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REVIEW: The Fable Episodes 1-25 Anime Streaming Review




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Daidan12



Joined: 13 Aug 2024
Posts: 40
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 11:20 am Reply with quote
I really wish someone picked it up weekly, but I am happy that you found the charm of the show.
The manga is many times better and in only one major instance I was really disappointed with the limited animation the show uses (a wonderful spread of Sato "teleporting" on Hina's rescue storyline).
The VA's were perfect and they show managed to capture the feel of the manga and sometimes enhance it (Yoko's dates are superior in the anime thanks to Sawashiro's masterful performance).

Small correction but The Fable - Second Contact is already finished, not ongoing.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11553
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 11:46 am Reply with quote
I'm not a stickler for animation most of the time, at least until the wheels are really falling off, or degenerates to putting speed lines on stills of inanimate objects, so overall I liked the art style. This was one of my favorites of the last two seasons, and it's a shame so many people passed on it, if they even knew it existed.

I disagree that Yoko's kink was humiliating her targets. She got pretty drunk along with them, and you know how everything is funny when you're drunk. And they're too drunk to really be humiliated (they don't see her laughing at them and are focused on staying upright and conscious). So for her, it's not them being humiliated that she enjoys, but rather she thinks they're at their cutest, the way people enjoy watching awkward kittens and puppies blunder about. The only possibly mean-spirited aspect to it is that she also enjoys maneuvering them into getting so drunk in the first place, because that's a battle of wits and endurance. When they're staggering around, it means she won. And the guys she goes after aren't exactly poor innocents. They think they're getting her drunk enough to sleep with them, after all.
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Zhou-BR



Joined: 28 Feb 2008
Posts: 1459
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 11:53 am Reply with quote
One of my favorite shows of the year, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for something truly original and offbeat (trigger warning for sexual assault, though). Honestly, compared to Under Ninja and other recent Tezuka Productions shows I've seen, I thought the animation was fairly acceptable and consistent. Not every show needs fluid motion.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2479
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 1:58 pm Reply with quote
Yeah, can't say the animation ever bothered me. The material seemed well-suited to a weaker or less well-funded studio, I guess? Could have expressed itself in cardboard cutouts and had me laughing.
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Conty



Joined: 16 Sep 2024
Posts: 2
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 2:26 pm Reply with quote
Spoilers follow. Dunno what the statute of limitations is around here for finished shows so I'll just mark the entire thing.

There are hints that Akira Sato spoiler[is on the autism spectrum. We're shown time and time again he's terrible at picking up social cues which leads to some comedy, but it perversely loops around to allow him to detach from his actual job... of murderizing people.]

I appreciate they treated spoiler[Kojima's ED seriously. He's using violence as a stand-in for sex, and become a mad dog that had to be put down. Not the sort of thing I'm used to seeing in these sorts of stories, or at all in genre media.]
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Maleko Ai



Joined: 06 May 2018
Posts: 72
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 3:18 pm Reply with quote
One of the underrated of the year.
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KrisPNatz



Joined: 20 Jul 2024
Posts: 24
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 3:41 pm Reply with quote
I think it does Yoko a great disservice to call her Sato's "assistant" when in actuality she's his partner. They're coworkers who work under the same guy (he is also arguably their foster father) and sure her job is more technical while Sato's is to be in the field but in no way is she his understudy or secretary. They're equals who both have what they're good at and they fill in the gaps the other is incapable of doing, just because she is the less stronger fighter doesn't mean she isn't his superior in all the intel gathering, record keeping and etc she does for him that he's clearly incapable of even approaching doing, my man can't even work a computer. There are many criminal/spy duos like this in plenty of stories that are gendered both man/woman as well as man/man but I always find it odd that a woman in the more technical role is considered the "assistant" where a man in Yoko's role would be considered a "partner" and often the one in charge ala an owner directing their guard dog on a leash, like a man doing the tech role is somehow more important in the hierarchy of a team.

Gina Szanboti wrote:
I disagree that Yoko's kink was humiliating her targets.

Seconding this, it's stated outright that Yoko is attracted to incompetent men because she spends all her time with a highly competent assassin so the stumbling and bumbling is less a humiliation kink and more an inherent attraction to incompetence. Humiliation kink would involve a sense of superiority over a subject but she just wants to see them in a state of incoherence because she finds that state wildly attractive especially when it's coming from men who are overly confident, if anything it comes off as an attraction to vulnerability in the most ludicrous way.

Overall I absolutely LOVED The Fable, this and Yatagarasu have been my back to back favorites of the Spring AND Summer seasons with few other seasonal offerings even coming close. I loved that Yuki Kaji voiced Yuki Kawai and I so wish we got to see more of their interactions because he's the perfect voice to play a "victim" of Yoko's. Apparently there's one more arc after this in the original manga so I'm really hoping they green light a season 2 at some point. I know Tezuka is not known for doing sequels but Kanojo mo Kanojo managed to jump to a different studio and get a season 2 so here's to hoping the same could happen for The Fable and if some people didn't care for the animation there'd be a possibility for that to improve as well. What I find the most perplexing is the fact it was licensed by Disney of all people, this seems like the literal last thing they would license even if it is on Hulu but then again I was shocked they licensed Black Rock Shooter and Tokyo Revengers albeit for different reasons.

Also I would like to add that... I find Sato attractive... Embarassed HE'S CUTE
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Matros



Joined: 22 Feb 2021
Posts: 315
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 3:52 pm Reply with quote
Zhou-BR wrote:
One of my favorite shows of the year, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for something truly original and offbeat (trigger warning for sexual assault, though). Honestly, compared to Under Ninja and other recent Tezuka Productions shows I've seen, I thought the animation was fairly acceptable and consistent. Not every show needs fluid motion.


There's limited animation and there's outright fundamentally broken animation like in this show. If people find this acceptable then more committees will get away with bare minimum effort productions.
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Lord Geo



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 2648
Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 4:05 pm Reply with quote
Matros wrote:
There's limited animation and there's outright fundamentally broken animation like in this show. If people find this acceptable then more committees will get away with bare minimum effort productions.


Then you should really give a proper example of how "outright fundamentally broken" the animation is, because even in the review the only example given is "a still frame featuring two stock-still characters that stay frozen for what feels like half a minute while dialogue and sound effects continue to play", which really doesn't sound like "abysmal" or "ugly" animation to me. There is mention of "frequently off-model characters" in the negatives, as well, but it's literally just a quick mention in the review itself, with no real clarification.

Instead The Fable sounds like something akin to the Violinist of Hameln's TV anime adaptation in 1996/1997, which was also infamous for its usage of highly limited animation, still frames, & slow pans (all done on purpose by the director, by his own admission), yet told an outstanding & riveting story with memorable characters & an excellent musical score, & even took advantage of its limited animation by delivering a deluge of Osamu Dezaki-esque Postcard Memories.

Animation simply not moving is not "broken", incompetent, "ugly", or "abysmal", but rather is simply limited, and while some productions have certainly used it as a crutch there is also an art form in limited animation, in & of itself. Unfortunately, critiques like the one in the review (that seemingly complain more about the lack of constantly fluid animation than anything else) make it seem as though animation is only "good" when it's constantly moving in some fashion, which seems immensely reductive & sadly seems to be a general belief by some anime fans nowadays.
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Covnam



Joined: 31 May 2005
Posts: 3799
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 4:43 pm Reply with quote
I didn't find the first episode that great, but really enjoyed the series from the second on, so I'm glad I gave it another chance. This was definitely a favorite of mine this year. Hopefully we get another season since I think we only got about half of the manga animated.
I personally didn't have an issue with the animation, though I wouldn't say it's high grade either. For me, it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the show, so if that's all that they could budget, I think they did a good job with it.
It's probably splitting hairs, but I agree more with Kevin that it seems to me that Yoko enjoyed watching guys fall off their high horse rather than actually being attracted to them.
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Yune Amagiri



Joined: 28 Jul 2016
Posts: 1050
Location: France
PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2024 4:55 pm Reply with quote
It took a little while to get going but after it kept getting better until the end, even when they keep reusing the same joke, I definitely wouldn't mind a sequel, I want Akira to talk with his idol Jackal at some point to see how he reacts. Animation-wise this kind of serie is one of the rare case when low budget can actually work or rather i can't imagine a grade A animation made by top tier studio doing anything noteworthy for this work.
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