I have to say that whenever a certain studio decides to do an anime adaptation of a shoujo manga with amazing and intricate art, it ends up ruining the whole thing. There should be a universal rule that only shounen manga should be animated.
One of the newly released shoujo anime is Kaichou wa Maid-sama! ("The Student Council President is a Maid"), which is aired as a simulcast show in Animax. It's on every Sunday at 8:30 pm. The show is an adaptation of the manga created by Hiro Fujiwara. It is the story of a very hardworking student, Misaki Ayuzawa, the Student Council president of Seika High, a former all-boys school that went co-ed a few years prior to the plot. She's mean and utterly vile when it comes to dealing with boys, so practically 3/4 of the student body hates her. When the resident hot guy Takumi Usui (he has the name of the devil, literally) finds out that she works part-time in a maid cafe...a lot of mishaps (and romance) spark between the two.
I've read the first few chapters, and I really like Fujiwara-san's delicate strokes that produce beautiful and detailed drawings. The characters are well-defined although there isn't something that makes her artwork entirely unique. Perhaps the most enticing parts of her drawings are the eyes and the hair-- a trademark of the shoujo category.
Anyway, as I was saying...I was a bit disappointed with the animators' rendition of Fujiwara-san's characters, especially Takumi Usui. He looks different; probably the eyes were left out of detail. And the voice is a tad murky (I'm so sorry Nobuhiko Okamoto-san!). Misaki Ayuzawa, the lead, is okay but her hair seems kind of...stiff. Haha.
The first episode followed chapters 1-3 I guess. I'm not sure, though at least they haven't strayed from the plot.
The opening theme left me unnerved for a few seconds but then I realized, it's shoujo, fluff is quite common. I left it at that and decided to never get LSS-ed with the high-pitched song.
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