Bakuten is good to an almost worrying degree

And like all good anime, it's actually Liz and the Blue Bird

But back to the somewhat worrying part of Bakuten's goodness. Toshimasa Kuroyanagi is a director who leans strongly towards realism, especially when it comes to the articulation of character acting, and the show's AniP is notoriously ambitious too. Which is to say, it moves A LOT

Since the very start of the episode it's obvious that the animation isn't just very precise, but also *dense*. More often than not you have something going on in the background, giving more life to the setting. Crowd and otherwise layered animation for days

Given this dedication to depicting every minute gesture, scenes where there are a bunch of characters become a whole lot of work - this may look like downtime, but it absolutely isn't when it comes to the workload

And Kuroyanagi's realism isn't cold and technical, he uses this thorough animation for characterization purposes. So far the show has been pretty by the books, but with direction that highlights the big moments so well and this level of acting, it's easy to buy into it (cute!)

On top of all of this, well, it's a goddamn gymnastics anime. Even with the smart usage of CG here and there, there's still a lot of traditional animation that needs to maintain believable volume if they want this approach to have an impact. And so far, so good

It's the future I'm wary of here. I know for a fact that this episode was completed far enough in advance, but you'd need an incredible buffer to sustain this approach, especially without the support of a powerhouse. Boy does it feel alive while it lasts tho