laceblade: Shot of Kiki from behind, flying on her broomstick with Jiji (Kiki)
I'm kind of amazed by how much I love the Kare Kano (His and Her Circumstances) anime, considering how much I didn't care for the manga. Of course, I'm only four episodes in and the plot has just hit the point where I then disliked the manga. Overall, though, I think I like the anime more because Hideaki Anno is an amazing director. I find myself fascinated throughout each episode. Also, I like the stronger focus on humor. The manga took itself too seriously, IMO.



I finished watch the Planetes anime. I have pretty mixed feelings about. I am unused to socially responsible anime. The premise of this show is that humanity has progressed into space. The main characters in the show collect space debris for a living, ensuring that it doesn't damage satellites or other ships. Pretty much everyone else looks down on them (except the people still living on Earth) despite the constant reminders how crucial their jobs are to human safety.

The show includes characters of many races, and their backgrounds are actually important to the plot. As you might imagine, the benefits of space travel are not reaped by every country on Earth.

The science in the show is also pretty awesome - former astronauts get sick from spending so much time in space/on ships; people born on the moon are abnormally tall due to the lower gravity; there is no sound in space, etc. It's pretty rare for anime, which will often waive physics to get across a greater emotional point (or a cooler fight scene).

In spite of all this awesome, I found most of the dialogue atrocious. Everyone was way overly dramatic, and it was irritating - here is such a believable future and believable science - and such unbelievable human interactions. Even by the end of the first episode, I was ready to kill every character, I think.
I want the same show but with a different script. (Although I'd probably make a few changes to what happens to Tanabe, too.)

I wish they had had a bigger budget for music. I was ready to kill most of the songs by the end of the series (much like Lovely Complex).

In the end, I'd say it was worth watching, but I don't think it's worth owning, for me.



Today I bought and read volume 8 of Sand Chronicles. I think that I love this manga unreasonably.
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Apollo's Song by Osamu Tezuka

Tezuka is considered the god of anime/manga, but I had never read anything by him before. His works date back to the 1940s and have influenced every manga genre.

Apollo's Song is really weird, but really good. The protagonist is a boy named Shogo, who has grown up hating love. Society fears him as being a psychopath, because he's killed animals after finding them mating. He is an inmate at institution attempting to rehabilitate him. Through hypnotism and electro-shock therapy, Shogo experiences elaborate dreams in which he falls in love with a woman, only to meet a tragic end every time. A Greek goddess (I can't remember which one it was, :/) tells him that this is his punishment for acting out so much violence against lovers in his life. Eventually, reality and the dream-world blur together. This was pretty awesome, and I'm looking forward to reading more by Tezuka.





Tekkonkinkreet by Taiyō Matsumoto

This manga was originally published in the early 1990s, but has recently gained a lot of attention because of the movie adaptation that was made in 2006.

Black and White are two orphan boys living in a city called Treasure Town. The yakuza (Japanese equivalent of the mob) is trying to take over the city, but these two snot-nosed kids simply won't have it. Black is the intelligent and more violent boy, while White seems to be somewhat impaired mentally, and is constantly singing nonsense songs. They live together in an abandoned car.

This manga, and its anime adaptation, have garnered a lot of positive press, but overall, I wasn't too impressed. I'd still be interested in watching the movie, though. It seems to have had a pretty high budget, and the action scenes would probably be fun.





Sand Chronicles by Hinako Ashihara

I absolutely adored volume one of this series, and I highly recommend it for its art style, its pacing, and its emotional impact.

Spoilers for volume 3.

I love Ann, and I love Daigo. But I also love the Tsukishima siblings, and I want them to be happy, so I want Ann and Daigo to end up with Fuji and Shiika instead of with each other.

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