Kannagi Review - 75/100
With a title as “Crazy Shrine Maidens”, the first thing you’d expect is a highly energetic silly slapstick comedy involving shrine maidens, but Kannagi is a bit different from that, and it’s actually more slice of life than slapstick. This series basically tells about a group of high school kids, one of which is some sort of tree spirit or god turned into a human. I kept watching it because I hoped that there would be some potential in its second half, but in the end I can’t really say that I’m glad to have watched it, or that it’s been a great series, but there have been a few interesting episodes.
What mostly turned me off about this series wasn’t the speed at which it developed into a harem, but rather that the show has an identity crisis. It felt to me that the creators never really knew what they wanted to do with this series. They’d go: “let’s have a simple slice of life series with a quirky man couple”, to “now let’s insert a complex back-story”, and soon enough “I want a harem”, “it’s been too serious, more comedy”, “Yaoi! We need Yaoi!”, “How about karaoke?” to eventually “crap, we still have an unsolved storyline! We need more drama!”.
Through the series, the series jumps from one theme to the other like an indecisive grasshopper. It makes the series varied, but also inconsistent, and the different segments don’t really feel complete and don’t flow well into each other. The whole back-story of the series gets completely ignored after only a few episodes, and in the end the drama that makes up the finale of the series may feel well developed as a standalone story, but within the series it feels forced and out of place.
There are however a number of standalone episodes that are quite a bit of fun to watch. It often involves episodes that are completely dedicated to one single subject, like the lead characters going to a karaoke-place, or like in the first episode of Lucky Star, where the characters kept talking about food. Because these episodes are so centred around one topic, they’re really able to get the best out of them, rather than feeling like an uninspired attempt to fill up an episode.
Another reason to check out this series: the godly animation of the first two episodes. In those, the creators really tried to animate EVERYTHING, and the result looks really gorgeous. Unfortunately, this disappears and doesn’t return for the rest of the series at all, so those who are watching this series for the eye candy might as well drop it after episode 2.
But in the end, the series wasn’t enjoyable enough to make me really recommend it to others. There’s so much better stuff out there, and Kannagi simply feels like a decent series. Above average, but not much more. It’s good for those moments where you have half an hour to burn, but you shouldn’t go out of your way to watch it. The creators simply wanted to do too much in only 13 episodes.
| Storytelling: | 7/10 |
| Characters: | 8/10 |
| Production-Values: | 8/10 |
| Setting: | 7/10 |
