So a bunch of anime I was watching finished their run.

Darker than BLACK: Gemini of the Meteor

The problem with DtB was that it ended with a bunch of questions and answering very few of them. The problem with DtB2 is that it didn’t answer any of the questions from the last season and added new ones and didn’t answer those either. It also removed most of the likeable characters or the parts of characters that were likeable. So yeah, the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t need a sidestory OVA to explain things that we were waiting for you to explain.

So Ra No Wo To

A.K.A. that show that looked like K-ON! but was superficially similar. At worst, it was some slice of life in a small European town. It had quite a few moments though, from moonshining to PTSD to the revelation of a post-apocalyptic wasteland right outside the borders. Not spectacular, but definitely not bad.

Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆

More Hidamari, more awesome. I was dreading what might happen if we threw in two more characters, but Nazuna and Nori filled out the cast pretty well. They weren’t exactly the Yuno and Miya clones I was expecting them to be. We’ve also got new relationship dynamics now that we have all the years filled out. Another highly enjoyable wideface season.

Kobato.

Not my kind of show, but I still watched it. It was alright, I guess, and it had its moments. I did not enjoy the random LOL CLAMP moments near the end of the show though. I probably wouldn’t have missed it if I dropped it. Oh well.

Nodame Cantabile Finale

Surprisingly not bad and pretty well paced, considering this is Chiaki Kon we’re talking about. Unfortunately, she also chose to stick to the manga pretty closely and that means we still got the terrible manga ending. That said, the ending’s probably the worst part of the season, which places it well ahead of Paris Chapter.

Hanamaru Kindergarten

This was a very fun little show and it looks like Gainax put way more effort into the show than they usually do. I liked pretty much all the characters in the show except for Anzu, which is kind of unfortunate because she’s around a lot. Hiiragi is the best character on the show, with Hinagiku and her Yakuza family coming up in second.

Ookamikakushi

Ryukishi07, I am disappoint.

Baka to Test to Shoukanju

I was expecting this to be something terrible like Seitokai no Ichizon, but it actually managed to be pretty entertaining. I guess the way the jokes are written are much more appealing to me than that show I mentioned before. It also gets points for actually using the convoluted battle system premise in an interesting fashion.

Kimi ni Todoke

This went down pretty much like I expected. It’s a really faithful adaptation of the manga and paced just right to reach exactly the right spot to end on. And it was great; easily the best show from Fall 2009. I’m looking forward to a second season in between checking if the next chapter is out yet.

Eden of the East: The King of Eden

This was kind of disappointing. Even though things definitely happened, it felt like nothing was happening at all. I’m aware that it’s really setup for the next movie, but as a movie, it was really, really weak. Just about the only good thing to come out of it is school food punishment’s light prayer single.

This week’s old animu is Hidamari Sketch. Hidamari Sketch is a slice-of-life anime about four girls who live in the Hidamari Apartments and attend an art school. Like Azumanga Daioh, which is something like a gateway to slice-of-life anime, Hidamari Sketch was adapted from a four-panel comic.

The most distinctive thing about the show is its direction and style. It won’t take you long after starting it to realize that it’s produced by SHAFT. It’s really strange to see SHAFT’s style applied to slice-of-life, since the other series it works so well with are very different. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is black comedy and the weird style complements the show’s twisted viewpoint. ef is a drama and romance and in this case, the style fits the quasi-intellectual mood of the show.

The direction definitely helped Hidamari Sketch stand out more. Without it, it would have been a lot quieter and muted and it would have been a lot less interesting to watch. After all, the show is fairly formulaic. Each episode begins with Yuno waking up and ends with her going to bed. It’s the most slice-of-lifey of the ones I’ve watched. At the same time, the anime was also made different by going with a non-chronological order in the plot.

This is different from Haruhi’s broadcast order, since the chronological order is used in the DVDs. Rather, the plot for the anime is deliberately not chronological and jumps around to various spots in the year. It takes advantage of the fact that slice-of-life doesn’t rely on prior knowledge very often. This allows for some interesting things that crop up over the course of the anime, like Yuno’s caterpillar. The ending in particular works incredibly well because of this.

If slice-of-life is your thing, then this is a good one, if only to see how SHAFT would make a slice-of-life anime.