Cinnamon Ass

OP - Kimi, Meguru, Boku (Motohiro Hata) - who was it that came up with the shot you see in loads of OPs where they want to showcase the supporting characters and they have them “circle” from the foreground to the background/off-screen? I’m sure it’s used in loads of high school shows (KareKano springs to mind when they’re flying through the sky at the end of the OP), and its use here reminded me it’s quite common. Anyway, the song is nice enough (male singer, you know it’s shoujo!) and there’s some nifty cardboard CG.

ED - Kataomoi Fighter (GO!GO!1788) - two minutes on from watching it and I can’t remember the song, plus static images of the heroine in various costumes; it’s the essence of “shit, we need to fill time with the credits”.

Kotoko Aihara hands her crush, Naoki Irie, her heartfelt confession of love at school. Ever since he gave a speech on the first day of school she’s loved him. She is, of course, quite upset when he turns her down flat - not to the extent of floods of tears, but a little downhearted, despite the encouragement of her friends Satomi and Jinko (and the rather overenthusiastic demonstrations of her male friend Kin (Kinnosuke)). Kinnosuke confronts Naoki as they leave school, and he rather haughtily tells Kotoko that he’s not interested in a “stupid” girl like her, again causing much indignation - however, Kotoko just gets on with things and heads home, where she lives in a shrine with her father.

However, that evening she has her friends round where Jinko notices that the house appears to be on a slant. Of course, as fate would have it, that evening there is an earthquake that completely destroys the house - Kotoko’s father is found safe inside clutching a photo of his deceased wife, bless. This turn of circumstances is bad enough, but then the Aiharas end up moving in with a friend of Kotoko’s fathers - who happens to be Naoki’s father. Naoki’s mother is so happy to have a girl in the house that she turfs Naoki’s younger brother, the brattish genius Yuuki, out of his bedroom for her, and Naoki is of course none to pleased to have Kotoko move in - with her crush and his evil sibling both conspiring to make her life a misery, fate truly is wreaking mischief on Kotoko.

I expected Itazurana Kiss to be absolutely terrible - I hold my hands up and admit it freely. It looked horribly low budget, and low budget shoujo NEVER works out - I just have to think of how sad, say, Peach Girl, or Bokura ga Ita, made me feel. Let’s face it - Itazurana Kiss is certainly no Ouran in opulence, and I have a feeling that Special A is going to completely dwarf it in popularity in the shoujo high school anime stakes this season. If you’ve got room in your heart for another show, though, I’m cautiously optimistic about this one. The cast is interesting (I love Jinko for no reason other than she has a voice that sounds like her larynx has been fed through a wrangler, which is totally awesome), the animation is serviceable, and the plot set up is amusingly contrived but perfectly workable. I can’t really say a lot more as this first episode is actually pretty thin on plot and mostly serves to lay the ground rules; it’ll be easier to comment on the long-term viability of the series once I’ve got more of a feel for how the characters really interact and whether the plot actually moves at a decent pace.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Currently Watching. 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.