Short Synopsis: It’s time for the local shrine festival and Ponta gets kidnapped by a manipulative woman.
Highlights: Someone hired different animators?
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8,5/10
What an awesome way to conclude the first season of Natsume Yuujin-chou. The different stories weren’t that connected to each other, but this episode instead of introducing new characters, brings back some of the older ones, and develops all of them a bit. It’s an excellent way to close off the past season, and at the same time introduce the second season, because this means that now, the characters are going to be a tad different from what we’ve seen up till now.
The biggest development is of course that Kaname finally knows that Natsume can see spirits, due to some slip-ups from Nyanko’s side, which made the two of them finally get a bit closer to each other, rather than being two people that happen to know each other and occasionally bump into each other. The rest of the cameos this episode was also very appreciated: the adorable fox returns, and Natori also makes his appearance, to do something that will probably be explained three months from now, with the start of the second season. Hinoe also made a short but nice appearance.
But really, this probably was the strangest time possible to suddenly switch animation styles. The background art was much more colourful, and the character-art was much messier than usual, especially in the first half of the episode. It looked pretty interesting, but… why now?
I really like how in this episode, they show how the main character and some of the secondary characters have grown. Natsume is really a different guy from when he was in ep.1
I didn’t notice this change in art style though that you spoke about.