March 29, 2009

White Album Review - 75/100

Filed under: Other:/Anime Reviews, Currently Watching:/White Album



I really wanted to like White Album. It had so many good ideas and concepts for a romance show. It had such a wonderful style and execution, it had the potential to be an incredible series. And yet… I just can’t. Beware: this series is very, very easy to dislike.

White Album is a harem series, but it immediately sets itself apart from the rest of its genre by its execution. The pacing is slow, and instead of focusing on silly comedy, this show is driven by the characters’ emotions, portrayed with a wonderful sense of subtlety. Often, we get small glimpses of what characters are thinking, either through short flashbacks, or their thoughts written on the screen. For a fan of subtlety as myself, this series really started out incredibly promising.

The cast of the series is very daring: Touya himself is far away from your typical paper-bag male lead, and instead he is an incredibly flawed character. Throughout the entire series, you’ll be screaming at him for the things he does. In fact, the rest of the cast is also pretty flawed, and it’s one of the driving forces of the series. Kabitzin wrote an excellent article on that matter, and even though it caused many people to hate this series, I consider it at one of the show’s strengths.

But in the end I just can’t recommend this show. I hate to say it, but it’s just too ambitious for its own good. It wants to do too many things and sacrifices the time it needs to build these up. Characters start crying and weeping way too easily in this show, and in most of the times it just feels too forced and directed. The show also has its share of plotholes here and there that only serve to increase the huge drama, but it never really seems to take control of where the drama goes to.

So in the end, the best parts of the show are the quiet bits, in which the drama subtly unfold without any forced crying or yelling. It’s a bloody shame; this show could have been amazing, but in the end it failed to live up to the expectations. I really appreciate the effort, but not every experiment goes exactly according to plans. I’d love to see a series that takes this series’ formula and does pace it properly, though.

Storytelling: 9/10
Characters: 7/10
Production-Values: 8/10
Setting: 6/10

White Album - 13

Filed under: Currently Watching:/White Album



Short Synopsis: It’s finally time for the three concerts to take place.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
Well, talk about an anti-climax. This episode didn’t resolve anything and was basically one big “please watch the second season to find out what happens”. There’s lots of stuff that happens in this episode, but this is what you’d expect from a building-up episode, not a major one as this one. In this episode, I really expected something that would make me long for the second season, but in the end I’m not really anticipating it.

In any case, what basically happens is that Yuki and Touya still haven’t broken up, but they hardly got any time to talk to each other. Mana shows that she’s interested in Touya (this was really bound to happen considering the harem roots of this show…), Haruka once again nearly breaks down but this time Touya seems to notice it but before he can really talk to her Akira magically appears from out of nowhere (seriously, how did he know where Touya was at that point?) with the message that Touya’s father collapsed. Oh, and Mana ends up in the hospital as well because she kept waiting too long outside of Touya’s house.

Also, I know absolutely nothing of the J-Idol business because I’m usually not that interested in cheesy J-pop and the things around it, but is it common that after a big performance every staff member spontaneously starts crying?

I’m not sure whether I’m going to blog that second season. It’s all going to depend on how good the upcoming Autumn season is going to be. When I started blogging this series, it was basically one big experiment because I hardly ever blog these sorts of romance shows. It’s a shame I picked this wrong one to experiment with, especially since it went off with such a great start.