Muaha! I just can’t help but love this series. This episode yet again was an awesome instalment for Shangri-La, mostly focused on a battle of wits between Ryouko and Mikuni, of all people, and it definitely delivered. The thing I love about Ryouko is that the creators remembered to give her the screen-time she deserves as a villain. This really made her into a dangerous character, and a serious threat to the lead characters instead of letting her be an incompetent idiot who never can seem to get anything right.

And really, this episode was yet again full of juicy plot twists. While they weren’t as big as “Kuniko’s Grandmother Founded Atlas!?!?!1!!11″, every single one was a nice touch, surprising and full of potential for the rest of this series (EDIT: on second thought, some of them really are big…). To give a small run-down:
- Kunihito decides to leave the military. Ryouko doesn’t seem to mind.
- Miiko doesn’t just get arrested, she becomes the next Hiruko!
- Mikuni has had it now that all of her loved ones are gone, and gathers all of her followers to forcefully take Miiko back.
- The new plants that showed up turn out to be called Daedalus. When left alone, they threaten to swallow up the entire forest.
- Momoko studied biology in her early days?!
- Ryouko finally stopped complaining about Shion’s work as her personal servant.
- Ryouko… can’t be hit by bullets?! wtf?
- Ryouko brings Mikuni to Miiko. Sayoko, who apparently had been hiding, shows herself, takes Hiruko Miiko hostage and runs away with Mikuni!
- Again, Ryouko doesn’t seem to mind because Hiruko seemed to be one of Tarsian’s plans.
- For some reason, the episode ends with Takehito putting a gun against Kuniko’s head.

I mean, seriously? How many plot twists can you include in one episode anyway, at the same time preventing the episode from feeling rushed, creating even more questions and potential plot twists for the future as well? On top of that, the characters were also at their best in this episode: Kuniko was awesome in how she managed to quickly recover from the disappointments of the previous episode. Mikuni rocked because she finally was able to do something for herself. Ryouko rocked for being so badass that even bullets can’t face her among others. Sayoko rocked for the lengths that she’s willing to go through to save Mikuni.

And really, this makes it even bigger of a puzzle of what the Digmas are. I always thought that Ryouko was meaning to collect them, but in this episode she doesn’t do anything to stop Digma 3 from leaving the military (calling him inferior to the other two Digmas), and she even seemed pleased when Sayoko took Mikuni away. What the hell was up with that?

And ON TOP OF THAT, this episode again rocked in terms of graphics. This episode had some utterly beautiful shots. Not in the way of episode 13, but the aesthetics were right in just about every shot. You could see nothing of the rushed animation that plagued the first bunch of episodes. The music also rocked beyond belief in this episode.

My only worry is that Daedalus is going to turn into your stereotypical evil plant that’s going to be the final boss, but hey: even the amazing Kaiba suffered from this. And the thing to wonder about: why was it introduced this early in the series, if there are still about eight episodes left for this series? Is Daedalus simply going to grow slowly, or did the creators realize this, and are planning a twist even there?
Rating: *** (Awesome)

A series in which all of the characters represent different countries. You just have to think of it. Hetalia follows the chronicles of the personifications of countries as Italy, Germany, Japan, America, England and France in a bunch of random sketches. I really liked the idea when I learned of it, so how did this series turn out in the end? Good, though it could have been done better.

I absolutely loved this series when it started messing around with cultural differences. This series really has a number of priceless episodes in which it takes different stereotypes under the loop. The references to each country’s history are also really hilarious at times. You’re obviously supposed to take them with a “little” grain of salt and this series by no means attempts to retell its version of history, and yet there are times when this series is surprisingly accurate and provides a free history lesson.

I really wished that I could have raved about this series, but unfortunately it’s incredibly inconsistent. It likes to waste entire episodes on topics that just… aren’t funny. A bunch of episodes are just random fanservice of gay pairings of the different characters, near the end of the series there are a bunch of episodes dedicated to a strange and unfunny subplot between Liechtenstein and Switzerland and there’s also a strange unfunny subplot about America cleaning out his garage that just keeps returning over and over.

I’m really not sure what was up with these kinds of episodes. They seemed to want to introduce some sort of serious storyline among the comedy, but that SO doesn’t belong in such a series that’s only made up out of five minute episodes. And I mean, this series has so much material it can choose from, and then it devotes three consecutive episodes to Liechtenstein, of all things.

Hetalia should have been better balanced. The episodes really range from utterly brilliant to utterly dull, and especially the dull ones can ruin the fun of this series a bit. Nevertheless, the brilliant episodes are definitely worth watching, so let’s hope that the second season is going to do a better job here.

On a final note: I do urge everyone to not take this series seriously. It’s never meant to insult anyone, just poke some innocent fun. The last thing you want to do with this series is take the jokes personal, which they obviously aren’t.

the more this series progresses, the more of a shame it becomes that there are only going to be 26 episodes. Sure, there can always be plans for a second season, but the chance for a second season to just be cancelled is just as big. That at the moment is sortof my problem with the trend that anime has followed for the past few years, to chop up their stories into different seasons. Sure, it’s nice and all for the popular series, but for the less popular series this always becomes a good excuse for the sponsors to drop a show. It happened with Amatsuki, Tytania, Narutaru and so many other awesome series that deserve a sequel so badly.

This show has really become excellent now that the characters have started to develop. What surprised me the most about this episode was how well Remus and Guin are getting along, now that Istvan and Linda have become a couple. The two of them are strangely alike, and Remus proved that he’s much more than your average stereotypical crybaby turned badass. He has ambitions now, but at the same time he’s grown up, he’s level-headed and polite, despite being direct and to the point as well.

This episode yet again showed that weird light that has been messing with the protagonists for a while now. This time, it speaks to Linda, and warns her about the dangers of the island: a hideous monster turns out to live on it. And damn, that was some nice eye candy when Linda made that light split open an entire mountain.

Next up seems to be even more political intrigue, as yet another country is introduced: the country of Agraia. They neither seem to be allies nor enemies, so this could prove to be interesting to see how they end up dealing with Guin.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This show is overplaying Anne’s thirst for learning. In a way, the creators made this show too “Japanese”. More on that later, first the summary:

The episode starts with Anne, reading a book at Eggman’s while Eggman is picking Tomatoes, and she’s getting impressed with it as always. We then cut to a scene in which Henderson talks with a couple of the children after class about books. One of them (Michael) wants to be a newspaper editor, and so Henderson gives him a book on the matter. He’s very happy with this, since they don’t have any books with them at home.

Henderson then passionately continues on how books are going to be very important for the class. Anne then thanks Henderson for lending her the book of King Arthur (it took me a while to figure out that “aasaa” stood for “Arthur”; damned Katakana), and asks whether she can loan it again. Her classmates then get angry because they too want to read the book, and rip it apart in the process.

The problem is that there are hardly any books around, so that’s why Henderson suggests to start a school library, and therefore she asks the children to bring some books from their homes. Unfortunately, nobody has any except for the book by Robert Browning from Anne. Mildred’s father has a ton of books, but her father doesn’t find it necessary for her to be reading books, since she’s going to get married to a rich guy anyway.

Since there are so few books, Anne suggests Henderson to pay a visit to Eggman, who she reckons is bound to have some idea. Eggman still acts rather grumpy against anyone who isn’t Anne. Eggman is disinclined at first, but in the end he becomes friendly with Henderson, and suggests that they should host a play in order to collect the funds needed to buy books.

Eggman writes the script, while Henderson is busy dividing the roles. Randolf wants to play Arthur, while Anne and Mildred both want to play the female heroine of Guineviere (however you spell that), so auditions on that are going to happen the next day. Eggman meanwhile managed to rewrite the script into some strange fantasy story, and for some reason Henderson loves it.

The class loves the script too, and so everyone spends the rest of the day rehearsing the script for the parts that they want to audition, while Henderson draws up a poster for the play, which gathers quite a bit of attention. The next day, Anne seems to have not just memorized her own lines, but also those of the entire script and so gets admired by the whole class.

During the auditions, everyone does well apart from Mildred, who gets a black-out because she loses her cheat sheet. So yeah, Anne gets to play the role of Guineviere, Randolf becomes Arthur, and Mildred becomes a little fairy. Obviously, the latter is angry and disappointed. She complains about it to her father and mother. Her mother then gets angry at the teacher for organizing a play while she should be teaching, and so the episode ends with the entire play getting blown off because her mother used her influence and refuses to listen.

I’d really wish that the Marysville arc is going to end soon so that we can get back to what’s really important: the Thomas family, but it’s certain that we’re still going to bet at least three episodes about them: one about Mildred, one about the play and one about Eggman’s dead daughter. It’s a bloody shame: the first arc of this series was a true emotional roller-coaster ride, but none of the newly introduced characters in Marysville are interesting, and most of them are just Kaze no Shoujo Emily rip-offs.

I’ve really been trying to not compare this series to the original Akage no Anne series, since that would just give me unreasonable expectations, and for the most part this worked. However, there is one thing that really bugs me: Anne’s thirst for knowledge. I have so many issues with that, I hardly know where to start.

The reason why I meant that this series is too “Japanese” at the beginning of this post is the following, and do correct me if I’m wrong about this, but the children here are way too obsessed with learning and books. Perhaps Japanese kids are like this: obsessed with learning. However, Anne is SEVEN. When I was that age, all I cared about was playing and having fun and school was boring. Only when I entered high school (or whatever the school is that you enter at the age of twelve) did I start getting interested in learning, and I was a real geek back then.

The thing is that at the moment, this series doesn’t feel in canon with the original Anne of Green Gables. What strikes me the most was how Anne at the beginning of the series indeed was a huge talker, but all she talked about was girly things, like puffed sleeves, rainbows and scenery. Not once did she mention her thirst for knowledge: that only became apparent gradually throughout the series, when she developed into the perfectionist we came to love. The Anne right here is completely obsessed with knowledge, so the second half of this series is going to have to include some really weird development in order to get that one right.

Als, probably the most annoying thing about this episode: ANNE IS NOT THE NEXT EINSTEIN. I mean, seriously: she’s six or seven years old; what the heck is she doing reading advanced books and stuff: she should be too busy catching up with everyone, doing her endless repetitions of basic summations and getting a good grasp of the written language. I know that she learned a bit from Elisa, but learning really doesn’t go that easily. She worked really hard in the Akage no Anne series. If she really were a naturally born genius, she would have blown away Gilbert Blythe’s efforts without any problems. The way she completely memorized the entire script in less than one week, while taking care of the housework at the same time is very hard to believe.

I praised this series for how it so naturally portrayed a bunch of little children. And really, Horace and Edward really feel like bunch of small brats. Anne also started out really well and down to earth, but I think that this series screws up at the character-development: the only well developed characters here are Bert and Johanna. The development of especially Mildred and Randolf feels superficial. And Anne… the creators seem to be forgetting that little kids don’t have the biggest attention span, which is something that the first bunch of episodes did really well, but completely disappeared once Anne became obsessed with learning and reading.
Rating: - (Disappointing)