Spring 08 Impressions PART II

Posted On April 8, 2008

Three more

Chi’s Sweet Home

Boy is this show a breath of fresh air. A step back to a simpler type of cartoon making, Chi’s Sweet Home is three minutes of pure, simple and adorable entertainment. How can you not be delighted by a cute little kitten doing cute little kitten things?

Code Geass 2

It seems a Japanese tradition, or at least an anime tradition, to follow up an unforgiving cliffhanger with a total reset or a shift in focus to something else entirely in the next installment. This is often times extremely frustrating, but Code Geass R2 (as it likes to call itself) wastes little time with the BS and gets back to being wonderfully trashy and insane in short order. The episode actually plays out similarly to the opener of Space Adventure Cobra, except for with more gay CLAMP design work and less Psychoguns. It also only manages to create more questions instead of answering any posed by the previous series. However, I have faith in Sunrise’s writers that everything will make sense in the end. Wait, never mind. So long as they explain what Jupiter is all about, I’m cool.

Also, I never really had a thing for Kallen but… bunny suit.

To Love Ru

I’ve always held an interest in To Love Ru ever since I came across some scans on 2chan some years ago, but passed on reading it since it’s a Shounen Jump title and Shounen Jump titles have a nasty habit of running for Too Long. That being the case, I decided to hold out for the eventual bite-size anime adaptation, if such a thing were to materialize. Well, here it is, brought to you by way of Studio Xebec, who incidentally happen to be working on another show about boobs. It’s clear which of these projects is taking priority down in the ol’ animation house, but To Rabu Ru doesn’t look bad by any means. It seems in attempt to the stretch the budget, backgrounds are simplified to not-very-detailed watercolour pieces and character movement and design take priority. The characters generally stay on model, and the animation isn’t jerky and/or awkward. The fanservice, which is the entire reason why you’re watching this thing in the first place, is standard fare but does the job. Shit like this isn’t high art, but this sure has more entertainment value than Rosario + Vampire!

The opening scene remindes me of a 90s anime for some reason, but that 90s feeling is quickly done away with once you see the post-2000 design work. Nothing bad, just an observation.