Cinnamon Ass

No OP for this episode, but the ED is Yoake no Ashioto by solua, a pleasant little song, with a simplistic ED showing shots from the episode on a sort of “parchment” effect.

In a war-ridden land, a group of superhumanly cloaked figures battle against a giant, organic spaceship of some kind, powered by enormous chanting guru-like figures, which vapourises the land below it. One of the cloaked men, Karas, apparently blows himself up by diving into the middle of the spaceship and making it implode in on itself. But then, as blue snow falls on Hakkodate, Haruka Ueno looks up at a church spire to see Karas standing there, watching her…

Haruka wakes up and hurries off to the last day of school before the summer holidays start, leaving her lazy mother behind and her dog Baron behind. Her friends, particularly the bespectacled Miho, are all abuzz with talk of a mysterious ghost appearing in a local graveyard, but Haruka is more concerned with her best friend Yuu, whose divorced mother is placing massive pressure on him to succeed in his middle-school exams (so much so that he wants to run away with Haruka to Tokyo to live with his father, something Haruka had almost forgotten about). Meanwhile, the buxom Uchida and the slobby Koriyama are outside the school monitoring mysterious data that neither has any idea about - the signal is lost, however, when Haruka leaves the school grounds…

While Yuu’s mother presses him on studying over the holidays, Haruka tells her mother straight out she’s going to test her courage by going to find the ghost that night, which she slightly grudgingly allows. That evening, Haruka meets up with Yuu in town in one of the brief moments of respite he gets from his mother. However, his mood does not improve, despite Haruka’s attempts to cheer him up, as he’s desperate to grow up and be able to do things the way he wants to. Suddenly he complains of feeling strange, and the world shifts to some kind of inversion of itself - Haruka puts her hand through Yuu’s body in astonishment as a strange, golden choker appears around her neck. From the power lines before her manifests the figure of Karas, whose presence seems unfettered by normal laws of physics - he tries to grab at her neck, calling the choker the “Dragon’s Torque”, but some kind of spinning golden globe malfunctions and he disappates into thin air, leaving only blue snowflakes as a signal of his presence…

The following day. Koriyama tries to prise information about weird goings on from Haruka and her friend Ai to no avail as they prepare to go and hunt the ghost in the graveyard. Yuu escapes from his mother to join them by lying and pretending he has cram school, and together with Miho and the smartass Isami they set out for the graveyard - until Yuu’s mum catches him, however, and starts to drive him home.

The others continue on without him, until they really do confront the ghost - Haruka recognises it as Karas, although horribly deformed (he’s anchored to his own world by a blue “bungee chord”, and somehow it has malfunctioned), and while she co-erces the others run off in varying degrees of terror (Isami) or glee (Miho) Haruka lures a newly materialised Karas into a churchyard, where he confronts her. Yuu, however, rejoins her, having felt sick when Karas materialised and escaped his mother’s car on the pretence of being sick, and draws a craft knife, which Karas sneers at, saying that he cannot protect Haruka. When asked by Yuu “Who are you?”, he replies “I am you!” before reaching towards the two children…

Well, that kicked several kinds of ass. I know I’ve been looking forward to Noein since the minute I saw promo artwork for it, but it’s another one of those series that just hits absolutely every button for me - jaw-droppingly good animation, great music, a juicily mysterious plot, likeable (or intriguing) characters, no fanservice… the list could go on. I’m itching to know what happens next, and can’t wait to see where the series leads us - while the first episode throws a lot of unexplained stuff at the viewer, it’s not overwhelmingly obscure, and tantalises with enough details and revelations to utterly hook you in.

As usual, I don’t expect everyone to share my enthusiasm for Noein. The character designs are kind-of odd, despite the mysteries the plot isn’t overly original, and the show’s style might not appeal to everyone. However, I’m head-over-heels in love with Noein from this first episode, and I hope that it lives up to my wild expectations from here on in. I just wish I didn’t have to wait another week for the next episode - I actually first watched this on Sunday when I won the chance to see an Internet preview of the first episode through Bandai’s web-broadcasting service, so it’ll have been a whole NINE DAYS since I saw this when the next episode airs. How will I cope?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at 12:57 am and is filed under Noein. 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.