No anime is dropped forever: Kobato

There’s no point in run­ning these ‘no anime is dropped forever’ posts if I never actu­ally watch any of the anime in ques­tion. Kobato ran away with the poll in the post it was in so I had to pick it up again. Clan­nad After Story was a rel­at­ive suc­cess while Excel Saga wasn’t, apart from that bizarre final epis­ode. Third anime up is Clamps manga turned 2009 anime: Kobato.

Picked up on: Epis­ode 4

Why I picked it up again: As I said earlier, it ran away with the poll in the post in ques­tion and that would have been enough a reason to watch it any­way. There was also the fact that most of the com­menters were doing their usual act of ‘it gets bet­ter, I swear!. Finally, there was that con­stant nig­gling desire to find some­thing that rep­lic­ated the feel­ing I had while watch­ing Chobits.

Review: Some­where around about epis­ode 12 it hit me. No, not that the show had sud­denly become watch­able, that wasn’t to hap­pen for sev­eral more epis­odes. No, what hit me was a per­fect way to express what it was I didn’t like about this show. I had some vague review thoughts in my head (sub­con­sciously review­ing the show as you watch it; the curse of being a critic) but most of them revolved around bitch­ing about how stu­pid Kobato her­self was and how the show relied on cute­ness as its main appeal, some­thing I’ve just never really liked. But then it hit me. Some­body had made a com­ment in an earlier post that the way they got through a series they didn’t like was because they spent their time also play­ing Poke­mon. So I finally got around to play­ing Poke­mon Plat­inum (why yes, I am a game behind every­one else) after sit­ting through the first few epis­odes of Kobato and real­ising I would prob­ably smash my laptop if I had to sit through another ‘Kobato Gan­bar­rebleargh~’ without some­thing else to occupy my mind. Now nor­mally this shouldn’t work unless I was watch­ing the dub. Mul­ti­task­ing while watch­ing subs is next to impossible. How­ever it did work because I actu­ally under­stood pretty much everything that was being said.

Let me explain. I have never once made an attempt at learn­ing Japan­ese. I know about as much as any wee­aboo who watches subbed anime would know. Watch­ing Kobato wasn’t a sud­den grand real­isa­tion that I was now flu­ent in Japan­ese. It was the sim­pli­city of the lan­guage the char­ac­ters used. They all had just a few stock lines they would throw out in most situ­ations which meant that after watch­ing a few epis­odes pay­ing atten­tion to the subs you knew pretty much everything that they could say. This effects the anime in far more ways than you might real­ise. Of course you get the pain­fully dull and repet­it­ive dia­logue. Of course there’s the way every scene and every epis­ode feels the exact bloody same with no inspir­a­tion, ingenu­ity or ima­gin­a­tion, bar Kobato’s ward­robe. But along­side that you also have the actual ten­sion in the series solved using the same unin­spired meth­ods in every epis­ode. Kobato throws out a few stock phrases, Ioryogi mut­ters some­thing in the back­ground and all is right with the world once again. It lim­its the dir­ec­tion any epis­ode can take.

But yes, it does get bet­ter. It may take until around epis­ode 17 before I actu­ally went through an epis­ode without hav­ing beaten 3–4 poke­mon train­ers while it was play­ing, but it cer­tainly did improve. Vastly improved. By epis­ode 20 I had shut that Game Boy for good and was actu­ally watch­ing this show for real. The show took a much more dra­matic and mel­an­cholic tone that suited the style of storytelling far more. After watch­ing the pre­vi­ous 16 epis­odes of failed com­edy (bar Ioryogi dodging cork bul­lets at the fest­ival. That was quite funny) and bland stor­ies that were sup­posed to be heart­warm­ing, the effect this change to a plot-driven story had on the over­all qual­ity of the show was phe­nom­enal. The MAL stats paint an inter­est­ing pic­ture indeed.

Notice that there’s a very high per­cent­age drop rate to com­pleted rate. And yet the anime is rated 8.07, a very respect­able score indeed. Because MAL doesn’t count the scores once you’ve seen bey­ond a cer­tain num­ber of epis­odes so those who actu­ally sat through the entire thing were clearly rewar­ded for their efforts. It also shows the usual reac­tion of people to rate some­thing highly because the later epis­odes were bet­ter, much like After Story. It’s some­thing that bugs me a lot because I hate hav­ing to sit through sev­eral poor epis­odes just because ‘it gets bet­ter I swear!’. I don’t doubt it does. It’s just those earlier epis­odes are a right pain to sit through. Because Kobato is, for the most part, a poor anime. It just hap­pens to end on a very high note. Plus you can’t skip those earlier epis­odes the same way you the­or­et­ic­ally can for After Story. Without those earlier epis­odes the end­ing ones don’t work.

It did turn me into a romantic sap though. Good old Clamp did it again. They made me believe that, through any­thing, love will pre­vail. No mat­ter what hap­pens to you, what you go through, what form you’re in, love will get through all that. It did the very same thing Chob­its did. It made me believe in the Power of Love. I came into this anime look­ing for some­thing to rep­lic­ate the feel­ing Chob­its gave me and, in the end, I guess it did exactly that.

Was it worth pick­ing up again: Not really. Not even for the Power of Love