Due to certain circumstances (mostly Jeff's C&C), I've been stelivablogging a lot receintly, more than the show deserved, in fact. Nonetheless, there's more. Using the no-blogging breather I also marathoned the first 10 episodes, conveniently packaged on 3 discs. It was fun, but also I saw lots of errors and mistakes.

I'd like to contrast Stellvia with Azumanga on this. Azumanga's animation is quite basic, albeit solid. In the same time, it's meticulous in its quality throughout. It has virtually no sticking nails to rip the pants viewer sliding along (well, I know of two layout bugs which I found by myself without reading any FAQs).

In contrast, Stellvia has tons of geometry mistakes and layer cross-overs. It cheapens out in many places by omitting smaller drawings, such as uniform patches. One of the worst examples is smack in the middle of ep.1, when the captain of Fujiyama reaches to control something on his dashboard, and it's not drawn at all - not a single button. Faces get distorted improperly a lot, too. When Rinna talks to her father in the stadium, his speach is noticeably out of sync with his mouth, because the animators did not bother to animate anything like a natural pattern of speech; his jaw simply moves up and down at regular intervals, so no voice artist would be able to salvage it. It's all over the place. So, while the line and shade counts exceed that of Azumanga, I would be hard pressed to assign Stellvia a better score for animation.

So, I'm getting curious about Shingu now. Screenshots that I've seen so far were quite impressive, but it may be a special selection (like the lead picture for this entry).