Interlude

I enjoyed the story as I felt it was a fun mystery to unwarp. The story was only about two hours long yet the world building made it feel like it was 10 (in a good way) and with the show did an amazing job with building a cool atmosphere. The story had some sad parts which Ill admit got me in my feels, but though some people would say the ending is sad I saw it was a more hopeful ending. I don't want to spoil it but I just would say if you watch the show to think at the end if you ... felt the choice he made was the right one. Overall great show.

Look at the poster again - can you see 3 large women? Good. One of them, the long red-haired one is a question mark. While she does vaguely resemble one useless character in the plot, whether it is she on the poster or not, either way both in the anime and on its poster the viewer is left thinking who and what the heck is she even doing in there?

In many respects this summarises the feelings you get after watching Interlude, whose plot doesn't fail to get you worked up with expectations but at the same time gives you a headach for the most ... part due to it being basically pointless. It is one of those animes where the authors tried too hard to twist things up but end up in the end getting twisted themselves with loose ends all over the place and leave the mess up for you to fill in the blanks, pretending all along there is somehow some great psychological logic behind it all which of course nobody grasped!

Despite an admittedly strong premise with a complex and contemplative core, it fails to capitalize on its ideas at all and ends up being kind of a nonsense title. It's supposed to be evaluating the value of direct experience versus simulated reality, along with the moral considerations of what it actually means to be alive and what value the mind brings to experience versus the body, etc. Instead of functionally exploring these concepts though, we get a totally delirious fever dream, an anime that has no idea what it's saying or how to say what it wants, or even what tone it wants to say ... it in. Is Interlude supposed to be funny? Tense? Horny? Existential? Everything at once? Even then, what genre is it? Sci-Fi? Psychological Thriller? Slice of Life? It's like they wanted to tell a story that blended elements of everyday life with reality-warping themes in ways which are reminiscent of Haruhi, but without any idea of what measures to use of each independent element. We get these sudden, jarring cuts from one theme to the next, with existential dread, to upbeat slice of life, to action and monster slaying, to an exploration of grief, to a close-up bondage gear ecchi shot, and on and on. It has no sense of proper proportion, thus making it completely ridiculous and impossible to take seriously. Even given all that, the story is still the strongest aspect of this title.

The art is fine, kind of your standard fare for the time in which it was produced, with competent character designs. Nothing really remarkable beyond what you'd expect from it.

The Sound is quite lackluster, as while the music and sounds of life meet the basic standard of quality for the time, the voice work is atrocious, with a genuinely awful dub. I don't exactly know why I continued to watch the dub, but I chalk it up to a kind of morbid curiosity. Hearing the word "anime" pronounced like "Annie May" followed by a dude jumping out a window was an absolute comedic flashbang I wasn't prepared for, even if the creators absolutely did not intend for it to be funny.

The characters are all sort of flat and forgettable, and while they're not actively terrible, they are tossed about like flotsam on the tides of this lackluster story. Perhaps, if Interlude had much better production quality, with some restraint in regards to its wild tone shifting, then it would have been something worthwhile. Alas, that is not the version of Interlude we got.