2008 autumn anime (part c)
9 Oct 2008 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayoraaseiSkip Beat! (ANN Info)
This is one of those extremely popular shoujo series that, in spite of its extreme popularity, has continually failed to entice me, which places it in the same awkward position as Nana.
Mogami Kyouko is living the with biggest rising idol, Fuwa Shou, on the market right now. She's been infatuated with him since childhood, and was elated when he asked her to come to the big city with him. She is his all purpose housekeeper - she cooks, cleans, washes and pays for the rent by working her ass off. To his childish tantrums, she's sweet-natured and meek and always puts his interests first. While making a delivery of his favourite desserts to him, she overhears him talk about her scornfully as someone whose meekness he's just using. When she confronts him, Fuwa smirks and tells her that he's so famous now that a commoner like her can never touch him. This opens her Pandora box of fierce temper, and she sets out to gain vengeance - by throwing herself into the very entertainment world that he taunted her with.
The anime starts off quite well. All the right shoujo elements are there - the bright colours, the cute humour, the pretty character designs, and Miyano Mamoru (LOL). But I find it hard to bring myself to like a story I've had a visceral disliking to for the last five years. Something about the art that creeps me out, I guess. People with exaggeratedly long (wonky) limbs and pointed (wonky) faces and freaky long lashes. While Kyouko is an undeniably strong female character, I had trouble either sympathising or liking or admiring her neurotic switching between gooey-eyed fangirl and screechingbitch banshee.
Personal taste. That's all.
To Aru Majutsu no Index (ANN Info)
Usually I stay away from something with a high cute factor, but this one was so well-received I decided to check it out. After one episode it's still hard to tell what the background of the story is, except that it's set in a city that's both sci-fi and magical.
Main character Kamijo Toma has no magic powers of his own except for his right hand, which can negate everything magical. This, apparently, also negates any blessing by God, which puts him prone to the mercy of Murphy's Law - everything that can possibly go wrong with his life inevitably does. While in the middle of his bad luck, he finds a young girl hanging on his verandah, and some light-hearted bantering later, he finally believes her story that she is a magical index (called, simply, Index) that stores a huge number of magical tomes. She is being pursued by magicians, and she leaves after eating all the stale food he had to offer - but he finds her again when he returns home from school, lying in front of his door, blood soaked through her white magical dress.
We haven't seen enough of the story or the background for us to decide. Index has just the right mix of cuteness and evilness to make her doubly adorable, reminding me a lot of the innocuously destructive Kagura from Gintama. What's probably most appealing is its mix of genres - not just fantasy or comedy or action, but a basis that seams all of them together.
This is one of those extremely popular shoujo series that, in spite of its extreme popularity, has continually failed to entice me, which places it in the same awkward position as Nana.
Mogami Kyouko is living the with biggest rising idol, Fuwa Shou, on the market right now. She's been infatuated with him since childhood, and was elated when he asked her to come to the big city with him. She is his all purpose housekeeper - she cooks, cleans, washes and pays for the rent by working her ass off. To his childish tantrums, she's sweet-natured and meek and always puts his interests first. While making a delivery of his favourite desserts to him, she overhears him talk about her scornfully as someone whose meekness he's just using. When she confronts him, Fuwa smirks and tells her that he's so famous now that a commoner like her can never touch him. This opens her Pandora box of fierce temper, and she sets out to gain vengeance - by throwing herself into the very entertainment world that he taunted her with.
The anime starts off quite well. All the right shoujo elements are there - the bright colours, the cute humour, the pretty character designs, and Miyano Mamoru (LOL). But I find it hard to bring myself to like a story I've had a visceral disliking to for the last five years. Something about the art that creeps me out, I guess. People with exaggeratedly long (wonky) limbs and pointed (wonky) faces and freaky long lashes. While Kyouko is an undeniably strong female character, I had trouble either sympathising or liking or admiring her neurotic switching between gooey-eyed fangirl and screeching
Personal taste. That's all.
To Aru Majutsu no Index (ANN Info)
Usually I stay away from something with a high cute factor, but this one was so well-received I decided to check it out. After one episode it's still hard to tell what the background of the story is, except that it's set in a city that's both sci-fi and magical.
Main character Kamijo Toma has no magic powers of his own except for his right hand, which can negate everything magical. This, apparently, also negates any blessing by God, which puts him prone to the mercy of Murphy's Law - everything that can possibly go wrong with his life inevitably does. While in the middle of his bad luck, he finds a young girl hanging on his verandah, and some light-hearted bantering later, he finally believes her story that she is a magical index (called, simply, Index) that stores a huge number of magical tomes. She is being pursued by magicians, and she leaves after eating all the stale food he had to offer - but he finds her again when he returns home from school, lying in front of his door, blood soaked through her white magical dress.
We haven't seen enough of the story or the background for us to decide. Index has just the right mix of cuteness and evilness to make her doubly adorable, reminding me a lot of the innocuously destructive Kagura from Gintama. What's probably most appealing is its mix of genres - not just fantasy or comedy or action, but a basis that seams all of them together.
