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Get me to the torrent sites!

This is a horribly horribly late blog post series. I had planned on writing something on the new Anime Season weeks ago, but on the plus side the delay has allowed me to properly check out all the new series and give my thoughts. I’m watching these via fansubs- while I’d love to live in Japan and watch them live, I’m not a good enough Japanese speaker yet!

Straight into the fray then- let’s start with the current Moe-fest that is K-On. From the same animation studio that made series like Clannad, Kanon and Lucky Star, here comes the latest 4-girl story. The popularity of this show has reached overwhelming proportions, if you’re a vaguely solid Anime-watcher you’re probably watching K-On, whatever you read about it. And you’re probably reading a lot about it, with half the world keeping track of every episode and the Doujinshi and Fanart community going at full speed around the series. It is nice to have a series on my list where I can watch an episode, nothing major actually happens within it and I still come away feeling lighter because of it. Lucky Star was the last one like this- it certainly isn’t a series to introduce people to Anime with, the many references to other Anime would leave most people baffled unless the group who subtitle the series are well-knowledged enough to provide notes during the episode about them. (How the Japanese watch it on TV without them, I’ll never know.)

(Spoilers Alert – The series is currently up to 5 Episodes at the time of writing) The overall story is that a two of the girls (Ritsu and Mio) are looking to continue on the Light Music Club, which is in danger of shutting down if they don’t get a few more members to join. Ultimately they aim to be able to play at Budokon but first have to actually form a band, and hopefully pick up some talent along the way. Ritsu is a drummer, (like me!) with Mio being the Bassist. The majority of anything actually happening in an episode is usually down to one of these two, when in actual fact neither of them is the main character. That particular privilege is given to Yui, who I’ll cover later.

The first recruit to Ritsu’s project, Kotobuki “Mugi” Tsumugi, brings her keyboard and yuri feelings to the mix. Other series have brought in the Yuri-curious character in for great comedic effect- Hidamari Sketch for example, although that series covers it with the characters involved either unaware or unwilling to bring out the feelings to any effect. K-On’s method seems to be much more obvious, mostly with Mugi spacing out when something of this nature occurs.

These three characters work well together, as they all have different characteristics that cancel each other out. Ritsu acts as the major protagonist- it was her who first dragged Mio into creating the club and act as Club President. Her spontaneous behaviour and errors in judgement are matched with Mio’s serious character, although her serious Moe outbursts can leave Ritsu as baffled as she can be bemused by Ritsu. Even so, their behaviour can be seen as relatively normal in comparison to Mugi’s oblivious rich-girl attitude towards the situation at hand, who also provides the calm along the moe-storm.

Singing??? Nooooo!

The 4th and final character comes in the form of Yui, who of course acts as the musical newbie aiming to reach the same musical ability as her peers, as well as the character who gets the most screen time. Within the first few episodes, to call her boring would be being a bit harsh, but compared to the other characters she didn’t show herself off well. Moving up from her old school with a friend who remains her only friend for the first few days, and coming from somewhere where she apparently didn’t have much of a social life.

Uguuuu...

Thankfully for her, (and for the series) she gets out of this cycle and the series can focus on the more interesting characters and the development of the band and their music. (Apart from the episode where the whole thing is about her trying to both learn the Guitar and studying for an exam…booooring.) We can then settle back and enjoy the Moe and fanservice.

<3 It's all about Mio.

...and the rest of the characters know it.

There are a few other incidental characters who are able to add to the series nicely, Yui’s childhood friend Yamanaka SawakoManabe Nodoka acts as Yui’s point of call for support as she goes outside her comfort zone. She also acts on the Student Body and so appears in a managerial method when Ritsu manages to forget to register their club properly. From the previews for Episode 6 it seems to continues this on, so we’ll have to see how long this continues.

Teacher Transformation... go!

The other incidental character is Yamanaka Sawako-sensei, who at first seems to be a light-hearted, friendly teacher who acts as the Musical director for another music club. When the club requires an adviser to continue, she is blackmailed into doing so when it is discovered that she has a darker musical past than it initially appears…

Besides inadvertently (read: blame Ritsu) scaring Mio into the corner with the metal music that they used to play, “Sawa-chan” also finds time to tutor Yui with the Guitar, give critical support with their songs and generally support them in their work. There’s an awesome whole section where it shows her transition from a Calm and Composed school teacher into a fanatic metal guitarist, who can apparently shred away quite happily when prompted…

Overall, and I’m sure you’re in a similar mindset to me if you’re watching it, I like it a lot. It has a great mix of characters that can bounce of each other, (no not in that way, in terms of character traits as I explained above, perv.) and the story continues slowly but surely towards their goal of performing professionally on stage. There are a few niggles which I have about it, notably the scale of a few of the instruments:

Seriously, I'd have backache within a minute playing drums this small.

Bass: Fine, Keyboard: fine, Drums: RIDICULOUSLY SMALL. I know it’s supposed to be a small Hipgig set, but the proportions are all wrong. In other shots they get it right, but it just bugged the crap out of me to see it so badly done in the first episode… :B

Check it! The band shot is absolutely fine, but in the second shot, the same drum kit is waaaay bigger than in the larger image above. Grr!

The OP and ED took me a while to get into, as did Hayate no Gotoku’s new set of tracks. It’s understandable that they move to a genre of music that can actually be played live with a full band rather than having to resort to lip-syncing and a large PA. While very very popular, OPs like Lucky Star’s and Hidamari Sketch’s come into the latter group, whereas K-On’s Girl J-Pop tracks work well to give the audience a teaser of what the band can actually do- even though at the moment they’re most definitely at an amateur standard in the series. It’ll be great to see what the studio have done and whether they can pull out a few more well-written tracks. (Nana’s soundtrack for example, had a full 14-track album made, although they did this over a much longer series.)

I don’t review a lot, so this whole section probably comes across as a jumbled mess of character info and plot information- I hope you can forgive me for that as I’m mostly writing this late at night when I have a bit of free time, although it has the downside of me being pretty tired and probably having horrible grammar to boot. Oh well, go watch the series if Anime’s your thing. They’re floating around Youtube if you don’t want to get them through other methods.