Tamayura ~ Hitotose – 08

Well, this was the episode that still needed to come: the episode about Shihomi and Hoboro. If this show really wanted to have an all-round cast, an episodes that focuses on them was inevitable. The creators handled it well in the way that they took Potte to a friend of theirs from high school. It’s a bit more subtle to get to know them than usual for this series. What I liked about this episode the most is that they used someone else to flesh out these two characters. That worked quite well, and it’s not as formulaic as you’d expect. Still, the formula remains there. Ideally you’d want to weave all things like this right through each other. This episode did do that with that other Kou fangirl whose name I forgot. Before the real material of this episode started we saw her also picking up photography, and even though this wasn’t her episode, she has been getting more and more bearable with every episode. Eight episodes in, and closing off the second third of this series, the animation still is quite good here. The best animated series was probably episode 2, but even then there is a ton of movement in this series with hardly any still frames outside of pictures. What’s more though: the characters here have a lot of freedom in their movements. On one hand the animation is smooth, so it looks like the characters are really moving, and on the other hand they do move enough to really come alive. This show has no action scenes, nor any climaxes that it needs to save its money shots for (in fact, the money shots of this show are very often still backgrounds), so it can just spend an equal amount to all of its scenes. But I think that this is an interesting comparison to series with action, who often don’t spend a lot of attention on their quiet scenes. Even though scenes like that can also bring the characters in question to life if they’re well animated. This series is a really good example of how to do that. Rating: ** (Excellent)]]>