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Sep 26, 2011
Ga-Rei Zero caught my attention while browsing a forum. To be more accurate it was a character named Yomi. The motto of the show “Will you kill someone you love because of love?” seemed interesting and makes you wonder about the series.
The show starts basically with the ending. We don't get any introductions we just arrive in the middle of the action. The whole first episode is raced through the events, and it got a sudden and suprising end. At the beginning of the second episode the whole pace changes, and we return to the events that happened years before the first episode. After this
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the show basically turns into a slice of life show with few bits of drama and pretty much cominc relief elements.
We get see the main characters relationships to each other and their motives explained. There are some action scenes in-between, but they don't become important to the main story until the end. The last few episodesw pick the pace up again and show us the events that eventually led to episode one.
Now few words about the ending. After all this build-up, you wait for a a climatic, atcion-packed conclusion and you might think everything gets explained and resolved. Wrong. You get the action and you understand the motives of the main characters, but it is so rushed and meaningless, that barely feels like an ending. The anime was a prequel to the manga series, so it is a bit understandable, that not everything is wrapped up, but there are so many unexplained elements to the story, that I had to look after the answers to my questions at more places.
The last episodes introduces dramatic changes in the story that felt rushed and they came basically out of the blue. I think they are supposed to have a dramatic effect on the viewer, however they only raise more questions instead. While the ending is dramatic, the monologues of the side characters ruin the mood and while these scenes are supposed to show the inner thoughts of the main characters, while they are explained through the viewpoint of the supporting cast. This distances the viewer from the main characters.
The characters themselves are colorful we can see many types of people appearing in the first episode. Too bad, that the supporting cast takes too much focus from the main characters, Kagura and Yomi. This wouldn't be bad if they played important part in the events. Sadly in the end the majority of the supporting characters only serve as cannon fodder to the demons and don't even play any role to the development of the story, save for a few exceptions.
Yomi is the one character who bears the whole show on her shoulders. She sets events in motion, her character is pretty unique and she has the most focus throughout the story, while the other characters are static. Her development is the only worth mentioning altough her actions may seem inconsequent due to the poor storytelling. But if there is one character you might get attached to during the that is undoubtly Yomi. Kagura, the other main character of the show is young girl who joins Yomi in her job as an exorcist at a very young age. She has a naive and kind nature, and this remains so during the events. She faces many hardships despite her young age, but the sad thing is, it doesn't even change a bit of her personality. At the end of the show, the flash-forward shows, that her personality hasn't gone through any changes at all, rendering the previous events almost meaningless.
I personally feel, that the show could have been much better if the story would only be about Kagura and Yomi. While they get much screentime, too much of it goes by without any meaningful events, and this gives back the feeling of a slice-of-life show.
The animation and the action scenes are the major strong-points of the show. The fights are well animated, the motions are fluid, the scenery is also nice. The sound effects and the music is pretty mediocre, it is not really worth mentioning. The opening song is very catchy, it goes well with the action scenes of the show and the slow ending matches the mood of the story.
The pacing of the show totally ruins the mood of the anime. I only can recommend the series to people who like action shows and are prone to tear-jerkers. For those, who look for a more time, Ga-Rei is certainly not their choice.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jul 3, 2011
The slice of life genre became quite popular recently, studios have been adapting more and more titles. It all began with the release of Azumanga Daioh and the genre is blooming ever since. A-channel also belongs to the ever increasing list of slice-of-life anime and the title is originally a 4-koma comic like K-on! or Lucky Star, which also have an adapted anime form. The anime was made by the relatively new Studio Gokumi, which is known for its other title Koe de Oshigoto.
The question about the show is: how is A-channel different from the slice-of-life shows listed above? The short answer is: there is
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no difference. A-channel follows the daily lives of 4 high school girls: Tooru, Run, Nagi and Yuuko. It's your standard high school setting with an almost all-female cast. Still A-channel turned out to be really enjoyable despite its flaws
Story:
Like in all similar anime, episodes can viewed independently from each other. There is no distinctive story that will develop throughout the episodes, there are rather stand-alone episodes which center on a certain event or setting. Since it was adapted from a 4-koma manga, it is a big question whether you can produce a continuous 20-25 minute long episode, or not. I think it did a great job with that. The episodes are nicely written; if some tension is built up during an episode it is usually resolved by the end of the show. A-channel moves with a really slow pace, so you might think it’s boring, if you're not used to the genre. I think the anime managed to put up a nice balance between the comedic and serious moments too.
Art:
The backgrounds are surprisingly well drawn in the anime. In fact there are very few occasions when someone seriously takes care of the backgrounds in a slice-of-life anime. The colors were vivid, they represented the mood of the scenes really good; overall it was a real eye-candy for me. The character designs are simple as they were in the manga, sometimes a little bit too simple for an anime adaptation. Most of the reactions and expressions were displayed through chibi faces, which they did a little too many times during the show. But the designs were appropriate.
Sound:
The background music wasn't anything remarkable, it was rather forgettable. The opening song 'Morning arch' on the other hand was very catchy and goes very well with the mood of the whole show. The songs at the end sung by the actresses were a nice addition and the lyrics also passed to the episode's story and mood, but they didn't make a great impression despite this. The ending song wasn't anything special either. The studio did a good job at selecting the voice actors for the show particularly with Yuuki Aoi, who almost single-handedly carried the whole show on her back. Kotubuki Minako and Fukuhara Minako already had some experience with the genre before and they did a good job with their characters too. The deep-voiced Uchiyama Yumi is a relatively new to the anime world, but her characteristic voice made Nagi unique.
Characters:
While the voice actors did a good job, their characters were just re-hashes from earlier anime. We can easily spot Azumanga Daioh's Yomi in Nagi, Lucky Star's Tsukasa in Run (I think it was intentional that they even share the voice actor), K-on!'s Mio in Yuuko's character (the producers managed to enroll Kotobuki Minako who had a role in K-on! as Mugi-chan, so I think she knew Mio's character pretty well enough, to play her counterpart in A-channel) and Mitsudomoe's Hitoha in Tooru (she can be also considered as a copy of Noel from Sora no Woto, since both characters have the same actress). While the characters are only copies from previous shows, their interactions and the story makes up for them, they really get along well together. Most of the stories somehow center on Tooru and events can be seen mostly from her point of view. We can also have some insights on other characters as well, but the only character, whose personality gets thoroughly analyzed is Tooru.
Summary:
A-channel is typical case, where a show offers the exact same thing we expect from it, nothing more, nothing less. Anime industry seriously needs more anime like this, where you get what you expect and the show manages to live up to the expectations of the viewers. A-channel is not the best slice-of life anime ever made, but is nicely done, and the studio managed to put up a heart-warming show from mediocre source material. It is the anime that you watch after a stressful day, when you finally get to sit down to relax. I can only recommend this show to those who like slower pace slice of life anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jun 27, 2011
What do you do, when you suddenly see a ghost of a person that you were close to? Most people would think it's just their imagination or the effect of stress. But what if your mind doesn't play tricks on you and you really encounter a ghost from the past? AnoHana plays with this idea. The story starts out on a usual day for the shut-in Jinta, who suddenly sees the ghost of his childhood friend Menma. Menma tells Jinta she has a wish that she wants to be granted by him. And from here on, Jinta's unusual summer starts.
Story:
The story itself centers around the
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six members of the Super Peace Busters, which was seemingly disbanded after the death of one their members. At first you'd expect that the story revolves around Menma and her wish but the truth is, the story tries to center around the members' lives and the way they were affected by the death of their friend and the show does a sloppy job with that. Of course true friends wouldn't leave each other in times of need. So why were the Super Peace Busters disbanded? Obviously there are more reasons behind that than the death of their friend.
I personally thought that story would be a coming-of-age story, where the characters deal with the problems of becoming adults and finally dealing with the death of their beloved friend. And boy was I wrong. Instead, the show turned out to be a love story pretty soon and the romance became the major driving force of the entire show. The mystery behind Menma's wish didn't unfold until the last episode and tension has been lifted so suddenly, at first I didn't know how it happened. The story itself moved forward pretty slowly, until the last 3 episodes, where the pace suddenly changed and everything was wrapped rather quickly up in one final episode. Not to mention many questions were left open and many were left unexplained.
The first 4 or 5 episodes were very promising, but after them, the plot went down the drain pretty soon and was dragged out for too long. I think the story could have been told in roughly 6 episodes, and then we could have been spared of all those unnecessary scenes that were dealing with the love polygon between the characters. It's a pity that they wasted 11 episodes on a story that was worth roughly 6 episodes.
The reason why AnoHana became popular is the romance and the fact that you could ship many characters together. Most of the characters rethink their relations to the others and since the cast is half male half female, it is inevitable that some of them play with the thought of starting a relationship with someone other from the Super Peace busters.
The plot wasn't really planned out from the start and it seemed the writer didn't know what to do with the 11 episodes he or she got, the pacing of the story made this obvious. This problem affects most of the original anime shows and AnoHana wasn't an exception either.
Art:
One of the major strong-points of the show. The animation is consistent, the backgrounds are well drawn. This is no wonder, since the anime was originally meant to attract tourists to Chichibu city and I think that AnoHana managed to capture the beauty of the region pretty well and reached its goal with this.
Sound:
The background music fits in the show perfectly, it was very well done. The opening and ending songs are very catchy and perhaps they are the best of the season.
Characters:
There are 6 main characters in the story. The creators could have used 6 episodes to explore their backgrounds and the nature of their problems, but the show wasn't able to do this either. I would have really liked if we could have gotten more info about Chiriko and Poppo too, since they were as important as the other four. The characters aren't any special and there is little to no character development throughout the story. Not to mention everyone is emotionally so unstable, that they can break into crying every now and then. This became very annoying especially in the last two episodes. The conflicts between them feel over-exaggerated most of the time and everyone runs in circles until the very last episode. But the execution of the last episode was so terrible, I can even tell the exact moment when all the problems are suddenly solved. The character interactions are melodramatic and take everything to the extreme. As I was telling earlier I was expecting a coming-of-age show, so I thought maybe the characters were going to discuss their problems and try to find a solution to them, but all the cast was doing was crying and complaining about their issues throughout the story and they didn't even care about the things the others were saying. Without analyzing characters I must say, that they weren't original, the show just managed to re-use some common and popular character archetypes. They are rather easy to forget.
Overall:
This show makes a perfect job on summoning emotions from the viewers and fills the holes of the plot with the tears of the viewer. It started out as a promising drama but failed to live up to its high expectations. But this might be a good start if you're unfamiliar to dramas, because AnoHana heavily relies on the sympathy that you feel towards the characters and takes you on an emotional rollercoaster and sucks you in to the story easily. If you had experiences with dramas before, I suggest you skip the show, because it’s forgettable and has many flaws that might disturb you and the rushed ending basically ruins the tension that has been building up since the beginning. Overall I say that AnoHana is a mediocre show, that had potential, but failed to exploit it, but despite this it became very popular. If you like shipping in general and crying over love stories, AnoHana is the anime for you.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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