This is it: THE chance for the director of Mouyou no Hako to show that he’s not just a one-trick-pony, but instead an incredible director. And oh my god, he really showed the latter. Madhouse have truly truck gold when they found this guy, because this episode was one of the best episodes of Aoi Bungaku yet!

You can really see his style from Mouryou no Hako flow through into Hashire Melos, the work he’s adapting. The sakura trees are there, the heavy use of lighting, and the protagonists also are quite similar in appearance, and both novel authors. Heck, it even has the same soundtrack as Mouryou no Hako. This episode satisfied my inner Mouryou no Hako-fanboy, while delivering its own strong story that aside from these things, doesn’t rip it off in the slightest and stands strong as a gripping episode.

The scenes in the theatre were a very nice twist: basically this episode told two stories: one story about the author of a novel and his best friend, an actor, and one story, which he’s currently writing. Interestingly enough, Masato Sakai who has been voicing all of the leads of Aoi Bungaku so far, ends up voicing Melos: the lead character of the play. I love how in this way, the creators are playing around with the concepts of “lead characters”.

But yeah, what makes this episode stand out is its sense of dialogue. It’s passionate, detailed and brings out the best of the characters. There’s so much emotion put into it, yet none of the lines are delivered cheesily.

And then the animation! It’s by far the best animation of Aoi Bungaku yet, and that in an already excellently animated series. This episode doesn’t have the best eye-candy, that’s for In the Forest. Instead, the characters move SO incredibly fluently. when they move, their entire bodies move, rather than just a limb, or some very minimal movement during just a short scene. The animation here is detailed and really brings the cast of characters to life.

There was one scene though in which this didn’t apply. I’m not exactly sure what happened there, but the part in which the lead characters’ friend comes crawling from under the bed lacks this detail, and therefore ends up a bit weird.

I’m not sure whether I understood everything in this episode, but the main storyline seems to talk about two friends who live together: one is a scriptwriter, the other is an actor. The scriptwriter is seen writing the story of Melos, the lead character of the play. At a certain point, his friend suggests to go to Tokyo, because his father would not allow him to continue acting. When the lead character is boarding the train, however, he is betrayed. The episode ended a bit too soon for me to actually make out how and why, but I expect the next episode to delve into that one.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

I wonder, after seeing Ed pay with a coin in this episode: how does money work in the Full Metal Alchemist universe? I mean, any alchemist could just gather some copper and nickel and make a fortune.

Anyway, this episode mostly consisted out of building up, although that introduction scene of Sloth rocked. The guy is pretty stereotypical (at least the “sloth” of the first season was a bit of a creative take on this trope), but the action scene was as good as usual. Heck, Sloth might be even tougher than Greed, who is supposed to be the strongest shield.

My guess would be that either Sloth or Gluttony was the first homunculus to be created. From the homunculi whose backstory we already know by now, you can see somewhat of a pattern, in which father experiments with various techniques to create homunculi, so naturally this would mean that his creations would keep getting better and better (see Wrath, who does stand out as the most skilled and emotionally stable homunculus so far). Gluttony and Sloth look like early prototypes: they have interesting powers, but tend to be too stupid or lazy to really be left on their own.

I do wonder, though. Father’s plan has always been one of secrecy, and silencing those who know about the alchemists. Why then does he send Sloth on such a mission, in which he’s bound to attract attention to himself. I mean, if he was looking for someone or something, he could have easily used Envy to infiltrate the base.

This episode was very much about getting Olivier to trust Ed and Al, which is of course a bit tricky considering how they can’t tell her exactly what they’re after, due to Winry. Still, I think she got the message at the end. The creators did well in portraying her as a hard-to-impress character.
Rating: * (Good)

Ah, the valentine episode. Thankfully, the creators use it well with a pretty romantic episode with quite a few new developments. It’s episodes like this that really show the chemistry of the entire cast of characters of this series, and not just the main ones.

This episode shed quite a bit of light of how Kou and Aoba genuinely feel about each other. Aoba is clearly into Kou, but lacks confidence because of the arrival of Akane. Kou on the other hand is just clueless. Unfortunately, he falls into a staple that many other anime leads fall into, but his relationship with Akane makes up for it. You can see that she finally makes him think about his own love-life.

But yeah, the great thing about Akane isn’t just that she sparks up tensions between Kou and Aoba, but because everyone in the series aside from Azuma knew Wakaba well, she also has this effect on just about everyone in the series, and even Azuma is indirectly influenced by her. Speaking of which, he was surprisingly direct when he claimed that that the only girl he’d want to date is Aoba. For a usually subtle series, this really came out of nowhere, but I think that the reason he was able to say it was because he believes that he doesn’t stand a chance against Kou. Give this a few episodes, and let’s see how this affects Aoba.

Also, Aoba finally tried out for the girls’ team. Again, this brings us back to the baseball. I really wonder what the final quarter of this series is going to be like (assuming that there are going to be 52 episodes). The baseball is obviously going to return there, but I really hope that the creators will put away enough time for the slice of life.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Aah, I’ve seen too many shallow anime. I really thought that Mana would break down in this episode, while in reality what got into her was just a short emotional outburst. This doesn’t turn out to be the case in which a bit of talking simply solves everything and magically develops characters in the right direction. Ah, I should have known!

But yeah, this was likely the best episode of White Album so far. Instead of a major climax for Mana, we get to see a major episode for Haruka, which really surprised me: paste that scene of her in any other series, and it would have ended up incredibly cheesy. Suddenly coming out of the shower naked in a desperate attempt… that’s so hard to prevent from turning into soap opera material, it needs lots and lots of build-up. But I think that White Album actually pulled it off. I feared for a moment, because Haruka’s earlier emotion breakdown made no sense whatsoever.

This episode really shed light into her character. Her scene was daring, but still subtle and nowhere over the top, and again it was more like an emotional outburst: after that she behaved completely normal again, rather than some angsty teen that refuses to listen to anybody. Then there’s also the matter of Touya, of course, who really doesn’t seem to know when to quit.

Also, what on earth could Menou be up to? How did she find out about Misaki, and why does she intend to make her seem like a slut? I know she’s rebellious and all, but to do that just to protect Touya seems a bit unnecessary.

With only four episodes left now, we’re about to get to the point where everything goes to hell. I really wonder how the creators are planning to end this. I mean, at this point they can indeed show what they’ve been promising us ever since Touya started screwing Yayoi, or they could play the gigantic troll that laughs over us by having a very mundane ending…
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Well, Lag is a bee now.With a bit of luck, the introduction should now be over and the real story should start. It was a bit embarrassing to hear him claim to want to become the best Bee ever. While I guess that he has been majorly influenced by Gauche and all, but all I could think of when I heard that was Naruto and Ash Ketchum. And that’s a direction I definitely don’t want him to go into. O.o

A majority of ths episode was spent on a really long flashback, that didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know already. At least, nothing major. It did raise a few subtle questions: why did Gauche change guns? Why did he want Lag to have his old gun? Where did he get such an expensive and unique gun? And why was all important information that would explain all of these questions conveniently left out of the flashback, even though those fragments are meant to be from his soul? Oh, and there seems to be some sort of organization that plans to overthrow the goverment, but yeah: every show has those.

Also, more crying! Sylvette reveals why Gauche became friendly with Lag: Lag reminded him of Sylvette. These two should enter crying competitions, seriously. I also feel that this series is using its soundtrack a bit too much. What I mean by this is the following: in this episode, it yet again wastes a bunch of beautiful tracks during relatively unimportant scenes. If the soundtrack for this series is big, then there’s no problem, however I fear that those tracks are going to lose their impact when they’re played too often.

I may be overly negative right now, but this wasn’t that disappointing of an episode. Uneventful is a better word. Unlike many other series, I really feel that Letter Bee has potential, but there’s no way for me to know for sure whether it’ll be able to deliver in the end.
Rating: (Enjoyable)