Ex-Arm Review

Ex-Arm fails at the level of individual frames, which is rare enough to be worth stating precisely. The production animates its characters in 3D and its backgrounds in 2D and never reconciles the two, so figures slide across environments they are not standing in, contact shadows go missing and footfalls land nowhere. The models are undercut by facial rigs that cannot hold an expression through a line of dialogue, and the direction cuts on action constantly, which exposes the problem rather than hiding it.

Motion capture is used for ordinary walking and conversation, and the result reads as people wading. The staffing explains all of it. The director came from live action with no anime experience and built a team around that background, and every choice in the series is one a person would make who has not looked closely at how the medium solves these problems. The manga underneath is ordinary but functional science fiction, a brain in a weapon and the unit that carries it, and the plot stays followable from beginning to end, which is the only thing here that works as intended.

The voice cast does clean work against nothing. Everything else, the fights, the faces, the sense that a body has weight, collapses, and the show became the reference point for the worst a production can do to a property it was handed.