Tamayura – 07

Now this was pretty much my favorite episode of Tamayura so far. It was just one huge chunk of atmosphere, and it had an absolutely wonderful balance between doing nothing, and heart-warming moments. That’s really my favorite type of slice of life series: the ones who can achieve as much as possible, while remaining as down to earth as possible. Most festival episodes, whether they are town festival, school festival or sports festival episodes, have this nasty tendency of appearing everywhere. Most of them unfortunately have devolved into randomly picking a bunch of events from a list of things you normally do at those events, and lumping them together as if it’s some sort of obligation. This episode created a festival with character. At its core it’s nothing new: remembering the dead is something as old as mankind itself. But this festival felt part of Takehara. It’s something that everyone really wanted to share with Potte, and the impending rain was used really well, while at the same time this episode showed some good restraint in not making the drama around it too heavy. This episode just did a wonderful job of bringing the cast together. We even saw some characters of the OVA again, but even beyond that, this festival’s purpose beyond remembering the dead is bonding people together. This just shows that this series is made by a team that’s really well versed in how a slice of life series works. Comparing it to Aria, I’d at the moment rate it around Aria the Natural’s level: it feels much tighter put together unlike The Animation, but the character-development is nowhere near The Origination. Compared to The Natural meanwhile, it’s a bit less impressive in terms of originality of both its overall setting and scenarios, but makes up for it by being much easier to sit through (oh lord, trying to watch that entire series took some effort…). Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>