I am only 4 episodes in thus far, but I am enjoying this series. The little girl, Al, is just a delight – her scene with the stuffed animal and later, her innocent roaming about the ship, and thinking she was unobserved, were just charming. Klaus is also pretty appealing as a straight shooter protagonist.
I really haven’t noticed the CGI, it isnt intrusive (except for smoke, which uniformly sucks). The landscapes of the world they inhabit are just too piecemeal to really appreciate. Unlike the vistas in gedo Senki, to take an example, you never see anything but a local shot and thus there’s no reference information about what the terrain is on a larger scale. You’re always zoomed in. The only time there is a clear view is up in the sky, and then it’s just a monotonic cloudscape. So, I dont have any sense of what the world is like. I hope we do get a better overview eventually.
Yes, you do eventually get a better idea how the world is put together, but I’d be lying if I said it made much sense.
Doesn’t mean the series isn’t good, though; I really like it. For whatever that’s worth.
The near-seamless integration of CGI and traditional animation in Last Exile was lauded by almost every reviewer when it first came out. Four years later it’s still pretty remarkable, even compared to some of Gonzo’s newer works *coughBokuranocough*.
My impressions of the show were favorable when I watched it three years back (wow, has it really been that long?), but they may have been colored by the new otaku’s general sense of wonderment, which I think lasts until you see your first really terrible series. The ending has drawn a lot of criticism, but I thought it was basically solid, if somewhat flawed in the execution. I’ve seen much worse in the three years since, that’s for sure.
Our family not only decided that they didn’t want to pursue this after the first volume (which I had bought for them when it first ca,me out), they even gave the DVD away. We found the integration between CGI and traditional animation far from flawless.