Author: psgels

Well, well, what have we here. Another anime show featuring a girl becoming a J-Pop-idol, this time featured by two shinigami in cat- and bunny suit in order to help her. Recipe for failure, isn’t it? Well, guess again. Our main character has namely been blessed with a throat cancer, which immediately takes this anime away from all of the other J-Pop-shows.

The series consists of a massive 52 episodes. The first thirteen episodes feature Mitsuki (our main character) getting introduced to being an idol, making her first single, and doing all sorts of stuff beginning artists do. Even though these episodes may be somewhat inspirational, they also remain boring. It will indeed be difficult to sit through these scenes if you don’t have a lot of patience. The second part consists of a few very good episodes, in between a number of boring ones. Even though these boring episodes may be a pain to watch, the juicy episodes totally make up for it, ending with a satisfying climax to end the first half of the series. The third part is just like the second part, but then with a bit less boringness and a bit more awesomeness. It was also good to see that the creators finally managed to include a bit of humor.

Then the fourth part comes. Believe me. The first five episodes WILL blow you off your chair, and you WILL end up crying. These are without a doubt the saddest scenes ever to be seen in anime. After these fantastic episodes the tension tones down a bit, but the remaining episodes will still be very enjoyable to watch. This goes on, until the final episode, which waltzes you down again with some of the most amazing scenes.

The following paragraph may be a bit of a spoiler, so be a bit careful. The final couple of episodes were indeed incredibly awesome. Why? Because the emphasis didn’t go to the two main characters, but the side-characters finally came into the spotlights and got to shine. The result is magnificent. I guess the creators were also aware that if this was to be handled by the main characters only, than it would have turned out to be incredibly cliché.

Because this is a singing-anime, one would not expect less than an amazing soundtrack. And the series delives on that. Even though I’m not interested in J-Pop, I found myself enjoying every note of the music. At least, most of the times. There’s a minor issue in which the creators make the mistake of using one particular song a bit too much. This results in a bit of repetitiveness, and some annoying moments.

When you start with this anime, you’ll immediately notice that this anime has a slight problem in the Seiyuu (I hope I spelled that right). Mitsuki’s voice just doesn’t sound like one of a twelve-year-old. It’s just too mature. But this problem fades away very fast, as you get used to it pretty quickly.

The characters are another strong point of Full Moon wa Sagashite. Even though you have to get used to them for a while in the beginning, the character development is awesome, and you will be feeling along with every single one of the main characters during their important scenes.

Overall, this is an amazing anime. The only bad part is that you need a lot of patience to get through the boring parts in order to enjoy the juicy stuff.

Okay. Whoever thinks that all 44-year-old anime sucks, should seriously check out Tales of a Streetcorner. That’ll certainly change his or her mind. This is the proof that even some of the first anime are awesome.

This anime tells the story of several animate and inanimate objects: a little girl, a tree, an old street lamp, a curious little mouse, a mischievous moth and a relatively large number of posters on a wall in an alley, which include a violinist, a pianist and a bar girl. Believe it or not, but each of these actor has its own interesting story.

The largest part features an introduction of the “characters”. I put “characters” between quotation marks, because technically, the term would not be right for some of the roles. Although I do have to say that each of them has several characteristics of normal persons. Anyway, we get to learn all of the “characters”, we get to know their problems, personality, daily lives, et cetera. Along with this, we get to see a huge load of different posters, all with people living their daily lives on it. It was good to see that the creators actually put some jokes in this. I’m not going to spoiler all of the different stories here, but do have to say that most of them are really adorable. They’re so simple, yet I think thats the reason they work so well.

At the last ten minutes, or so, this show takes a turn you would so not expect from a show with this nature. It really had me shocked for a while. But after thinking about it a bit more, it does begin to make sense, as this was made no less than ten years after World War II (1962, to be exactly). The ending it features is probably one of the best endings ever. I enjoyed it a LOT.

The graphics are, of course nothing special. But for some reason, I wasn’t really bothered by the old-looking drawings. The music is another strong point in this anime. It’s really the type of sound that sticks to your mind like bubble-gum, and won’t come off for quite a while when left alone. The sound effects also work really well. They’re mostly there for comedy reasons, but they’re really consistant, and contribute to the unique atmosphere of this anime.

Overall, I’d say that if you’re thinking of trying out a very old anime, you should definately check out Tales of a Streetcorner. And even if you’re not, you should.