Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Nana 11.5 – a fake meditation on the nature of the recap

July 22, 2006 on 5:42 pm | In Anime Standards | 2 Comments

A recap episode. I watched it at 4x speed for maximum efficiency, slowing down only for Junko, Kyosuke and Shouji’s commentary on the plot.

You may argue that I lost the effect of the episode, but I’ve seen this all before and didn’t need the reminder. Others among you may say “Why didn’t you just skip it?”
I have an urge to observe all new animation in recap episodes, no matter how little it is. I maintain that Evangelion has one of the best recap episodes in town, partly because it only takes up half of an episode and partly because it features new voice overs by characters that add a little something to the scenes. Nadesico had a recap episode that scored for novelty points but one realises that the actual recap material isn’t very interesting at all and suffers from ADV’s incredibly dry sub translation of that series.

I’m amazed at how few of the series I’ve seen actually feature recaps, as I was raised in the early days of my fandom to believe that they were a common occurrence. I can’t think of many other titles that I’ve seen off the top of my head that featured recaps. Gundam Wing had two consecutive recap episodes, which was a major buzz kill for a series that was already boring itself to death. While I have not seen it, I can imagine that Wolf’s Rain‘s four consecutive recap episodes would have been torture.
In matters dearer to my own heart, the recap episode of City Hunter presented action sequences without the charm that the series required to pull them off. The new animation content in that episode was pure horror, as well, as if Sunrise had drawn Kaori, Ryo and Reika then shopped them out to the staff of the more poorly produced episodes of Angel Heart.

As for Nana itself, back on topic: I can’t be the only one who finds it weird that the previews aren’t actually previews, but rather advertisements for Nana related merchandise.