Snowball Earth ‒ Episode 5

Let's go over what I liked about the episode first, shall we?

First, I thought there was a better plot and pacing this time around. We have a new girl, Hagane, introduced here, and she's the daughter of one of the survivors Tetsuo met a few episodes ago. Her tragic backstory is that her mother, who taught Hagane everything about being a mechanic, was brutally devoured by a gopher-looking kaiju. Naturally, Hagane does what she can to enact revenge on the kaiju anyway she can, and does so by episode's end (at least for now, I'm assuming, we never do see the kaiju shuffle off this mortal coil). Although she doesn't have much personality yet, the show allows her to have one emotional, adorkable moment with Tetsuo, much like Ao did last episode. She shows affection to Tetsuo by way of headpats, which sends Tetsuo into a state of awkward shock. The show has not abandoned Tetsuo's social anxieties; he's still a kid who doesn't know how to communicate or react properly, and this shows in his interactions with Hagane. He's not another faceless anime protagonist that's just a vehicle used to move the plot and action along, which would have been very easy for an anime like this to do. His relationship with both Hagane and Ao might even reveal a harem-y side of the show, which I hope in turn reveals more sides of Tetsuo.

The show's B-plot revolves around a new round of bad guys who are closing in on the mall to trigger an all-out war. Their sequences are paced and spread out in a way that allows these guys to slowly creep in as the melodrama between Tetsuo and Hagane unfolds, and then later on during the aftermath of Hagane's fight with the gopher kaiju. We don't see any big showdown at the mall (yet), but based on the way these villains are weaving their way to corner Tetsuo's gang of survivors in, I'm expecting things to get explosive soon.

So we've got a pretty decent episode in the plot and character department. Those are the pros. But what is the major con here?

You guessed it.

It is.

The.

C.

G.

I!

I still don't get it. Why do two-thirds of every episode of this series have to be rendered in CG? And why does it go back to 2D animation at such random times? Specifically during the less eventful moments? One sequence has CG shots of Tetsuo, Hagane, and her father cooking, then a 2D shot of the food itself, then back to CG when they say itadakimasu? And then it happens again when a CG'd Hagane reaches her arm out to Tetsuo, then 2D when Tetsuo crouches down, and then back to the bogus 3D when Hagane gives him headpats. We get a 2D-rendered, three-headed kaiju about to fight some guys at the beginning of the episode, only for the episode to have the temerity to not show the fight at all. What's even the point? And then the CG that happens during the fight between Hagane and the gopher-kaiju is so...bleh. You could have benefited from 2D animation here instead of making everything look like a video game. I'm not a sakuga guy, but holy cannoli, please inject some into the show, fam! It's hard to have some memorable, eye-catching moments when the CG renders everything so sterile.

(Oh yeah, some ultra harem-y cliches pop up that are kind of an eye roll. There's a “baka no hentai” moment that comes with Hagane's introduction. And the accidental yukadon between Tetsuo and Hagane as the episode's grand finale. But that's the way things roll, I guess.)

Rating:

Snowball Earth is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.