Barely Competent Reviews of Merely Competent Anime

So Birdy The Mighty is mightily good, and Slayers Revolution is, well, Slayers More Of The Same, but what of other shows I said I wanted to watch. Well here’s my first impressions of two of them.

Natsume Yuujinchou

Both these shows I’m going to talk about don’t have anything particularly wrong with them, it’s just that there’s been similar and better shows in recent memory.

A show like this is always going to have the shadow of GeGeGe no Kitaro hanging over it, but it also has Mushishi, Hakaba Kitaro, Mononoke and Mokke to name a few in recent memory too. And without the presumably larger budget that WOWOW allowed for Baccano!, moments of impressive animation are sparse (the first time Nyanko transforms for instance).

The main thing it does have going for it is Kazuhiko Inoue. His heroic roles get a lot of focus but the guy has a good range of voices and his role as the grumpy cat spirit Nyanko here brings a lot of life to the show. It helps too that Nyanko in his cat form is the most visually interesting aspect of the show.

Ryoko’s Case File

This show epitomises the main problem with novel to anime adaptation – novels aren’t visual storytelling, and what might work in written word doesn’t necessarily work as a cartoon.

Which is not to say it’s bad, it’s just rather languid. Even someone explosively dehydrates within the first 5 minutes there’s very little urgency to it. My other concern is the storyboarding is mostly either lacklustre or cliched. Lots of scenes gave me a sense of deja vu. It’s entirely possible to make anime that is a lot of talking heads interesting, but I don’t think they achieve that here.