Category: Finished Series: Slice of Life/Drama

Showa Monogatari – 04

by psgels, posted in Showa Monogatari



A surprising episode in which we get to see some background on Kouhei’s parents. His mother basically takes him to visit the place where she grew up (she needed to be there anyway for a class reunion), and there she tells him about how she met Kouhei’s father. It’s a nice little story of how the two ended up getting married, albeit a bit simple, but again this shows that this is a family series: it can be enjoyed by any age, as long as you like slice of life.

Unfortunately, there really are two annoying characters in this show that make it less enjoyable than what it could have been. The first is the narrator who looks and sounds like she’s talking to a three year old kid. The second is Kouhei. He’s not annoying all the time, but the point in this episode in which he had daydreams about his mother leaving with that crush she once had was just… too much.

Still, it’s a nice nostalgic episode for the characters and it did a good job of showing different sides to the older characters here. I like how the crush of Kouhei’s mother was really a teenaged crush that went over with time.

In any case, the next episode will arrive somewhere in May. I’ll pick it back up there.
Rating: * (Good)

Showa Monogatari – 02 (Not 03)

by psgels, posted in Showa Monogatari



Okay, so apparently I mistook the second episode that I reviewed a month ago for the actual third episode. Today, finally the real second episode and the fourth episode became available It’s confusing, but then again, this show really needs all of the advertising it can get. Especially since it still hasn’t gotten fansubbed…

In nay case, this episode starts with a strange and annoying announcer, and it’s more than apparent that the voice actor of the lead kid can’t act during the dramatic parts. Apart from that though, it again was a pretty good episode here. This time, it focused on the way in which the main cast lived in an era of transition: on one side there was the second world war that people were still recovering from (signified by the scarcity of water), and the way that people started looking towards the future.

The main character is a kid, but at the same time this show also gives ample time to the rest of the characters. I liked how this episode also focused on his brother as he tried to fit into the working culture of Japan, that would later propel the country to becoming one of the top economies in the world.His sister meanwhile also has the problems of finding a guy, and his parents have the problems of trying to raise him, and his grandmother has the loss of her husband. If this show was solely aimed at kids, we probably would never have gotten all of them nicely fleshed out like that.

Oh, and the ED is different this time as well. I’m not exactly sure what the creators are playing, but they sound very authentic. And that’s really a key word for this series. There have been movies that tell slice of life stories that took place around World War II, but there are hardly any TV series that can claim the same. The only one I can think of is Porfy no Nagai Tabi. The animation obviously isn’t that good, but the extra length is definitely going to be interesting here to paint a nice picture of how life was back in those days in Japan. I mean, Rainbow was a very good series and all, but to call it realistic…
Rating: * (Good)

Bakuman – 18

by psgels, posted in Bakuman



Akito’s brother… am I the only one who got Light vibes from him?

Anyway, it’s taken a while, but I’m liking this series quite a bit at this point. After the Nurarihyon no Mago debacle, I really began to fear for series that took their time at the start, but this thankfully proved to be a good example of how to do this. We’ve seen eighteen episodes of development into these characters, and it’s paying off quite nicely at this point and turning Akito and Moritaka especially into well rounded characters.

This episode also reminded me of how this is coming from the Death Note authors: we’re talking about a shounen jump adaptation here, and yet this episode was filled with dialogue (though admittedly it’s not as extreme as it was in Death Note). It’s what made this episode really interesting in any case.

Even though the tone is apparently very different compared to the manga, I do understand now why everyone forced me to blog this show. Even the series’ weak side, the romance, got progressed quite a bit in this episode. Akito and Kaya actually feel like a genuine couple now, and this finally sparked Moritaka to do something about his own as well. The past episodes have also upped the pacing a tiny notch, and if the creators can keep this up for both the rest of this season and the sequel, this could turn into quite a satisfying series in the end.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Hourou Musuko – 04

by psgels, posted in Hourou Musuko



I’m also watching Kimi ni Todoke at this moment. And really, the difference here shows when a series actually has characters who openly know that people have a crush on them. It makes for much more interesting drama here, beyond the usual “when in God’s name will they ever find out that they’re into each other!?”

This episode was mostly building up. Those episodes are rather dangerous in a Noitamina series of only eleven episodes, but this episode still added a lot of stuff to the series here. It established that both Saori and Shuuichi are too stubborn to give up their crushes. I also like how they are constantly talking about this and their feelings, instead of keeping it all cropped up. And I mean, they’re teenagers so they’re bound to be impulsive and strange at times, but in the same time I like how Nitori wants to be a girl, not just for the sake of this crush, but because he really feels like he is born in the wrong body.

I also like how the problems that Yoshino has aren’t some kind of mirror of Shuuichi here. They both have to deal with growing up physically, but she is far less bothered with hormones and love than Shuuichi is.
Rating: * (Good)

Bakuman – 17

by psgels, posted in Bakuman



This was another one of the very good episodes of Bakuman. The premise was simple: just stuff a bunch of mangaka into a room watch them for 20 minutes. It worked wonderfully and I loved how good they play off each other. Nizuma and Moritaka already were very different, but the creators add two more vastly different characters here, with varying amounts of experience.

This episode also touched upon the less than dreamy side of manga writing: if you can’t come up with interesting storylines or images you can very easily spend decades as an assistant. Granted, this is an anime so I guess that we are to assume that that 33-year-old guy is really old, but this episode did seem to suggest that most manga authors are fairly young. Is that a fair assumption, or are there also plenty of older mangaka around, beyond the successful ones?

I also like how this episode established that Niizuma wasn’t perfect either, and that he actually learns some things from the other characters. The dialogue in this episode felt quite natural, especially when Eiji went out of “airplane-mode” and started talking normally. This probably is the first shounen jump adaptation in ages that doesn’t have some sort of bad guy, and it really showed in this episode: nobody is really trying to be evil here, and instead they’re just being themselves.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Hourou Musuko – 03

by psgels, posted in Hourou Musuko




Most of the time when anime use far-away shots, this is to save budget: after all, it’s easier to draw something smaller because you don’t need as much detail. Hourou Musuko however puts a great amount of detail into these shots, making them look just great. It’s really something that could not be done before the era of HD. On top of that, I also love the attention this series spends on its backgrounds. I don’t mean the regular background art: that’s just some art with a watercolour filter over it. Instead, I love how this show draws all of the people in the background, with all sorts of realistic poses and make them more than a bunch of cardboard copy-pasted cut-outs that are just there to fill space.

This episode, among many others, also introduced a staple of school-based series: the school festival. Interestingly, with some help from Saori the thing that the class ended up doing was a gender-bender play. Interestingly, the students get to write the play themselves (by Shuuichi and Saori, to be exact). It’s here where Shuuichi shows that he’s actually a capable writer, but like most writers of his age, he’s very much into self-insert fan-fiction.

Oh, and this series broke another big taboo here as well: some people actually have a relationship with each other. Maho (Shuuichi’s sister) actually has a boyfriend; romance isn’t limited to a bunch of love triangles surrounding the main couple! And even the lead couple is more than just “will they won’t they”: while it’s true that it’s still uncertain whether or not they will end up together, it does seem like they actually both considered to go into a relationship, but chose to just stay as friends. That’s actually much better compared to all of those character that are oblivious to their own feelings and refuse to take their relationships anywhere.

Probably the biggest question-mark of this episode was: who actually knows about Shuuichi wanting to be a girl, and who actually knows about about Yoshino wanting to be a girl? I’m suspecting that very few know about the latter, but at this point I’m not quite sure why exactly Mahou didn’t want her boyfriend to see her brother, because Riku seemed more surprised at Maho wanting to strip her brother than that brother actually walking around in girls’ clothes.

Overall it’s a great depiction of middle schoolers, though. Their actions at times are a bit irrational, like when Saori tried to dress up Shuuichi despite earlier telling him not to, and at the same time it’s not like this show is caught up in its own angst at all: the tension comes and goes very quickly and naturally. Is it as good as Aoi Hana, though? At this point, I’d say not yet: Aoi Hana brought in even more layers in making its characters feel alive. At the same time though, I don’t see it doomed to remain in Aoi Hana’s shadow: if the rest of the episodes are good enough, I can really see this show getting progressively better as it goes on.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Bakuman – 16

by psgels, posted in Bakuman



Bizarrely enough, this episode ended with a twist from a bad soap opera, in which Character A walks in on Character B and C while they’re making out. It’s a good thing that there are no love triangles in this series.

Apart from that, it pretty much was the same old story here: this episode was slooooooow, but some stuff did happen: Akito dived into a bit of a writer’s block, Mio made her first appearance on TV and Moritaka is going to be the assistant of Nizuma Eiji during the summer vacation. That latter was probably the major development of this episode, but the fact that people actually kissed here also is a major breakthrough. As opposed to Moritaka and Mio, Akito and Kaya actually spend time together, which is a much healthier way to develop a relationship.

And yeah… that’s pretty much all I have to say about it. Normally with blogging I try to at least fill three paragraphs, but this is moving at such a slow pacing that apart from that I don’t have much to say about it, hence this fillery paragraph…
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Hourou Musuko – 02

by psgels, posted in Hourou Musuko




Finally! Another good AIC series!. These guys really got on my nerves in 2010, in which they released a truckload of series and I only ended up liking one of those (Tentai Senshi Sunred, to be exact). This however is an excellent depiction of the bustling school life. It’s perhaps a bit on the angsty side, but the creators somehow succeeded in making a very slow paced slice of life series in which a lot of stuff is happening at the same time.

As someone who hasn’t read anything about the manga, I like the decision to start out in the middle of the manga. There are already too many series that only end up animating the first X volumes of their source material, and this is an interesting twist on the matter, especially considering how there is no way that Hourou Musuko is going to be longer than 11 episodes (Noitamina and all).

At first it’s a bit confusing, but this show explains where necessary and at this point I’ve finally got a good image of who the characters are. Whereas Aoi Hana’s cast was really small, Hourou Musuko’s is quite large, but that’s what I like about it. My problem with a lot of high school series is that they only bother to give a character to four or five important characters. Here, the entire classroom feels alive.

During this episode, I also nearly forgot at times that this is about cross dressers. It’s so unlike any other cross-dressing show I’ve seen, and this episode was about many more things than just the male lead’s gender issues. A major theme was with the female lead and her friends. It was nicely built up in the way that you only realize that it was building up to this when the major parts already started.

Overall I really like slowly learning more and more about these characters who already have a heap of backstory prior to the start of this series. The main downside is that I still have no idea which character is named which. I usually have to look up some characters’ names while writing these blog entries, but in this series it is really extreme: I even have no clue what the names of the two lead characters are…
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Bakuman – 15

by psgels, posted in Bakuman



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)

Some Quick First Impressions: Hourou Musuko and Fractale

by psgels, posted in Fractale, Hourou Musuko, Some Quick First Impressions

Hourou Musuko

Short Synopsis: Our lead character wants to be a girl.
At the start of this episode it was a tad hard to figure out who was who because the creators didn’t bother to introduce most of the characters (this episode started in the middle of an already ongoing story), but yeah: this is good. It’s got some of the best acting of the entire season, it’s wonderfully animated with its own distinct art style, and this episode did a great job of portraying its different characters. I like how all these characters have had a history between them, and act like it. It’s miles away from the usual “childhood friends” stereotype that you usually see, and even the fact that the male lead cross-dresses is portrayed in a way unlike I have ever seen. This show takes itself seriously and really knows how to do good drama. The only pitfall that I can see is that this is Noitamina: does the story of the manga fit within 11 episodes, or do we get another rushed ending like with Kuragehime?
OP: Decent, but cliched and nothing special.
ED: Well sung at the beginning, but then loses steam.
Potential: 85%

Fractale

Short Synopsis: Our lead character saves a strange girl from a bunch of bad guys.
Ah, now I understand why this got to be Noitamina: it’s heavily inspired by Ghibli. It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a series. This show pretty much tries to add the moe factor to Ghibli, with some parts that work and others that don’t. In a lot of ways this one reminds me of Dragon Crisis’ first episode. It’s only that the setting for this one is much more creative, while the characterization is far from as good. The annoyance of the characters is definitely going to be the biggest problem for this series: just about every major character had his or her moment that rather got on my nerves due to the stereotypical moe acting, the worst being the male lead whenever his hormones started acting up. Still, this episode brought quite a bit of interesting stuff to make up for it, including a really trippy OP and a very detailed setting that is unlike anything that appeared during the past two years.
OP: Very trippy, excellent example of how to do a low-budget OP correctly.
ED: A bit of a boring ballad.
Potential: 70%