I haven't been watching anime for a while (Bleach went on a protracted filler run again that only ended recently), and I was wondering why my Japanese listening comprehension improvement rate wasn't keeping up with my classmates', or why I wasn't expanding my Japanese vocab fast enough.
Then it struck me - if I'm reading manga scanlations, I don't get the benefit of seeing the original text, whereas when I watch anime, I get to hear the Japanese and match it with the translation (as long as the sub is accurate). Since I know more grammar structures now, I'm just out to pick up vocabulary and meaning nuances.
So recently I've started watching the anime for Mashima Hiro's shonen series "Fairy Tail" (
manga link here). It's a pretty wild series about magic users who brawl more than they brew potions - lighthearted, humor-filled, macho, with a wide ridiculous streak and lots of dramatic moments of gushing manly tears. :D This is the sort of series in which a giant pink-aproned rat named Veronica that flies by spinning its tail like a helicopter rotor can be taken as a credible enemy, for instance. XD Nice immature boyish fun, essentially.
The series also trends toward the extremely fanservicy - the main characters are either busty chicks in revealing outfits or fit guys who don't like to wear shirts. The blatant fanservice of one strong female character (Erza Scarlett) bothered me at first, until I developed a big crush on one of the male leads (Gray Fullbuster) and decided that fanservice would be ok as long as it remained egalitarian. :)
Anime Mutterings
The anime does two things well to enhance the original material: the music and the special magic effects.
Fairy Tail takes place in a sort of medieval-esque Western location, full of cobblestone streets and elaborate cathedrals, although the characters' clothes and concepts are very 20th century. The music, however, is full-on Celtic rock, which gives the series soundtrack a distinctive flavor. Here's the Fairy Tail main theme as a sampler:
Click to view
Other tracks aren't quite as distinctively Celtic (my favorite character/crush, Gray, has a
somewhat disappointingly conventional shonen heavy-metal fight theme). If you've ever watched any Naruto Shippuuden and enjoyed its awesome soundtrack (and mourned the horrid pacing too as you prepared to drop the series...),
Fairy Tail's sad/pensive theme might sound familiar to you, and that's because Fairy Tail's series composer, Takanashi Yasuharu, also did the Naruto Shippuuden soundtrack.
Opening #2, flipped to dodge copyright lol
Click to view
The other thing to praise the anime for is the addition of the special magic circle effects, which can be seen in the opening linked above. Except for a single circle rune cast by an enemy later in the series, there are no such magic special effects in the original manga itself, so watching those concentric circle runes pop out and spin every time someone casts a spell is pretty cool. There are some sequences of magic invocation or transformation that are clearly reused a few times throughout the series (budget!!), but they're mercifully short enough and interesting enough that the repetition is tolerable.
One thing the anime does NOT do right is stuff a pile of filler in from the get-go. It's not a good sign when you're in filler territory less than 10 episodes in. (
Episode 9 is a filler. Yay.) I know filler is the blight of all long-running shonen anime series, and since the Fairy Tail manga is still being serialized in Shonen Magazine right now, it's clearly not going to be able to stay ahead of the anime the whole time, but in my humble opinion, fillerizing the first 10 episodes is suicide, because it really destroys a viewer's expectations for the rest of the series. Yes, obviously this is not a high-gloss quality animation affair, but the very least we could ask for is faithfulness to the source material, or at least reasonably good filler instead of the OOC stuff that Ep 9 shows. (Early Bleach anime did this right, IMO - a full-on charge from the start til the end of the Soul Society arc, with only a rare few canon-based high quality filler episodes in between.)
I tend to follow series more earnestly if I have a character I'm invested in, so as long as the crush on Gray lasts (which I'm not sure of, since I'm not nearly as nuts about him as I was about Ichigo, or Gintoki/Hijikata from Gintama for that matter), I'll probably keep following Fairy Tail. The cast is large and varied enough, and the plotlines definitely fantastical and creative enough, to keep my attention for a while.