Category: White Album

Short Synopsis: Yuki and Touya finally get to see each other again.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Whoa, so many things happened in this episode, and yet it felt like a really quiet and slow-paced one. At this point, it’s pretty certain that this is one of these series that’s continuously building up for one big finale, and it’s also pretty sure that Touya and Yuki are going to break up with each other. The question is just going to be: how? And how are the two of them going to end up afterwards?

So this whole time, Touya has been trying to live his own life, I think also trying to find something to be busy with in order to forget how often he’s apart from Yuki. Most people indeed wouldn’t put that much time into the wishes of someone else like he’s doing with Misaki, but I think that he unintentionally tries to seek distraction, and with that he’s also getting more and more distanced from Yuki. I’m starting to get the points that this series is trying to make like this.

I also loved the very subtle sense of humour in this episode. The jokes around Haruka were fun, but not meant to be laughed at. Still, it was pretty cute when Touya discovered how she broke into his apartment that evening. We do need to see a bit more about Haruka, though. Something’s clearly bugging her: she’s jealous of Yuki, and probably looked up to her, since she apparently spent a lot of time with Touya since her childhood and was never really able to let this go, but I just know that the creators are still hiding something from her. That breakdown of hers isn’t just explained through simple loneliness.

My only problem is that this series the umpth one that is overplaying the “dead parents” trope a bit too much. I know that it’s a good way to evoke sympathy and all, but when it’s becoming an exception for a character’s parents to be both not missing or dead, then you know something’s going in the wrong direction.

And what the heck was up with Yayoi at the end of this episode? This really is the first episode where Touya definitely cheated on Yuki, but why Yayoi of all people?

Short Synopsis: The identity of the mysterious high school girl gets revealed and Rina invites Touya to his own recording session.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
So in the end, this remains a harem, though it also remains a damn good one. I’m not watching this series to see how many girls Touya can screw, and I don’t care whether this series ends with Touya ends up breaking up with Yuki, making up with her, or even if he ends up screwing everyone and his dog (not exactly the most appropriate figure of speech to use here, but you get the point). Right now, I’m satisfied enough with the show’s execution and how well it captured the different emotions of the different characters.

If School Days was blessed with the same execution, I bet that I wouldn’t have hated it as much as I did in the end. Especially in the harem genre, where it’s WAY too easy to throw a bunch of girls together near one protagonist, making them fall in love with him for the shallowest reasons, you NEED this good execution, otherwise you’ll just end up with a copy of all the fifty or so (how many are there anyway?) harems that are already out there.

Anyway, the mysterious high school girl turns out to be the girl that Touya was supposed to tutor. It turns out to be an easy job, since she seems to be a very good student and her mother simply hired him in an attempt do do her daughter a favour. She’s a typical girl whose parents are always out, and stands out the most in the surprisingly direct comments she makes towards Touya.

I think that this episode also showed that Touya doesn’t believe he’s cheating, but simply was helping out a friend in need. However later, he does behave a bit obsessive when Rina suddenly pops up, up to the point where Misaki just walks out of him. Haruka also turns out to have feelings for the guy. We really need to see a bit more about her.

One thing that I feel like is missing here is other males. True tears did this quite well, where the female characters also had feelings for other males apart from the lead character, but here Touya is the only one for the female characters to fall in love with. Are there no other childhood friends for both Haruka and Misaki? How come we never see Yuki hanging out with other boys? Ah well, it must have been a conscious decision from the creators to not make this into an overly convoluted soap opera love polygon, but it does feel a bit jarring at times.

Short Synopsis: Touya helps Misaki with her story, while Yuki records her new song.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
I really have hardly anything to say about this episode. It was over before I knew it, and mostly spent its time building up for the future episodes. My brain feels kind-of empty after watching this episode, which quite possibly is a good thing.

This episode was all about Tooya, spending time with Misaki, while trying to keep this a secret from Yuki. The only real cheating that Touya has done so far is with Yuki’s manager, though at the same time, I think that Yuki isn’t going to be happy when she finds out about how Touya has been spending his time with all these girls. Oh, and the creators did give Hirano Aya a small chance to sing in this episode. She did it quite well, and remained within her subtle voice. I also liked how the producers made Yuki do the song over and over. Most of the times in these idol-anime, the lead characters get these songs immediately right after one or two takes, while in reality it probably takes much longer to get a satisfying result.

Short Synopsis: Yayoi approaches Touya, with the message to leave Yuki alone.
Episode Rating: 8/10 (Excellent)
Haha! Nice: the creators are actually preventing Hirano Aya from singing in this series, even though she plays the role of an idol. I must say that I wholeheartedly agree on them in that decision, because it would completely have ruined Yuki’s character. Even one of Hirano’s best roles, Chiko from Nijuu Mensou no Musume, raised quite a few eyebrows when she started singing. It has to be a conscious decision from the creators of this series, because Hirano usually takes over the singing in nearly every show she stars in. Now I also see why she’s been absent from the OP and ED so far. ^^;

In any case, this episode adds a whole new dimension to this story, by focusing on Yayoi and Misaki, and it does so in such a way for it to actually make sense, rather than insert an obligatory filler to satisfy the fans of said characters from the game. It was quite a surprise for me when ayoi started hitting on Touya, in order to take his attention away from Yuki, even though it had it coming with this series’ set-up.

I must say that this series has overall proven to be a very interesting variation to Makoto Shinkai’s “being away from the one you love”-theme. While Shinkai’s leads generally remain faithful despite the distance, the thing is the entire opposite for Touya. Not only is there a large distance between him and Yuki, but he’s also being pressured from all sorts of sides to break up with her. His feelings already were a time bomb about to go off, but now that also Misaki is starting to depend on him, it’s become even worse. I do like, however, how Misaki has her own life, and the creators came up quite a decent excuse for her to rely on Touya for emotional support. I’m really liking this series more with every episode, and yes, this is coming from someone who once hated all harems with passion.

Short Synopsis: Rina arranges a date for Touya and Yuki but the two keep running past each other.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Well, this series continues on the same thread that it’s been setting for the past few episodes: very unpredictable, complex, hard to understand and full of subtle emotions. I’ve seen this series compared to School Days a few times, and I guess that the two are similar at their basic premises, though the big difference was that School Days was really badly written: characters went out of character just as the plot saw fit, there was hardly any attention to detail or attempt to flesh out the characters beyond their basic stereotypes.

And that’s indeed why I’m liking this series so much. The basic premise is a pretty simple one of a boy who interacts with a bunch of cute girls, but the creators really made the cast come alive, and avoid lumping their characters along with all of the thousand stereotypes that are already there. Okay, so what if they don’t know how to spell “north”, the backgrounds overall are pretty basic in this series, but in order to make up for it the foreground animation is really well done.

So, if I understood it correctly, Rina arranges a date between Touya and Yuki. However, since she calls Touya at five am he’s half awake when he hears the appointment and fails to correctly remember the time and place of arrival. At first I found it a bit strange why the guy didn’t have her cell phone number, but then I remembered that this series is set in 1986… not 2009. ^^; In any case, at the station he accidentally bumps into a middle school girl who mistakes him as a molester, so he also wastes precious time trying to get that misunderstanding straight, and at the meantime she also helps his indecisiveness at the moment.

What made this episode so hard to understand was the huge amount of small flashbacks that the creators threw in. Especially when watching raw, it is a bit confusing when suddenly characters start looking back at past events. I like this however a lot. Those flashbacks really feel like memories: they’re there, and before you know it they’re gone again. This series isn’t of long ten-minute flashbacks, but instead it presents these flashbacks as how a person would remember them. Very nice touch.

Another complex part is Rina again: what the heck is she up to? Why couldn’t Yuki arrange the date herself, and why did Rina have to phone Touya about it, at such a nonsensical time of five o’clock in the morning? What was she planning to do at the beginning of the episode, disguised and all? And how about Yayoi? I originally thought that she was simply taking on the role of the very strict manager, but her mood was completely different this time.

Short Synopsis: Rina arranges a new job for Tooya.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
I’m starting to like this series more and more. The writing is very subtle, and likes to skip scenes of dialogue, to instead just show the expressions on the characters’ faces. And especially with Rina: it’s really hard to try and understand what she’s thinking. Why is she so specifically hitting on the boyfriend of one of her good friends? The girl is a very good actress, so it’s hard to tell where she was simply putting up an act or genuine, and the writers of this series are really good at switching the impression the viewers are supposed to get of her multiple times within one episode.

First, she invites Tooya to a job: be Rina’s assistant manager. When he arrives for his first day, Rina turns out to have fired her old manager, so that Tooya has to become her main manager. Then, after seeing Tooya and Yuki flirting with each other while she was rehearsing, she smacks Tooya (twice) and a day later he’s fired. Then it turns out that it wasn’t Rina who fired him, but her brother. Yuki was also supposed to have a day off at Saturday, which she planned to spend together with Tooya, but this was cancelled due to a sudden job that came up. I’m not sure whether Rina was behind that one too, but the possibility is definitely there.

I’m surprised at how badly this series is received. Weren’t shows with cute girls and eroge adaptations supposed to be popular? In any case, I like this series, and how it intentionally waits with playing all of its trumps in the first round. There’s a lot going on in this series, but most of it is still pretty much hidden, and instead the creators go for a slow but solid and natural progression of events.

It’s a shame that the animation quality went down this episode, but that was to be expected. Now I just hope that the creators have enough budget to return back to the same quality of the first episode (a la Birdy the Mighty), but I do fear that the biggest part of the animation budget was blown on the first two episodes like you see with most short series like this one.

Short Synopsis: Due to a stress, Yuki pays a surprise visit to Touya.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Good)
Ah, why not; I’m going to blog this series. It’s going to be a nice quick series from a genre that I usually don’t blog about. I’m able to blog three new series this season, and for the final one I was doubting between this one and Kemono no Souja Erin (I think it’s pretty obvious what the other two are going to be ^^;). I was at first edging for Erin, but then I changed my mind: White Album, while it may have some clichés in it, it’s way better executed than Erin. The problem with Trans Arts is that they’ve got an eye for new and fresh premises, but they don’t know squat about actually making a good story. I’ve been disappointed by them one too many times, especially considering that none of their series went really right so far.

I definitely know that I’m not good at blogging romance shows. With True Tears I kept switching sides after every single episode, and my experiment of blogging Macross Frontier turned into a complete disaster. Still, I’m going to take this chance again because these two episodes have been really well written. The creators have an eye for detail, and manage to get the best out of their actors. This show has subtlety, of which I’m a big fan of. It also brings Hirano Aya back to a role that actually FITS her: a subtle one. The Yuki here is reserved and not very confident of herself, and far away from the energetic characters that she usually plays and fails horribly at.

My biggest fear for this series is that it’s going to turn into some cheesy harem along the way, but I’ll remain confident for now. There are plenty of male characters so far with their own distinctive personalities, and I’m especially intrigued by Rina: something tells me that there’s much more to her than what we just saw of her: here she accompanies Yuki to see her boyfriend, and then she starts hitting on the guy behind her back.

It’s interesting how this show doesn’t seem to have a director, or either the director is so obscure that he/she wasn’t even mentioned on the show’s promos. In fact, most of the important staff members of this series have relatively little experience. This can be either incredibly bad (they don’t know many of the major pitfalls yet) or incredibly good (new ideas that current anime staff can’t think off). I’m really edging for the latter with White Album.