Sei Shonagon again, this time with the focus on her actual romance. This definitely was an episode for dialogue, because the two of them loved making quibs to each other and there were a lot of tongues in cheeks this week, along with nice historical details like how hats played such an important role in those days.
A difference between this episode was that it wasn’t necessarily about the constraining environment in which people lived back then, but instead it showed a different side of how things went on for the nobles and poets of those days. Sei Shonagon is a woman who has enough influence over people to make a difference.
Overall, Uta Koi has painted this nice picture of who the authors of the 100 poems were. It doesn’t stray too long on one of them, but it also picks a few of them to give a bit more attention than the others. Whether it’s the most exciting show though… that is unfortunately not the case. The fact remains that the acting still is quite wooden (although this episode wasn’t the worst example of that).
Rating: 4.5/8 (Good)
The acting is quite wooden?
I couldn’t disagree more with that statement. This along with Polar Bear Cafe has some of the best seiyuu performances of the year for me.
What I meant by that is not just the voice acting. That indeed is really good in this series, but when you look at the characters themselves they’re often just portrayed in still frames and hardly move at all. That’s what makes them wooden for me. The voice actors do a good job of compensating for this… but not entirely for me.
Though I dont know how much movement can they really do since they are mostly just talking half the time. Does not seem like the highest budget show either
I think then you shouldn’t have used the word acting then as to me that has entirely to do with the seiyuu performances.
I agree with you that the show is lacking when it comes to animation. It has a very cheap budget. I think it somewhat makes up for that with interesting art design but the product as a whole is still pretty cheap looking, which is a shame because it’s a good series otherwise.
But then again I suppose we should be happy a series like this was made in the first place. It’s definitely does not have “big hit” written all over it.
Ive really been surprised with how much ive enjoyed this show.
They have handled the romance so well, and portrayed it in so many different ways already. Ive been impressed.