lagann it reminded me of Mysterious Girlfriend X—different genre, but the same retro fanservice style.
The overall impression was reminiscent of Grindhouse—“ok, you’ve crafted an excellent pastiche of this old style—but actually we abandoned that old style for a reason”. I found Kill la Kill very fun to watch at the time, but it hasn’t stayed with me since.
It was interesting to compare people’s reactions to Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill, seeing as one is in essence the gender swap of the other.