Angolmois: Record Of Mongol Invasion Episode 5: A Reason To Fight

This episode of Angolmois is working hard to establish the desperate situation the citizens of the island and Jinzaburou have found themselves in while also attempting to fill in some backstory that I guess was meant to make me like him more as a character.

I’ll get the comment about the ugliness of the filter out of the way nice and quick and then I can focus on what this episode does well, and some of the other things that aren’t so great. For example, I really enjoyed the way the conflict is going with the survivors of both the actual army and the exiles fleeing with the survivors from the capital, hiding from scouts, and working to slow down the army. The battle on the cliff was quite well handled (though we’ll discuss the animation in a second). It also gave us more of a chance to see Jinzaburou as a leader of not just the exiles but the islanders as they realise he’s pretty much the only one left who can take charge.

Teruhi, after her minor freak out and morale boosting arrow storm (slight exaggeration), pretty much fades into the background this week. Instead we get a flash back to Jinzaburou prior to being exiled and I guess we get a message about his character through his approach to playing shogi, but it is pretty heavy handed in the way it is dropped in there. Not to mention, this show kind of sets everyone who isn’t Jinzaburou to be a complete ass, and even Jinzaburou isn’t exactly coming out of this looking amazing given he has some pretty rough edge to him.

But the real casualty this week was the animation. While in the first couple of episodes conflicts were nicely animated, we then had a few that moved the majority of the action off camera, and now we have some heavy reliance on panning over still images. It doesn’t bode well for the production over all and a story that is this caught up in these massive conflicts between armies probably needs to actually be able to handle some consistency in the delivery of those scenes.

Despite that complaint, overall Angolmois remains a fairly solid story this season and it is one of the few titles I’m genuinely enjoying rather than watching and hoping for improvement. There’s definitely room for improvement but even with the issues the anime has, it is still doing a pretty good job of delivering entertainment.

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Thanks for reading.

Karandi James