Roger Ebert famously wrote on the movie North how much he "hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it."
That sums up perfectly how I felt about Dragonar Academy. I hated this series so much I had to write a quick review about how utterly disgusted I was when the series began. Now months later here's a re-write giving a little more detail about why this show is truly as terrible as it is even though the rest of the reviews are throwing roses to it and it somehow managed a shockingly high 7.8 score.
Dragonar Academy is awful. If you're the type to enjoy shows like these then maybe it's for you but if you are looking for something even remotely entertaining stay away from this garbage. Dragonar Academy was produced by newcomer C-Station and directed by Shunsuke Tada of the Tsubasa Chronicle video series and Kuroko's Basketball.
I didn't have high expectations going onto this but I was curious and much of my morbid curiosity stemmed from the fact C-Station was once apart of Bee Train, a studio that many have come to hate over the years but I still remain a fan today for their vast and highly imaginative works. By 2012 however it seemed Bee Train made a quiet retreat from the business with it's aged founder and director likely retiring and this sub studio breaking out on their own.
Anime is full clichés that never seem to die and Dragonar Academy is so packed full of them it shows just how void this show is of any shred of creativity or imagination. Count them, Giant bouncing breasts on all women characters, naked magic girls showing up from nowhere and mood swinging characters and that's just scratching the surface of all the stupid tropes that are ripe and abound in this series.
As C-Station's first produced effort, it's a marginal failure on just about everything it sets out to do. Taking from probably equally lazy source material, the scripts written by Noboru Kimura are shoddy and thrown together with no thought or effort behind them. Many tropes from Mai-Hime, which Kimura wrote the manga for, are present in this it feels like deja vu all over again. Basically this amounts to being a fantasy slapped into school setting for no good reason.
There's a large cast of cookie cutter characters that will bore you with just how uninspired they are. We have Ash Blake, typical do-gooder-main character, Silvia whom feels like she might have some depth but in the end is only a shallow attempt at depth, her loyal maid servant who clearly is supposed to be clever and in on some grand scheme and Echo the dragon, a girl with no concept of any of our silly "Human Standards" as an excuse for her to be brash and walk around naked when the producers feel like it. This show is a cliché of clichés and this is barely forgivable from a group of first time creators but this comes from several long time animators.
Topping off this we're treated to many moments of soft core tentacle porn, a trope you thought would have died out in the 80s but somehow has found a modern revival. Between Ash being molested in his dreams and given oral sex and the moments of tentacle molestation of our characters I'm surprised the producers didn't just opt to make this a porn and call it a day. There's so much fan service and tentacle action you'd swear that ARMS Company the makers of Queens Blade and Elfen Lied were the ones animating this series.
The series animation and art is just as lazy with ugly looking dragons to top off the grossly exaggerated character designs. One would think with a show centered all around dragons it would be the one thing you could get right. Half the time you won't see any dragons and it will be mostly focused on whatever lame slice-of-life scenarios ripped from every other show of it's kind. The dragons are oddly colored and look like they're stained in hard water spots you'd find on a mirror and the character animation is laughable. I'll admit I do like some of the designs namely of Anya and Silvia but that's about it.
The music was about the only thing memorable about it, at least the score was, the theme songs were typical J-pop song that feels the need to shore-horn in the entire cast for some odd reason. I can't imagine every seiyu in Japan has singing talent, yet it seems every anime that features a pop opening has to use its cast for some reason; another thing that really needs to go away.
Dragonar Academy has to be the most uninspired, unoriginal, unimaginative, most creatively bankrupt show I've seen. With its cast of clichéd, cookie-cutter-anime stereotypes, terrible character designs terrible animation and over the top pointless nudity and sexual content it wouldn't surprise me if it's source material was just as lazy. Beating down dead tropes that have saturated the market of the last several years alone and still going. This is a show that would barely make the grade for a crappy one episode direct-to-video, forget a 12 episode season.
Perhaps it's not fair to compare or expect C-Station to be the successor to a studio I adored which made most of its work with the very auteur director Koichi Mashimo but it goes even beyond Bee Train now as we are seeing the potential end of Studio Ghibli and in this era of remakes, reboots and horrid stuff like Dragonar Academy we need these creative forces more than ever but as long as the otaku keep running things expect more light novel adaptations but hopefully those will have a little less soft core and a little more plot.
