Short Synopsis: The students are taught magic through various practical assignments at real clients.
Highlights: Sora may have been a bit too emotionally attached to her assignment.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10
I’m pretty annoyed by Bonen no Xamdou, for its attempt to mess up my whole blogging schedule this season. Just when the final show this season aired and I decided which shows to blog, this one pops up. I don’t have a Playstation, and I’m not willing to buy one, so I haven’t seen its first episode yet. It’s not certain that I’m going to blog it, but there’s a pretty good chance that if it does pop up somehow, I’ll end up covering it. Especially since there are going to be 26 episodes.

One really annoying trend of 2008 is that, when compared to previous years, there are hardly any shows that go on for longer than 13 episodes. Only a select few went with a series length of 22 or 26 episodes, which is a real shame, in my opinion. In any case, if I do end up blogging Bonen no Xamdou, Natsu no Sora is probably going to be dropped. It’s obviously not a bad series, and I actually really like it, but everyone already seems to cover this series, and I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to say something interesting about each episode, considering the nature of this series. Either that, or Birdy the Mighty’s third episode has to be realy bad, but I doubt that one.

To go back on topic, this episode shows how the school in Natsu no Sora isn’t as Harry Potterish as I originally thought, and Sora is actually going to carry out many jobs as a magician in order to learn and develop her skills. It showed how in this world magicians are quite rare and not always admired. Sora’s also gets accompanied by some sort of manager or something. I’m not quite sure yet how this system works, but my limited Japanese may have been the cause of that. Do these people continue to accompany their magicians, or is it just for the first few months? Are these people magicians themselves? Does the school really have enough manpower to assign one manager to one magician?

Just as with episode 2, this episode again was very solid, with a bunch of forced plot-twists popping up from out of nowhere. Thankfully it wasn’t as blatant as that truck, but Sora suddenly decides to run off with the photo albums that she was supposed to get outside of a locked safe and bring them outdoors. This may have triggered the client to show a more personal side of herself, but I’d prefer it if was less forced, especially considering the nature of this series.

I’m also interested in whether the rest of this series will shed some more light into the world this anime is set in. I mean, in this episode we saw how easily Sora cracked that safe. What if there was a magician who suddenly thought that it’d be a nice idea to start robbing houses. If he’s talented enough, he’d probably get away with it, based on what I’ve seen in this series.

EDIT: aaand just after I make this post a sub of Bonen no Xamdou turns up. Does anyone know whether the .mp4-file is in HD or not?

Short Synopsis: 044 betrays her organization.
Highlights: Fixes the movie’s mistakes.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
I tried watching the movie Ultraviolet, to get an understanding of why everyone seemed to hate it. Well, I lasted 30 minutes until the pain made me stop watching. That was exactly what I feared that this anime-series would turn out to be, and let me say that the Ultraviolet anime fixes a lot of the mistakes of the movie.

The movie was a horrible mish-mash of random fights and cheesy dialogues. The little story that was there was a combination of the original setting of the comic books and a plot that made no sense, where 044 rescued a child that could have been the doom of her entire kind… just so that she could be saved… or something like that. It’s at that point where I just gave up and stopped watching the movie.

The biggest mistake in the movie was the fights, though. Enemies dress in the most ridiculous outfits, you never know who they are, they’re just… there and supposedly security-staff and they die within 5 seconds. Instead of trying to protect their lives, they go for overly cheesy poses (one particularly bad scene featured them as they surrounded 044, stood around her in a perfect circle and… all shot at her. Combined with 044’s amazing talent to evade bullets (in the movie, at least), what where they thinking?

And here comes Osamu Dezaki, and he managed to successfully put some focus away from the action, and focused much more on the personal aspect of the characters. There’s still action, but the goons that 044 has to defeat are given an identity: you know what they’re doing there. 044 also doesn’t have the ability to dodge bullets anymore, and not all people that stand in front of her have to be slaughtered. This episode shows that she just gives that treatment to the goons from her organization.

Both the movie and the anime feature 044 as she betrays her organization. In the anime, she does so because she suddenly fell in love, and saved one of her supposed enemies, and she’d do more for him that for her organization, which I suspect she never liked anyway. In the movie, I guess she falls in love too… with a 10 year old boy who never says anything and who turns out to be the son of some of the major enemies. I guess, that’s the only explanation I can think off to make her actions there seem at least a bit plausible.

But boy, this surely turned out to be the dark horse of the summer-season. Three episodes and still no subs? I guess that this can be blamed to the bad reputation of the original movie. I can really say that I like this series now, though. My biggest fears, of this turning into Devil May Cry II with a bunch of boring fights were avoided completely. So far, there hasn’t been any trace of filler at all, and with the current storyline, I’d be surprised if the creators would manage to stuff one in.