After the eventful previous episode, we’re back to a leisurely pace this week, centred mostly on its aftermath, building up and one new major development: Mio’s debut as a voice actress. The romance itself didn’t really change during the past few episodes due to that strange promise of not wanting to meet each other until they’ve both made their dreams come true, but thankfully that’s about the only thing about this show that’s currently not moving (albeit really slowly). That’s pretty much this show’s biggest strength at this point.
This episode did give Moritaka some extra motivation though, now that he knows about it. Mio also showed some new sides of her: the conflict between her modesty and her dreams of becoming a voice actress. She did get herself quite a rare chance here (I can only imagine how different the voice acting business works from the manga writing business) and it took a while for her to really accept that she just made a major step toward becoming a full fledged voice actress.
The start of this episode meanwhile (the recap at the start was one minute and ten seconds long, by the way; I think I’m going to keep track of those times from now on…) showed also a bit more about the difference between Nizuma Eiji and our two lead characters. Because he’s on his own, he has this talent of making things up as he goes along, and somehow making it interesting (I’d like to see how that guy handles continuity, by the way), but with two people this suddenly becomes a lot more difficult as you have to make sure that you’re both on the same line of thought. At the same time though, Moritaka and Akito also don’t strike me as the pure version of the “calculating type”, in the way that Nizuma Eiji is the pure form of the “genius type”.
Rating: * (Good)
Just for your information, about half of this episode (the part about Miho) is anime original. I don’t remember her having this much screentime in the manga at all.
And man, how long will it take for a decent subgroup (with someone who actually knows Japanese) to pick this anime up? Now that they’re adding more original stuff to the anime, it’s not enough to just reference the manga to understand. *sigh*
Yes, half of the episode is just filler. The authors said they wanted the anime to attract non-Bakuman reading crowd to buy Bakuman. So basically this is a half hour commercial, rather than a faithful adaptation of the manga.
If you want to know how voice actress are starting their career watch ‘REC’ (if you didnt).
Besides, to be honest, Bakuman has always looked to me to be more suited to a slow-paced anime. I quit reading the manga because too much stuff happened that it became really hard to keep track of. Stopped having fun and just dropped it. Watching it go as a slower “slice-of-life” anime is exactly the thing I like.