Shigurui

The first series I checked out for the summer-season, and I think I’ve already found my favourite OP of the season. I love artsy OPs like this one, that do something else than just “oh, let’s display the different characters in a cool or sad way and add some random music to it”, not to mention that the melody rocks. Anyway, about Shigurui: let me first start with a warning. If you’ve got a weak heart, are rather young or just can’t stand gore: DO NOT WATCH THIS. This is a horror-show, focused at a select audience, and it tries to captivate it by combining an eerie mood and some of the most disturbing gore I’ve seen in anime. If I had to guess, than the entire anime is about the fight between two samurai, one missing an arm and one without eyesight, where most of the airtime is spent on fleshing out their backgrounds. It’s only been one episode, and already we’ve seen bloody broken fingers, a guy pulling out his own guts and another guy stabbing his own toe, in all graphic details. Personally, I like the show so far, but the scene where the guy broke his fingers was too much for me, and I just couldn’t bear to watch the screen anymore.

Nanatsuiro Drops

Oohh.. someone… PLEASE make Sumomo stop whining! Seriously, how more annoying can she get? Her character-designs suck, her voice-acting is way too drawn out and her personality is, just like the rest of the cast by the way, a cookie-cutter at best. I can’t believe the character-designer is famous, because what he shows here was just horrible. Anyway, about the story, it’s not much interesting either. A guy gets turned into a fluffy animal and needs Sumomo to catch sparkly thingies in order to change back. These sparkly thingies can draw the energy of the flowers, and if they do, Sumomo will cry because it’s so sad for the flowers… god, she needs to grow a spine. Oh, have I already mentioned the obligatory dark mysterious character who watches from afar and will probably get drawn into the main character’s harem at episode three? This is one to avoid.

Doujin Work

And here we have the anime about a group of doujin-artists. In this episode, a girl attends a doujin-convention, realizes how much money people can make in it and decides to become a doujin-artist herself… and that’s about it. There’s not much to say about this series anyway. The art is sub-par; the animation is not very good. The jokes manage to make sure that it doesn’t get boring too soon, but they’re not exactly funny. The characters are rather flat and one-dimensional, and I honestly can’t think of something that stands out. Let’s hope that this is one of these anime that needs a bit of time to warm up, as this episode didn’t impress me much. I liked the yuri-joke, though.

Haha! El Cazador is really getting fired up now! The first half did a great job of building up, and now the plot really starts moving! This episode, we get treated with an episode fully dedicated to showing Ellis’s time with the professor, before she shot him down (in fact, the cliff-hanger ends with the bang that killed the guy). My enthusiasm for this show is really growing rapidly with each episode!

This episode was entirely meant to show what the professor meant for Ellis. They’re the only two people who get some airtime, along with a couple of shots of Rozenberg. Ellis got first transferred to the professor’s house so that he could study her. Eventually, they began to have feelings for each other (cue insert song! ^^;). Not terribly original, but I still loved it. It also seems that the professor got shot down on thanksgiving, when Ellis first confessed her love for him.

The question, though, remains: how did the guy die. We do see a suspicious pair of feet enter the grounds of the mansion right before the shot sounds, but the fact also remains that there was a shot in the middle of Ellis’s package, right on the place of her chest. Where did that one come from? If I had to guess, then Rozenberg killed off the guy because he didn’t do what he wanted him to do (hence the shattered glass), but that doesn’t explain why Ellis blames herself for the murder either.

If El Cazador can be able to keep up this pace for most of the rest of the second half, this series can very well become one of the highlights of the spring-season. It’s going to be the highlight of this week in any case. The big question now remains: will the next episodes focus more on the plot, or degrade back to the cryptic first half? Only time will tell!