Yozakura Quartet is almost good
I don’t know what it is that compels me to write about mediocre-to-average shows by Studio Normad, but whatever.
Kou Matsuo isn’t a director whose work I’m terribly familiar with. I did however really like Kure-nai, so I figured Yozakura Quartet would be good, too. And it is! Almost.
One of the things that made Kure-nai work was how naturally directed the character interaction was. I won’t say it felt unscripted or improvised, but it had a looseness to it that you don’t see in many cartoons. Plot centric scenes were also handled in a very natural way, but they still managed to carry a strong sense of drama.
Yozakura Quartet has some of the Kure-nai magic when the characters are just doing slice of life stuff, but when plot things happen the show gets really bad. Maybe Matsuo doesn’t care about this plot, and I don’t blame him– becuase it sucks. And that is what brings Quartet down. Its plot is so generic, bad and poorly explained that I just don’t care whenever it rears its head.
Normad’s animation is also pretty average, as usual. They’re an ok studio but they really need to find a way to actually animate things. They draw still images and character designs well, though!
From what I understand he had more say in the story for Kurenai (I guess involved in the script?) whereas for this show it’s left to someone else and he’s just doing a basic directing job.
Who needs plot anyway? I watch this for nice character designs and Kotoha, and would still watch it with no plot whatsoever. Oh,wait, it would probably be much better show that way.
But seriously, I was one of the few people actually looking forward to this show(mostly because of the character design), and the first two episodes were pretty disappointing. But it got better from there, and even though the story still drags it down, it slowly turns out to be a decent series. Not anywhere close to the top shows this season, but still enjoyable enough.
I enjoyed the characters, setting, and premise enough to pick up the Del Rey manga volumes 1 & 2 of it out of curiousity, and was surprised that the manga actually is less plot, more character slice of life so far…not great stuff, but definitely more in keeping with what I’d expect the Kurenai director to do (basically mostly the good bits you described). I’m assuming the “plot” stuff is a mix of stuff added in and events from later in the manga that have been “bumped up” to make it “more exciting”. Meh. I really didn’t like how they rewrote the one story with the kid that didn’t want his mind read. In the manga version, Aoi actually refused to read his mind from the beginning, and had to figure out by other means what his deal was (which annoyed Hime), exactly the opposite of what was in the anime, which came across as heavy-handed. It’s a shame Kou didn’t have more a say in the scripting of the show.