Here’s that europhile bugle anime you’d been demanding.
As much as I’d want to encourage well produced, original anime, So·Ra·No·Wo·To kind of makes things hard for me. On a purely technical and artistic level it’s head and shoulders over most TV anime. However, there was only about 5 minutes that I was particularly happy with.
The problem is that it feels so safe.
Most obviously that problem lies in Akai Toshifumi’s design of the lead characters. They look like they’ve been spat out by a machine that’s processed what character design elements have shifted DVDs in the last couple of years.
However Hiroyuki Yoshino’s script is where the real problem lies. As respectful as it is to the animators, there’s no bite to it. It was so utterly inoffensive and twee, I found it hard to invest myself in the show. I’ve had similar to problems with other Yoshino shows, most recently Macross Frontier. Even when there are supposedly emotional scenes, they always seem to lack real passion. It’s the sort of show you’d imagine Noah and The Whale fans watching.
Even the biggest strength of the Yoshino’s writing, the world-building of the psuedo-Europe of the story, feels like they didn’t go the whole hog. We’ve a town that’s clearly Spanish, but the characters write in French, have Japanese names and use Yen as a currency. Taking that into account, the world still feels better developed than the characters. They feel like they have character traits that have been chosen by market research, rather than actual personalities. Again, that was a problem I had with Macross Frontier and My-Hime too. So, I suspect if you were fine with those shows, and there are a lot of fans of them, you’ll find a lot to like here too.
And that’s because the show looks fantastic. The backgrounds are impeccably designed and researched. And most of all there’s some really great movement, that’s all the better in some instances due to the fact they’re making life difficult for themselves by having the main characters wear baggy, ill fitting uniforms and writing two short crowd scenes. Thankfully the crowd scenes have individually drawn characters rather than a crowd brush.
So, I’ll be interested in seeing highlight reels of the animation from future episodes, but I can’t be dragging myself through the cloying tweeness of the story and characters each week.