Completed: B Gata H Kei – How To Make An Excellent Show With No Rewatch Value

(Note: I couldn’t decide how to title posts for shows that I finished which aren’t part of “Finish or Fail” series, and I didn’t want to call them “Reviews”, so I’m instituting the “Completed” title for them. Also, there will be spoilers, but they don’t really matter, and will probably sell you on the show anyway, haha.)

B Gata H Kei is rock solid – I have nothing negative to say about it. I was constantly impressed by it’s writing, which created a hilarious and believable romance that, for once, made real progress at a satisfying pace as the series continued. Every episode made me laugh, and the jokes struck me with their cleverness – often the punchline is a bit of music, a very quick cut-away, or a background detail, so that the joke doesn’t feel too obvious nor intrusive, but a bit of fun cleverly spliced into a continuing scene. The running gags stayed funny and didn’t get old, which is way more than I can say about most school anime with running jokes.

Yukari Tamura and Mamiko Noto At Their Very Best – Voice Acting in Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel

For a while now, I have thought that I don’t get enough into the bones of my appreciation for the various elements of anime. In my reviews, I try to cover every single facet of a show, but even as my word count rises, it’s not like I’m saying THAT much about the elements. Sure, I’ve told you that X and X gave excellent performances, but I haven’t told you what made those performances so great or what moments sold me on them, etc. So I’m going to try breaking things down a little more, starting with a 2-episode OVA I watched today called Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel. (I highly recommend it!) This OVA had a lot of great elements, from directing to music to animation and voice acting, so I’ll be posting about each element separately.

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A's – Straightforward Structural Perfection

UPADATE Sep 4/09 this post is under revision!

If you asked me to name an anime I truly and utterly hated, my immediate response would probably be ‘Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.’ I found the original series to be utterly horrible in every way, in spite of it being the work of my favorite director, Akiyuki Shinbo. I’d heard from a number of people that Nanoha A’s was much better and would justify the first season. To my surprise, it went above and beyond mere justification and was in fact one of the outright best anime I’ve seen in a long time. I’d go so far as to call it a masterpiece.