Bocchi The Rock! :
"Abandoning your uniqueness is equivalent to dying"
Every episode just feels so incredible. The staff understands this story and its sentiment at such a deep level it's incredible. They laid off the crazy visuals and overly creative aspects to make the buildup to their playing more grounded and the focal point of the episode rather than the visual aspect itself, and then brought it out once they were in the clear. They know exactly what they want to do, and how to achieve it and it's just so awesome. They mix and match and play with a back and forth of everything to establish the baseline for the creativity of the series, and depending and content and context, branch out from that where they can. The realism seems to be a pillar of the series at this point, alongside the aggressive camera angles, and the relative visual creativity with Bocchi. But they don't reach past that, they don't search for a stronger piece to cling to or make use of this episode until the very end, and it works wonders.
Regardless of the creativity of the staff for this episode, their execution was nothing short of stellar. Was it just CGI? Was it rotoscoped like Bocchi's run earlier in the episode? They chose relatively low detail designs for the characters so the line is so incredibly blurry between all the different modes that without a point of reference in the same scene it's impossible to tell. Even then, they've been massaging CGI and 3d work into the backgrounds and props of the series so far so the line gets blurred even further. Whether a creative choice or one to cut corners while providing the best possible execution of their music I've no idea, but the work done is incredible from start to finish.
Bocchi The Rock just casually shows up each week to prove that it's even or better at basically everything than all the other seasonals out there right now, and then walks away as if nothing happened just so they can get ready to show up for next week too. It's incredible. They excel at 2d, 3d, rotoscoping, environment and background work, camera angles, art styles, animation styles, lighting and shading, just every step in the visual process is dominated by the staff at Cloverworks right now. And that's not even adding on top the creative work for things like the dialogue and interaction, the amazing efforts from the VAs, and so on and so forth. Just sort of incredible to experience this level of polish and passion each week.
Obra Maestra...
