So I noticed that I’ve been finishing the old animes at about a pace of one per week in addition to whatever I’m watching that’s airing right now, especially since I learned to manage my bandwidth better. I guess that makes it a good excuse to make this a weekly feature, at least until I start 3A and get beat’d by a triumvirate of CS courses. I guess when that happens, I’ll just not-stfu about everything all the shows that I’ve wanted to talk about but missed. There are a lot of those drafts sitting around. Since Clannad, I’ve gone through Kanon and Spice and Wolf. So this week is the fourth since then, which brings us to ef – a tale of memories.

ef is another one of those visual novel adaptations that I’ve tried to avoid but am now getting around to them for lack of anything else to watch. The VN that it’s based on is divided into four different stories and ef goes through two of them. Notice that this season, ef – a tale of melodies is airing, which goes through the other two stories. The entire thing has a very different feel from Key VNs, which at this point, together with School Days which I would prefer not to bring up, are the only points of reference I have to this genre.

Actually, the entire thing isn’t really comparable. Yeah, there’s drama and romance and they try to make you BAWWWW, but that’s about it. The structure of the plot is completely different, focussing on several different stories going on instead of going through several arcs with the main character at the centre of everything. The real striking difference is in the presentation.

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, which was done by the same studio, had a really crazy artistic and visual style for a comedy. Just take a look at the OP and ED. Now take that style and add some symbolism, some significance and importance to the plot, and apply it to a show with drama and romance. There are tons of jarring cuts to scenes of seemingly random stuff that grow into something very powerful. Like SZS, the best way to get a feel for the show is by having a look at the OPs and EDs.

And part of the presentation package is music. Let’s be honest, the Key VN anime’s strong points do not include their music, save for the occasional fluke. But in ef, the music fits right in with the crazy visuals. The entire thing is finely tuned and deliberate.

Thematically, ef is a lot heavier than Clannad. Because of the visuals, there’s a lot of symbolism going on. Because of the circumstances of the characters, there’s a lot less focus on them and just being in school or walking around the shopping district. Clannad and Kanon were very similar in that there was a guy that just went around solving the problems that the girls they met had. Eventually, the focus came down to only one girl. Here, we’re able to see how the different themes play out at about the same pace, since we’re focussing on more than one relationship progressing.

Basically, it’s an impressive, fairly thoughtful drama filled with tons of symbolism and imagery in crazy ZETSUBOUSHITA style. I’ll be watching ef – a tale of melodies, but I don’t know if I care about the other two characters’ stories as much. But, I will have to amend my post about this season’s OPs, because ef melodies has an awesome OP, ebullient future, that places second, in between Hakanaku mo Towa no Kanashi and Toki wo Kizamu Uta.

Tags: Anime, ef, visual novel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.