First Impressions: Kobato, Kimi ni Todoke, Darker than Black 2, 11eyes

My next first impres­sions post was meant to include anime like Book of Ban­torra and Natsu no Arashi but I’ve been hav­ing some admin­is­trat­ive errors with Crunchyroll and it won’t accept my paypal. But that’s for another day. For no we’re going to have to con­tinue watch­ing fan­subbed anime. Oh poor us, how­ever will we survive!

My Rat­ing Sys­tem Explained!

A = If you watch any­thing this sea­son, watch this

B = Very good, some­times sur­pris­ingly so.

C = If you have the time, you should check this out

D = Not my kind of thing, I won’t be watch­ing this

E = Bad. Very bad, ignore this show

F = Frus­trat­ingly awful

Kobato

I’ve yet to make a ‘top 10/20 favor­ite anime’ post but if I did, you would see exactly how much I adored Chob­its. See­ing Clamp and Mad­house return for a new anime that has a sim­ilar atmo­sphere has clouded my judge­ment a bit with this new series. For that reason, it’s kind of hard to take my review here at face value.

Of course I enjoyed the epis­ode. The cheer­ful naiv­ety of Kobato works so well when played off her viol­ent stuffed dog. The anim­a­tion is superb (it’s great to finally see Mad­house back on qual­ity anime again instead of Need­less) and the whole atmo­sphere of the epis­ode was so easy to enjoy. That grin never left my face.

One large prob­lem though. Con­sid­er­ing it’s such an import­ant part of her char­ac­ter, the pro­du­cers really should have picked someone else to voice Kobato who could actu­ally sing. Some people said that it would be impossible to sound as angelic as the anime por­trays her as but you should at least get someone who can hit those high notes.

Rat­ing: B

Kimi ni Todoke

I have a lot of prob­lems with this epis­ode, most of them being aspects that are stand­ard to any shojo. The dia­logue is hor­ribly unreal­istic and unima­gin­at­ive. It’s basic­ally like how a teen­age girl would like her dia­logue to go with the guy she liked. The guy’s per­son­al­ity was too annoy­ingly per­fect and idealised.

Then there’s the fact that the romance is pretty much already there. The main two already like each other and are prac­tic­ally going out by this stage. The most fun part of a romance anime is watch­ing the char­ac­ters fall in love with each other. These two fell in love in that ‘the school is that way’ scene, killing the series right from the start.

Con­sid­er­ing how much I heard about how intel­li­gent the manga was, I’m pretty damn dis­ap­poin­ted. I guess I just don’t like shojo. It’s not just the star-sparkles and so on, it’s the annoy­ing level of wish-fulfillment that goes on. The only sav­ing grace is that I actu­ally quite liked the female lead but oth­er­wise that epis­ode really dis­ap­poin­ted me.

Rat­ing: C–

Darker than Black: Comet of Gemini

They come along every now and then don’t they. Those first epis­odes that just make a mock­ery of every other anime’s efforts and bowls them over effort­lessly with their own level of qual­ity. Darker than Black man­aged that. Noth­ing this sea­son has even come remotely close to the qual­ity of this episode.

It actu­ally took me ages to get into the first sea­son of Darker than Black. It wasn’t until around epis­ode 8 did I start to enjoy the series. Thank god that I didn’t have to do that again for this series, con­sid­er­ing it’s only 12/13 epis­odes long. The other plus from the last sea­son is that this Yoko Kanno-less sea­son actu­ally has *gasp* bet­ter music!

Yes, Darker than Black has returned in all it’s glory. Brian is also going to make an emphatic return to blog this series so you can fol­low him if you so wish.

Rat­ing: A

11eyes

Why oh why did this anime have to stick to such pain­ful otaku-pandering. There’s clearly a good plot under­neath all that stu­pid panty flashes and hor­rible moe and argh! No really, the scenes where the two char­ac­ters swap over to that undeni­ably creepy other-world are excel­lent and very Noein-esque.

But oh dear god, what sort of non­sense did they put in before that! There must have been about 10 panty flashes but they were far from being the worst part. Far worse were the pain­fully gen­eric char­ac­ter arche­types and con­ver­sa­tions that we’ve seen a bizzilion times before. It’s as if the cre­at­ors were try­ing to be as gen­eric as pos­sible and suc­ceeded spectacularly.

And then there’s the moe. I don’t hate moe but by god…ok just stop me now before I keep bitch­ing about all the things that pained me about this epis­ode I’d go on all day and it would get tl;dr. The worst thing is that there is clearly a good story under all this utter gen­eric crap that’s dom­in­ated most of the episode.

Rat­ing: E+