This episode was really good and I felt the animation went pretty smoothly as well. I do especially love how Yumemi is animated so well and her cute reactions were just like in the VN and I think the production studio did an awesome job of developing her character as well as the Junker in capturing the tension as he is trying to manage to survive in the sarcophagus city. I give credit to how the studio is handling the animation and they deserve the utmost recognition. I can’t recall the Junker ever wearing a pendant of the constellation Cygnus as well but I hope it will prove later on how that became an important memento to him. The ED was very good and seeing Yumemi as a chibi format looked just like how she would act for the customers as they would come visit the planetarium. So far, I think it is off to a great start and I can’t wait to see the next episode. 
Overall, a good first episode.
I feel that this episode did its best to condense the first few chapters into roughly eighteen minutes of animation. It reminded me of how annoying Yumemi was during that time and how subtly depressing her circumstances are. I do have a couple problems with this episode, both of them more nitpicks than anything.
First of all, Yumemi’s a lot shorter than I imagined her to be in the VN. I expected her to be about as tall as the Junker himself, but I don’t remember her height being particularly emphasized in the VN. It might take some getting used to on my end.
Second, I don’t remember the planetarium entrance being protected from the Rain outside by a glass archway. Yumemi often said her infamous lines out in the rain in the VN, which was okay for her because she had a protective coating around her entire figure. The Junker had a protective poncho on him as well because of how toxic the Rain was, so it baffled me why he didn’t bother to put his hood back on in the end. I guess they wanted to gloss over details in this adaptation to fit the whole story in, but it still bothers me that this episode forgets them.
Other than that, I have no complaints with this episode. Here’s hoping the next four make the same impact the VN had in terms of feels~ ;;7
Junker is hot
She’s described as looking about 15 years old. A teenage girl is usually short compared to adult men.
They’ve changed the layout of the entrance pretty drastically. I suspect that’s due to the fact that it needs to be drawn numerous times from several angles. I bet it’s now based on the planetarium in Akashi which they’ve collaborated with. But yeah, the lack of poison is strange.
Unless they left that part the way it is to represent that the Junker has basically given up on his life and doesn’t care anymore
VNDB has her at 155cm (5’1")… While I’m not sure exactly where they got that (they source Wikipedia for their info, but it’s not there), 5’1" - 5’4" was going to be my best guess with the vague description of “about 15 years old”.
Suffice it to say, she’s not really going to intimidate anyone by looking down on them.
Wow… Get out. Out into the never-ending toxic rain where you deserve to be.
One thing I notice about anime girls: they’re usually super duper short. IMO Kotori in the Rewrite anime feels a lot shorter than what I remember her from the VN. Maybe the reason why I don’t feel that way for Yumemi is because I saw a life-size pop stand in character1 and that kind of registered in my brain that “wow yumemi is tiny”
Huh, I vividly remember it…
Sure, it doesn’t look the same, but I can definitely see an archway right there; probably leading from the planetarium to the elevator to the mall or whatever
EDIT: Oh hey, episode 2 screenshots are up
It’s happening
Solid first episode. There’s not a lot to complain about, except for…
I know that juker spent a couple of minutes running away from drones that tried to kill him, but he still looked kinda silly when he kept drawing his gun on reflex. That’s probably because
The world of Planetarian seems a lot less dangerous right now because it hasn’t been fully explained. Also, the viewers still don’t know just how many life-and-death situations Junker has been through. Then again, explaining that would take too much time to fit everything properly into a single episode.
The other thing would be that the episode kinda lacks a hook, but then I remembered that the original didn’t have anything of that sort this early in the game.
5/5, the episode really delivered.
I thought it was interesting that they chose to start with an action scene, maybe to hook you in.
I wish they went a little more into the danger of the sarcophagus city, but other than that I got everything I could’ve hoped for.
I don’t feel the atmosphere is right. The world isn’t dark enough due to the rain being too light, I find it quite detrimental to the setting up of the Planetarian world and I hope it doesn’t persist because I feel it will make some later scenes much weaker. Without the first-person perspective, Junker’s paranoia isn’t yet captured well and makes him appear clumsy.
However, I want to praise the use of Junker losing his submachine gun before his meeting with Yumemi because it makes more sense for him to resort to using his grenade launcher for intimidation in close quarters than the visual novel did. Also the use of the snow globe in the initial discovery of the planetarium is very nice symbolism and ties in well.
The pedant he wears now wasn’t in the visual novel but I can tell it is going to expand on his backstory and I suspect it will tie into the reminiscence he has about(Visual novel spoilers) when he was a child leaving a bunker with his what he thinks might have been his parents, and they were looking into the sky with what he wonders might have been the starry sky.
This might be a bit biased since I still have the imagery of the VN in my mind but I personally thought the atmosphere was just fine. I always felt there was a stark contrast between the outside world, which was very dark and gloomy, and the inside of the planetarium, which was bright and relaxing; and I think the anime did that fairly well, actually.
After watching again. I have rethought my complaint and realized that it is done well and changes in this part have been chosen wisely and have adapted this part well. I had been a bit too surprised by the fluency of Yumemi’s animation, which really compliments portraying the kind of character she is.
Every time the Junker threw something offscreen when he was in the planetarium this episode, I just wanted to hear the screeching of a cat or something dubbed in.
Anyway, a friend and I watched this and I swear we fell in love with Planetarian all over again.
I surprisingly like this episode, and I feel that the story benefited more from its new medium more than it did from being a kinetic novel. To be honest, I wasn’t really able to like the kinetic novel, mostly due to it dragging so much that I neither was able to emotionally invest to any of the character nor enjoy the story as a whole. When the (KN spoilers) feels truck came over by the end, I just couldn’t bring myself to feel any sort of emotion at all.
I wasn’t even planning to watch this, due to me following to too many series this season, but I decided to watch because I stumbled upon one of the anime soundtracks on Youtube… and it just did it to me like how Gentle Jena brought me to read the KN. Ahaha.
When I watched the anime, I was gladly surprised that the characters feel more likable. Perhaps by cutting out some of, in particular, Yumemi’s repetitive dialogue from the KN, she became more endearing, at least to me. There’s still the element of repetition in the anime, and the viewers will still feel that Yumemi just annoys the heck out of Junker, but the anime somehow managed to make her feel endearing enough. (Again, I just didn’t really like Yumemi back when I was reading the KN)
Well, I’m not really sure if my overall appreciation for the ONA is because of me re-experiencing the series and gaining new appreciation for it, or because the anime actually did better at portraying the characters. But what I can say for sure is that the anime is handling the story very well, so far, and I really feel that the story strongly benefits from its new medium, especially on the side of pacing.
Saw the first episode yesterday with kaza bois and these are my impressions so far, Im gonna try and make it short:
Well paced, nicely delivered the scenes I was hoping for, like when he was remembering the old man talking about a robot.
Yumemi is super fucking cute. That smile shines through my soul.
I love the animation.
Showing constantly Yumemi’s perspective with HUD is cool.
And I dont know if anyone already menitoned this, but did you hear that sound design in the music? Those synths are so.damn.good. One thing about apocaliptic things I like is that they often put really cool music, and here I was even suprised at the point of how good it was. And if I recall correctly, the synths were not used before and are completely new (I hope)
(TL;DR I am a music fag)
The one thing that kinda confused me was, well ofc the pendant, but the rain… ? Isnt it supposed to be acid or something? I mean he was just standing there in the rain, and … nothing? I thought it hurts huh ._.
Overall rating, 5/5. Cant wait to see more.
(Fuck you Ika, this isnt short at all)
I’m actually surprised by how much I enjoyed the dubbed version, despite the fact that there were some serious inaccuracies, like the fact that the older junker implies that Yumemi was actually operational when he found her (that was never implied in the vn or the anime). However, I think Jill Harris’ voice might actually work better for Yumemi than the 10 years older Suzuki. Just my opinion.
I find the dub kind of hilarious due to the fact that a guy can apparently be typecast as a Key protagonist.
The voice work was pretty good, though; I think it only took some getting used to on my part because I’m so used to the Japanese audio and only had that for years.
I actually paused the video after literally 1 second and considered quitting because of how wrong it felt, but I persisted and ended up really enjoying it
I will take some of the pronunciation to task because I always hear “Yumemi” and “Jena” as “you-meh-me” and “yay-na,” rather than what the dub does, really biting into those sounds to get “you-may-me” and “yee-na.” That first one bothers me for some reason, it sounds like they’re calling Yumemi a dank maymay or something.
If I ever do try out Funimation’s free trial, I’ll probably binge Planetarian’s dub because I think Matranga is a great choice for the Junker.
I agree with you. Those dub pronunciations are weird to me, especially the one they chose for Jena. I mean, I can understand changing the emphasis in the pronunciation to make it flow a little better in English (I’m guessing this is why names like Tomoya, Nagisa, and Ryou weren’t delivered quite right in the Clannad dub), but I don’t see why the original pronunciations wouldn’t flow in this case.
