This anime season.
I'm sort of back to watching anime because this season brought a huge number of more or less interesting series. Three, to be precise. And I also managed to marathon Working! which I missed before. Yay?
The best of the three series I mentioned at the moment is Gosick. It's set in a non-existent country somewhere in Europe in 1924. Kazuya is a transfer student in a prestigious boarding school. He is the third son of a Japanese military officer, which means his family doesn't care much about him, but he tries to prove that he is at least as good as his older brothers. He doesn't have friends at school because most of the students believe that someone who transferred in the middle of a year brings bad luck. One day he comes to the school library and meets a girl on the top floor garden (yup, the library is situated in a tall tower, and there is a garden on top of it). The girl, whose name is Victorica, never leaves the tower because of some sort of legal matters. And she is constantly bored. They quickly become friends because both are lonely, Kazuya doesn't mind to come all the way to the garden, and Victorica is happy to have him there as long as he brings her sweets and interesting stories. But there is one more thing about Victorica that Kazuya finds fascinating. She's very smart. A lot of strange things happen in the town (of course, we're talking about an anime here), and she helps her older half-brother, who is a police detective, to solve those cases, mostly because it saves her from boredom.
After six episodes I can say this series is very promising. I like the story so far, and I like the art very much. The opening animation is made in Mucha's style, which looks just great. I really hope they won't make it into romance in the end, it's good as it is.
Hourou Musoko is a totally different kind of story. It's about school kids who are either transgendered or, so to say, gender-confused. The series deals with their inner struggling and public view of their issues. It's difficult to describe this anime without getting into details, and I don't want to do that now. But I must say it's definitely interesting and sort of realistic. Plus the art style is very refreshing.
When I decided to try watching Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, my only reason was to listen to its music as the soundtrack was written by Kajiura Yuki. The character design made me shiver. I still don't like it, but I got used to those deformed faces and disproportional bodies. This story is about a girl, Madoka, who has a potential to become a "magical girl". The problem is, magical girls are not what people think they are. In exchange for granting of one of their wishes they get special powers to fight "witches", supernatural beings that cause people to kill or to commit suicide. As a reward they get a grief seed that can clean their magical crystal (forgot the proper name) from impurity gained in fight. However, not all creatures MG fight have those seeds, only the ones who already killed humans. Add to this the fact that being a good person is not a requirement for being a MG, and some do their job only to get the reward. Nice.
All in all, it's an interesting story so far, the music is fantastic, as expected, and the art style, if you forget the character design, is unique in a good way.
The best of the three series I mentioned at the moment is Gosick. It's set in a non-existent country somewhere in Europe in 1924. Kazuya is a transfer student in a prestigious boarding school. He is the third son of a Japanese military officer, which means his family doesn't care much about him, but he tries to prove that he is at least as good as his older brothers. He doesn't have friends at school because most of the students believe that someone who transferred in the middle of a year brings bad luck. One day he comes to the school library and meets a girl on the top floor garden (yup, the library is situated in a tall tower, and there is a garden on top of it). The girl, whose name is Victorica, never leaves the tower because of some sort of legal matters. And she is constantly bored. They quickly become friends because both are lonely, Kazuya doesn't mind to come all the way to the garden, and Victorica is happy to have him there as long as he brings her sweets and interesting stories. But there is one more thing about Victorica that Kazuya finds fascinating. She's very smart. A lot of strange things happen in the town (of course, we're talking about an anime here), and she helps her older half-brother, who is a police detective, to solve those cases, mostly because it saves her from boredom.
After six episodes I can say this series is very promising. I like the story so far, and I like the art very much. The opening animation is made in Mucha's style, which looks just great. I really hope they won't make it into romance in the end, it's good as it is.
Hourou Musoko is a totally different kind of story. It's about school kids who are either transgendered or, so to say, gender-confused. The series deals with their inner struggling and public view of their issues. It's difficult to describe this anime without getting into details, and I don't want to do that now. But I must say it's definitely interesting and sort of realistic. Plus the art style is very refreshing.
When I decided to try watching Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, my only reason was to listen to its music as the soundtrack was written by Kajiura Yuki. The character design made me shiver. I still don't like it, but I got used to those deformed faces and disproportional bodies. This story is about a girl, Madoka, who has a potential to become a "magical girl". The problem is, magical girls are not what people think they are. In exchange for granting of one of their wishes they get special powers to fight "witches", supernatural beings that cause people to kill or to commit suicide. As a reward they get a grief seed that can clean their magical crystal (forgot the proper name) from impurity gained in fight. However, not all creatures MG fight have those seeds, only the ones who already killed humans. Add to this the fact that being a good person is not a requirement for being a MG, and some do their job only to get the reward. Nice.
All in all, it's an interesting story so far, the music is fantastic, as expected, and the art style, if you forget the character design, is unique in a good way.