(Ante-script: I don't know how many anime films I am going to watch considering I have a growing list. As of now I have four more queued up for time consumption and ambitious analysis, them being Grave of the Fireflies, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, and Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below. Note that I am using the word "film." The selections I am/will be writing about aren't mere pictures that move 23 frames per second, but are works of art by preeminent Japanese directors who have no apparent limit to imagination. Respect, man. Respect.)
Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts
Monday, 30 January 2012
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Freak is Dead but Geek's Still Here
It feels as if it was just yesterday my best friend and I had dreams of ruthlessly spending money on costumes that bore resemblance to shinigami robes and wearing wigs the color of apples or grapes, or maybe even apples and grapes blended together. We had our plans laid down to the tiniest and most embarrassing detail-- including our setting, the characters we were going to portray and whose deviantArt account would take all the credit. We were so young and optimistic. We were cosplayer-wannabes!
Friday, 9 April 2010
Anime review: Kaichou wa Maid-sama!
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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