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I first became interested in Wind – A Breath of Heart after this guy gave it a surprisingly positive review. After watching it, I can understand why. Wind is a typical series that’s short (it’s only got 13 episodes of fifteen minutes), simple, but effective.

It doesn’t start out that way, though. Especially the first few episodes are an exercise in “spot the overdone cliché”. I spotted the annoying spunky sister, the childhood sweetheart, stupid and energetic best friend, girl who keeps abusing this best friend, classmates with a part-time job in a café, there’s a priestess, a girl with heart problems, parents gone, the terrible cook, school sports festival, shrine festival (complete with yukatas) and of course the beach episode. The only thing that seemed to be missing was a sakura tree.

And yet, this series works. The biggest reason is a great cast of scriptwriters that manages to keep the story going and the dialogues meaningful. The airtime is short, but every character gets at least a bit of depth and goes beyond the usual stereotype. The cast feels fresh, and the main storyline is also a pretty good one. Don’t expect anything amazing, but it’s well told and surprisingly dark. My only complaint is that its conclusion may have come a bit too easy, in the way of “why didn’t you do this in the beginning?”

This series is also interesting in terms of graphics. At first sight, the CG and sloppy animation may seem like a turnoff, but it’s got a sort of “I don’t care whether I’m ugly but I want movement”-feeling, which I appreciate a lot. It’s so much better than nearly ninety percent of all other bishoujo-series, which are way too obsessed with creating the perfect female body.

Overal, this isn’t the most complete series but what it does feel is a whole (if that makes any sense). The different storylines are carefully woven into each other and not a second is really wasted. The scriptwriters know exactly how to use their time, and pleasantly surprised me.

Gems often pop up at strange places, and Solty Rei is a great example of this. I’m not sure why exactly I dropped it when it first aired, but it probably was something along the lines of “too dull” and “gonzo”. As it turns out, Solty Rei is a very capable anime and just as underrated.

Solty Rei does start out rather underwhelming, though. The cute characters and the dark-ish setting don’t mesh well together, nothing much really happens and the main character Solty is overly moralistic, with a typical storyline of “save the oppressed”. There’s also not much eye-candy for the viewer (none of the character-designs are really appealing and the animation has a lot of bugs). There’s honestly nothing much to get excited about, but thankfully a lot changes once this series hits its second half.

It’s rather hard to properly talk about this, since the entire second half is basically one big spoiler, but let’s just say that the first half knew exactly what it was doing, and merely was building up and fleshing characters out properly for a much, much darker second half. What shines the most is the character-development, where themes as family and loss play a central role central. The entire cast develops into something worthwhile, and not a character seems wasted.

But also the setting turns out to be much deeper than you’d originally expect. It starts out as your typical uninspired dystopia, but the series slowly develops this setting into something much more complex. The ending, at first sight may seem like another one of those overly ambitious endings, but it somehow works out and gives a great closure to the series.

Solty Rei is obviously a cheap-looking series, where Gonzo’s CG and the 2D animation just don’t mesh well together. The soundtrack is nothing special (apart from a small amount of excellent tracks that pop up once or twice), but what lies behind it is a charming series. It’s well-told (although it lies a bit too much on coincidences at times), it’s got a great setting and great character-development. It just needs to take a while to get fired up.

Seto no Hanayome: Gonzo’s attempt at comedy, and what a fine attempt it is. It’s very much the spiritual successor of Magikano: both series share directors, both feature cute girls and both managed to take an incredibly clichéd premise and turned it into something worthwhile. Seto no Hanayome is a bit tamer than Magikano was, and it’s also not the best comedy out there, but if you’re looking for something to laugh at, then it’s a great recommendation.

The key to the success here is the combination between the incredibly distorted faces that were also prevalent in Magikano, combined with a frantic pacing that hardly ever takes a break. Especially during the first half, this series makes sure to keep the laughs coming and coming, and it never seems to run out of inspiration for its next jokes. The characters are smartly not introduced all at once, so that each of them gets enough time to introduce his quirks to the audience.

Then, as the series entered its second half, the humour thank goodness didn’t get dull, and there still was plenty to laugh at. The characters thankfully receive enough depth to prevent them from getting dull after two or three episodes, which is very much appreciated, but this series does have some other problems, which pop up as it hits its second half, and the drama starts kicking in.

Don’t get me wrong, I usually love touching characters, but this is one of these series where drama just doesn’t belong. It gets in the way of the comedy and it’s also not that good anyway. Every time the characters started acting all serious, I kept longing back to the first half, where episodes just kept the jokes coming and coming. Thankfully, at least the series goes quickly back to comedy after these serious moments, but there’s one big exception to this: the bloody ending.

Oh, how deep does this series fall in its final two episodes. I guess it was to be expected with the director of Magikano behind it, but let’s just say that the climax of the story removes all traces of comedy whatsoever and goes down a predictable road with a story about a generic bad guy who tests the strength of the relationship of the two main characters. It’s predictable, dull and pretty much pointless.

It’s a pity when you watch a comedy with an identity crisis: no matter how hilarious the characters are, for some strange reason the creators find that they always need to close off their series with a big, epic and serious climax. The thing is though, that if I wanted to watch a good drama, I wouldn’t go for this series at all. Seto no Hanayome is all about comedy, and at least it’s got that part nailed very nicely. I especially wanted to give credit to the female lead: San. When compared to her counterparts in other romantic comedies, she feels really refreshing. She had a mind of her own, and she actually was one of my favourite characters in this series. I’m very easily bored by romantic comedies, but Seto no Hanayome has showed me yet again that the genre also has a fine selection of gems. The flaws remain, but in this case the pros do very much outweigh the cons.

Franz Kafka was once a German author, famous for his downright depressing stories. I’ve only read one work of his (about a salaryman, turning into a huge beetle and then dying from loneliness), but I can fully understand why he got that reputation. A Country Doctor is the interpretation of director Koji Yamamura, the director of Atama Yama on one of the guy’s short stories.

I think it’s already apparent through the screenshots, but the director went for a surreal approach with this 20-minute long movie. The character-designs are constantly warping into strange shapes, and the entire movie is chock-full of symbolism about the old country doctor that plays the main character in this story. You might need a second viewing in order to fully understand what’s going on.

Overall, I liked a country doctor. It’s a great short horror-ish story, but I do think that the director went a bit too overboard with his visual effects. The warped character-designs only distract from what’s really important in the movie, and the plot doesn’t flow as smoothly as you’d like at times. It’s just like Shoji Kawamura’s Spring and Chaos: you want to give a classic writer too much credit and go overboard with the style so that the style actually works against it a bit.

Nevertheless, the art style does look great and apart from a few humps and bumps along the way, the story is well-told for such a short time of 20 minutes and it gives a good look inside the mind of the titular country doctor. A country Doctor is obviously not for everyone (stay FAR away if you hate depressing stories), but if you’re looking for something surreal and have half an hour to burn, then why not give it a chance?

Coincidence can be a very strange thing… I started watching Space Battleship Yamato, and only five episodes later, this piece of news pops up. I mean, what are the odds of that happening? It doesn’t look like a remake, but more of a new movie, but still, based on the first television series of a franchise that spread three series and countless movies, it’s got its work cut out for it.

Space Battleship Yamato is the classic among classics, and Matsumoto Leiji’s debut into animation. Aired in 1974, after Lupin Sansei and Alps no Shoujo Heidi it was the very first television anime to get any significant popularity and it single-handedly defined the space opera genre for anime for many decades to come. Heck, even Mobile Suit Gundam has borrowed a lot of inspiration from the simple storyline of Space Battleship Yamato (executed much better and more interesting, of course).

After watching this series, I can see why it caught on so much. The story is simple but effective, and the crew of the Yamato is adequately developed in order to prevent the series to get dull after its halfway-point. Topics such as honour, love and manliness often pass the screen when pepole aren’t fighting, and the manliness seems enforced by the downright epic soundtrack. It’s of the kind that keeps sticking to your head like glue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being the best soundtrack of the seventies and early eighties.

But of course, this series was developed when anime was in such a young stage, and still needed to mature a lot. For starters, the storyline is incredibly simple: Earth is in danger and Yamato sets out to save it. It’s well told (and the main characters actually don’t get involved with the storyline by accident, and are instead trained officers), but I can’t help but think that it could have used something to spice everything up more. It’s like eating a salad without any dressing whatsoever. Sure, the lettuce is nice and all, but does taste rather plain. The ending does try to spice things up at least a bit with a number of plot-twists, but the problem is that this actually works against them and creates a Disney Ending (seriously, haven’t these people ever heard of checking a person’s heart pulse?!).

Then there’s the ton of technical errors that can be spotted in this series. The director and animators weren’t the most careful, and it’s clear that the production of Yamato was hurried a lot. Sometimes, there are odd leaps in logic (for example, one frame the Yamato is heavily damaged, full of holes, the next it’s magically fixed), the animation can be inconsistent (the bad guys suddenly go Vegeta and change skin-colour in the middle of the series), the animators have clearly trouble to synchronize the characters’ mouths to the voices properly, but the most grating is the huge amount of scientific inaccuracies that would make Gurren Lagann jealous.

Overall, Space Battleship Yamato is an average anime: it doesn’t stand up against most of the better series that we have today, but it’s certainly not bad. The art style has matured in quite an interesting way and you can see the typical manliness of the action scenes from the early days of anime, and today’s anime would definitely be something different if it wasn’t for this series.

Time for another classic. If you’re one of those people who has only seen “modern” anime of the past decade, and are interested to see what the medium was like before the arrival of Evangelion, in the seventies and eighties (and perhaps the early nineties), then my top recommendation isn’t Gundam (at least, not until I’ve seen Zeta Gundam), but instead the very charming series of Mobile Police Patlabor.

The biggest reason for this is that while Mobile Suit Gundam caters for a specific audience, Mobile Police Patlabor seems to have something for nearly everyone: only if you need your series to have harems or slice of life (or gory horror, I guess), then you won’t find what you’re looking for. This series has mecha, it’s got drama, comedy, action, and a bit of romance and horror here and there, all packaged together quite neatly into 47 episodes.

It’s one of those very few series that tries to find a realistic use of mechas: in this series, they’re mostly used for construction and the police only use the mecha in order to solve conflicts for when these mechas go out of control. I’m surprised why I haven’t seen any newer mecha-series taking over the same idea, because it makes perfect sense. The main characters also aren’t anyone special: they’re no heroes whatsoever; they’re just a bunch of policemen who are in charge of these mechas. The epic “saving the country”-themes of the movies don’t return at all in the series, and everything is purposefully kept nice and down-to-earth.

But what really sells this series is its lovable cast of characters. Especially Captain Goto is an incredibly likable and unique character, but the rest of the crew also gets enough opportunities to shine throughout the series. The hot-headed Ota may be a strange character, but you’ll get used to him in no time. Noa, the most central character in this series, is quite likely the most stereotypical of the bunch, with her love for mechas (or labors, as they’re called in this series), great driving skills and naive nature, but she does end up being the most fleshed out and developed character of the entire cast, so she makes up for that.

Patlabor is an episodic series: every episode the crew handles a case (or does something other labor-related), where the focus is more on the characters than on the actual action, though the action itself is also very impressive. You won’t see any overpowered god-mode beams in this series, and fights are almost always based on strategies, rather than senseless bashing (although some characters in the series seem to forget this at times ^^;). The interesting thing is that this series joins Ooedo Rocket on the very short list of series whose dramatic climax isn’t at the end of the series. Instead, there’s just one arc in the series that takes up more than two episodes, with interesting villains and a tense atmosphere, and once that arc is done, the series just continues with episodic stories, and the final episodes instead go for some subtle character-development, instead of trying to end the series with a bang (but then again, with three movies and two OVAs, why should it?)

There aren’t much flaws in this series, but I’d love to have seen a bit more about division one (the division that works right next to the division of the main characters). We see hardly anything about them, with the result that the last episode hastily introduces a vital member of the division from out of nowhere, and acts like he’s been there all along. That was rather confusing.

Nevertheless, if you have the time to watch nearly fifty episodes, and have yet to see the Patlabor Movies and the television series, then I recommend going for the television-series first. The movies had their own excellent points, but it’s the series that brought the cast to life, and the movies clearly assumed that the viewer had already seen the television-series. The highlight of this series is definitely its cast of characters: it works great during the more serious moments of the series, but at the same time some the comedy-episodes are absolutely priceless. The comedy isn’t of the in-your-face type, like most slapsticks, but instead it requires proper build-up to work best. Patlabor may be nearly 20 year old, but it’s smart and it still packs a punch.