Cinnamon Ass - Reborn Like a Zombie

Air Episode 9 - Moon

Air is the perfect otaku show - the episode titles are not only standard basic anime Japanese, but written in hiragana for us poor simpletons!

Anyway.

Hello, Kanna's mother! Goodbye, Kanna's mother! From one sad moment to the next we are whirled through the remnants of the Summer arc, as Kanna suffers tragedy after tragedy, while Uraha and Ryuuya get busy (in more than one sense) to stop her from suffering the same curse as her mother.

Jeff's dislike of the pacing is perfectly valid in many senses - see Kanna's mother (or rather, don't!) for a good example of that - but I think it's actually one of the reasons why I like Air so much more than I might otherwise (admittedly, it being the vaguest bright spot in a season of dreck is probably more of a reason than anything...). I think this arc in particular would have suffered from being much longer in length, and I felt I saw enough to get to know the characters well enough in the end - and Kanna wasn't particularly hateful in the end either, and I even quite liked Uraha!

Charlie mentioned that he felt the events of the Summer arc happened to the characters, rather than them driving them, and to a certain extent I think he's right in that the events are largely beyond the control of our protagonists, thus making their misfortunes more sympathetic but less interesting to an extent.

However, at the end of the day, this is a bishoujo game adaptation which, like shows such as Kiminozo before it, revels in its own mawkishness and melodrama. And we certainly got a lot of that here, and it was nicely done. Air just happens to have the benefit of a more interesting story than most, and the following arc looks to have another interesting, if not definitely well-executed, twist.

Posted by BluWacky at March 21, 2005 03:54 PM | TrackBack