Category: 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)

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)

Erm… what is going on here? Wasn’t this thing supposed to air in Spring? I can understand previewing the first episode a few months in advance, but to air the second episode a week later… what are the producers trying to do here? Is there some announcement that I missed or something? In any case, if this does end up airing weekly then you can consider it as one of the shows I’m going to blog. If it has some really weird airing system, then… to be honest I have no idea. I still have no bloody clue how I’m going to cover Supernatural the Animation this season…

In any case, one thing that I DO know about this show is that it’s another product of Wao World, the people who were behind the movies Nitaboh, Furusato Japan and Symphony in August. This series misses their flagship director, but a lot of other people who worked on these movies are also working on this series. Especially interesting is going to be the upcoming movie, which is going to be directed by someone who went from a special effects expert to an executive producer to a director. That should be interesting (because yes, both the movie and the TV-series are made by different people).

Wao World, for those who don’t know about their previous works, pretty much is a company that tries to celebrate the Japanese cultural heritage. They’re the perfect antidote for the moe and bishies that have invaded anime nowadays and I’m really glad to see that they’re actually doing TV-series now. The big difference with their previous movies is that Showa Monogatari isn’t about performing: it instead tries to depict the daily lives of a typical family in the 1960s.

It’s got a pretty good balance between the uneventful parts and the drama that comes along with being a kid those days, like the tension with your parents. This episode also showed him getting into trouble for something as simple as secretly buying manga with his parents’ money (plus: ah, the sixties: the time in which children still could buy cigarettes unsupervised). This episode also touched upon the relative poverty that some families lived in, yet also makes sure to not portray it as one sided as you’d expect. On top of that, the past two episodes have devoted enough attention to a lot of other characters besides this kid: his parents and friends also received quite a bit of attention.

The weakest part of this show is probably its production values: the voice actors for the kids lack experience, and the animation is often quite jerky and off model. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a series like this, though and I like it a lot so far.
Rating: * (Good)