So the summer season is in full swing now, with a lot more of the anticipated shows airing. Sword Art Online II, Sailor Moon, Barakamon. I will hopefully continue to bring more and more reviews soon.

I am a huge fan of PA Works and what they’ve established in the anime industry speaking strictly on animation designing these past couple of years. Canaan was a solid action series that was a pretty enjoyable even if the ending sucked. The show could have used more episodes and if there hadn’t been a few loose ends the show would have been my favorite action series of the summer 2009 season.

When I had originally watched the first few episodes of Angel Beats I thought to myself oh great another visual novel adaptation filled with moe and annoying characters. This was not the case here, as it fully developed into having so many different genres throughout. Its core was being a mystery series, but it threw in comedy, action adventure and even some romance that played together very nicely. Director Seiji Kishi rushed it all to hell though. It was extremely entertaining to watch, but not a strong memorable series. This series like some of the other ones I’ve mentioned before would have had such an advantage of being a 2-cour show.

In 2011, Hanasaku Iroha was a fantastic look at a coming-of-age story taking place in an inn of all places. They did a wonderful job with that series on developing each person slowly. Another was a series that could have used more episodes as well. The premise was interesting as were the characters but with that show it felt too forced in the horror genre. Let alone the fact the music all sounded the same. It wasn’t the greatest with timing, but it achieved being scary plenty of times.

Tari Tari was another slice of life that pulled on heart strings with all the romance in that show from young kids who wanted to be older. This was too forced as well but still entertaining to watch. Red Data Girl allowed for some of the same recycled feelings to come across just with the addition of supernatural elements.

Now onto a series that was amazing. Uchoten Kazoku. This show surpassed all of my expectations on being a solid series, and the music was memorable too. What a great plot to have your lead cast be from different species of families all rivaling with each other! That show had some witty humor to it as well. The thing you’ll notice is that this wasn’t PA Works usual stuff most notably in the character and background designs. They were adapting a novel by the same guy who wrote Tatami Galaxy. By the way, one of my favorite Japanese authors. After the first couple of episodes I knew it was going to be a success.

Nagi no Asukara had a strong and unique premise. People live on land, and underwater. What happens when someone from underwater falls in love with someone from above and vice versa? This was awesome. If it not were for all the melodrama and they had created characters that were not only older but more vocal in their feelings this show would have been much better off.

Now we are into the summer, and PA Works dove into an interesting plot. Here we have a girl who wants to be a glass artisan. Ok, this is a plot I have not seen before let alone I do not know much about glass-making, so hopefully I could learn something here. But what happened here? The animation is fantastic looking along with the music and characters. This should be an introductory episode and it did a fine job rolling credits of each of the main cast yet there was little to no dialogue, as if we were supposed to telepathically understand everything. The romance towards the end that was brooding was extremely noticeable and I could tell that side of the show is going to be intense. Too intense. The interactions between Touko and Kakeru were just plains weird. Where was Kakeru in Hanasaku Iroha? This guy would have been more well-off in that show considering how straight-forward Ohana was. Here though it felt so out of place. I am still going to be watching this just because it’s PA Works, but aside from that it isn’t even worth my time to blog about it. I do however, hope we learn a little bit about glass creation in this show. Too bad we couldn’t have had Masayuki Ishikawa as series writer. That would have made this first episode a lot more fascinating.

Likely to Blog: 30%

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