My blog has moved!

You should be automatically redirected in 6 seconds. If not, visit
http://psgels.net
and update your bookmarks.

February 15, 2010

Sora no Oto - 07

Filed under: Finished Series: Slice of Life/Drama/Sora no Oto



Wow… just wow. To everyone who was expecting this to be a fluffy and light-hearted series: this episode is here to prove you wrong.

But yeah, that’s one of the things about anime: while it’s often relatively simple to tell whether a series is going to be good or bad, after blogging for more than four years I still can’t predict at all when a seemingly innocent series like this one is going to blow me away. This episode caught me utterly by surprise: what an execution!

While this show has its moments of innocence, it’s moments like this that remind us what would happen if war would break out again. And really, this episode revealed that it’s been lie, what? Five years since the last war? This episode didn’t just do a wonderful job in fleshing out Phylicia (it only took one episode for us to understand EXACTLY what kind of a character she is, without making her a stereotype), but it also showed how fragile the setting is.

This episode also gave a lot of more hints about what happened to the past. First of all, the Japanese somehow took over Europe. After that, or during that, there followed a technological boom, and what I expect is AI going out of control (humans in machines don’t control them like the way they moved in that flashback). In order to get rid of them, nuclear weapons were used. The Japanese died of the aftereffects of the fallout, and the French resettled the area. My guess is that we’re currently at one of the few areas that were unscathed. My guess is that the current generation of wars either is about a few survivors of that strange AI (that would explain why they called the attacker of Vingt the “Invisible Angel of Death”, rather than just another war, or it’s a power struggle between the survivors for the last remaining patches of fertile land.

I must say, I’m impressed by the director. His two previous works, Elfen Lied and Denpateki na Kanojo both had some very good direction, but both were held back by a certain degree of unbelievability: characters would do stuff, just to advance the plot. In this series, his focus is EXACTLY to fix this. And here this episode comes and shows that he can also hit really hard when he wants to. I really have to say that Elfen Lied would have been a truly amazing series if it had its characters as well written as in Sora no Oto.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

Hanamaru Youchien - 06

Filed under: Finished Series: Comedy/Hanamaru Youchien



A bit of a lesser episode because it had some unnecessary stereotypes: the pool episode and the tsundere sister, things that have been done millions of times before. But yeah, I guess that in the context of this series it still had its fresh elements.

That swimsuit was a bit too much, especially considering how Yamamoto had no idea about Tsuchida’s reaction to it. It’s a good thing that she still lives with her parents, because I really don’t think that she could take care of herself on her own… But overall, what set this episode apart was the focus on siblings. And when Tsuchida’s sister wasn’t acting like a shallow tsundere, she was surprisingly down to earth and interesting. And the synchronized swimming part was hilarious.

The thing about this series is that the adults all had lives on high school before they started to work at the kindergarten, which were vastly different compared to what you’d see in high school series, in which kids tend to segue from one to the other quite naturally. Tsuchidahas been characterized pretty well throughout the past six episode, however he remains rather annoying when he keeps ogling at Yamamoto.
Rating: (Enjoyable)