I’m back from London. It was really big, but also great. And Kero, Sachin and Smurph: you were awesome. It really was great to meet you!
And now I have the daunting task to catch up to everything again. Starting off: Silver Spoon, the latest Noitamina-series. Thank god, afte the past spring season had that Katanagatari-rerun. Next autumn there will be two new original series and a second Psycho Pass season has been announced, so the timeslot will be back in its glory again.
But first: a Moyashimon-esque series about farming. On the surface the two series really are similar: a guy joins an agricultural school, with a lot of quirky characters. The difference is how both series look at quirks. In Moyashimon, all of the quirks were played straight, and you got to love the characters because of that. In Silver Spoon, there is more lurking underneath the quirks.
Silver Spoon toys with your assumptions. In that way, you could see that this comes from the same writer as Full Metal Alchemist: one moment it’s serious, and the other it’s silly. And it uses the serious moments to build up for its jokes, only to bring the characters back to reality again by showing the harsh realities of farming that a lot of people like to pretend aren’t there.`I mean, the thing with the vererinarians being able to kill animals? Powerful stuff. The combination between comedy and drama was probably done best with the piglets.
I wouldn’t immediately see that Silver Spoon is better than Moyashimon at this point. The big danger for this series is that it will start getting too melodramatic, which is something that Moyashimon managed to avoid on the whole. The main character’s background… it feels a bit too angsty for my tastes. It’s there where there was no comedy whatsoever, which felt a bit out of place.
Another thing that this show does quite well is the balance of the cast. There are a lot of characters here, but they’re all quite different and colourful, especially when you look at the main side characters. Though granted, some of the minor side characters are walking cardboard cut-outs.
Rating: 5.5/8 (Excellent)
Based on manga, I’d rate it higher than moyashimon. Having said that, I never really connected with the characters in moyashimon/
I think Moyashimon was really just meant to be a silly thing and silver spoon will be more of a drama than it where the characters are actually more important.
I didn’t watch Moyashimon, though I’m reading the Silver Spoon manga. I don’t think it’s melodramatic later on. It’s dramatic, yes, but it’s more like “that’s reality”-dramatic without dwelling too much on the “oh, poor [person]”. I think it’s optimistic, especially Hachiken, while there are things, you simply can’t change. I think it really stays down to earth. The characters also develop a lot, especially Hachiken and Mikage.
I think they may be compressing the manga too much. By now in the manga, you had a lot more feeling and humor. Pork Bowl’s introduction should have been a whole ep by itself, practically.