When I posted my first impressions on Kobato, I noted how incredibly cute its lead character Kobato was. I then started watching Risky Safety, and suddenly Kobato looked more like Hamako from Gintama in comparison. Omishi Magical Theater: Risky Safety has got to be one of, if not THE cutest anime I have ever seen.

And it’s not like most series that attempt to go for cuteness, in which they try to make everything as brightly coloured and fluffy as possible with a lot of energetic overacting. The titular characters, an apprentice Shinigami and Angel named Risky and Safety respectively, have such a natural charm that’s near impossible to plan out. Nearly all of their quirks are just too cute to watch when combined with the incredibly talented voice actres of these two (why yes, they’re voiced by the same voice actress, who does a fantastic job portraying both of them). They’re the type of characters who make all of the scenes they’re in a joy to watch.

The ten-minute episodes basically consist out of the two titular characters helping out a kid with worries, but the storytelling is genuine enough to make something interesting out of such a simple premise. The stories are well built up, and are about serious themes as undecisiveness, love, good and evil that aim to teach simple moral stories. You can also see that the creators like to try out new ideas: sometimes they like to show a bit of what happens in the setting around the characters, like showing a random conversation between a few passers-by that has nothing to do with the story, or showing some sort of reference to an earlier story. It’s interesting how in this story, whenever something gets destroyed or changed, it remains changed. For example, the stuff that Risky breaks in one room still remain broken 24 episodes later.

Overall, this series shows that anime can also be simple, yet effective. It’s an excellent recommendation for those who are looking for a quick watch. It’s such a charming series from beginning to end, and surprisingly solidly produced as well with detailed animation that hardly cuts any corners. With an excellent dreamy soundtrack excellent voice acting and incredibly cute antics, I really enjoyed this little series. It’s a shame that we never hear anything from its production-company anymore, APPP. Around ten years ago they used to do a number of series with very neat ideas, but right now they only seem to concentrate on in-between animation jobs (but doing a great job at them nonetheless).

As for the series I’m not blogging:
- Kämpfer is just yet another stereotypical fighting show with no depth whatsoever.
- Nyan Koi had a really disappointing and shallow second episode. Plus, it’s obvious that the creators have never owned cats.

As for the Book of Bantorra, I think it was pretty obvious that I was going to blog this. Barring the sequels, it featured for me the best first episode of the new season so far and it looks to be another hit for newcomer David Production. This time, they might not have such a powerhouse behind the direction, but the premise has quite a few nice ideas thrown into it, there are lots of characters, all with different morals and values, and this episode showed yet again that it can deliver very nice action-scenes, even with its clearly limited budget. All in all, a very intriguing series.

The director didn’t handle any series I know, but this guy seems very experienced, with a lot of different series under his belt. I’m also very happy with the one who’s behind the series composition: Mari Okada. She wrote the script for a lot of the episodes of Simoun, and did the series composition for a lot of different series, including True Tears, Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club, Canaan and Vampire Knight (which may have sucked, but I heard that it was the best possible adaptation that the really mediocre manga could have gotten). That’s definitely a plus when animating a series of light novels with such a big setting.

The art director is also an interesting one, because Shigemi Ikeda is an artist with a huge amount of experience: the list of series he did the art direction for just goes on and on, and the result show in this episode in the architecture. You really need a lot of creativity to come up with these complex structures. A job well done, if I say so. The soundtrack also is done by the Death Note soundtrack guy, who also composed the scores for Himitsu and Real Drive, which means an excellent soundtrack as well.

But yeah, the weakest point in this series really is the direction, in the way that the quality control tends to be a bit off at times. This episode most notably showed that in the sudden increase of the already huge cleavage of the director, or how the widow of the guy who was killed by Coolio’s friend suddenly chose Colio of all people to talk to was also a bit too coincidental. Nevertheless, when compared to Shangri-la last season there are far less assaults to my suspense of disbelief, so there shouldn’t be any major problems there as long as the creators continue to keep the rest of this series interesting.

Volken also seems like an interesting male lead: he’s an adult for one, and he’s an interesting combination of an capable commander with strong morals, and a naive subordinate with a lot of potential for growth inside of him. He’s able to stand out as the lead character, and yet he doesn’t hog all the screen-time for himself (in fact, that meat guy has gotten more screen-time than he did in this episode). Hamyuts also has the potential to become a very interesting villain, the way she has been portrayed in the past two episodes: as long as she isn’t going to end up as a static character, the creators can do a lot of great things with her. I especially like how she likes to do things herself, instead of sitting in her chair, looking evil.
Rating: ** (Excellent)