Not so Secret Santa: Hitohira

Afraid, yet excited in a weird kind of way. Hitohira was picked by mefloraine for my Not so Secret Santa Project. I was most afraid by her pick because I generally dislike slice of school life shows to no end. Sometimes it's good to find enjoyment out of shows that you should generally hate.

Mugi Asai is a new student that basically gets drafted into Nono's Drama Research Society Club. The only problem is that Mugi is super duper shy, she has no confidence, and her catch phrase seems to be "I can't do it". The thing is she has an amazing voice and her acting is pretty darn good when she isn't nervous as hell. Nono sees this in her and wishes to push her to the limit to see what she can accomplish.

The OP makes me feel like I'm about to watch something extremely fluffy and girly. The ED is just there. It's not bad but it's just very forgettable. It honestly could be any old ending to a shoujo anime. The music in the anime it's self is very fitting and dramatic at the moments that suit it best. The art in general is quite lovely.  Generally the pacing in the show is pretty steady. It sometimes it does dip into that slow boring lull that I just can't stand about this type of anime but luckily this doesn't happened too often.

Like all anime about school clubs and chilling out if the characters suck, the anime will suck too. This is not the case here. All the characters in this show are amazing. To even make things better there are actually two boys in the show that are around quite often! I really like their uniforms for some reason. They seem simple yet complicated. I dunno that's just how I feel about them. I'd love to have one to wear myself LOL I like that the club was a drama club and that we actually got to see the performance. It just wouldn't feel right if we didn't get to see it after watching all the hard work they put into it.

Nono was the best character in the show. Even thought she has an illness. I always think characters that are always ill in anime are a sad excuse for storytelling but luckily it didn't get in the way too much. Everything about her was fun. She has great drive to accomplish anything that comes her way no matter what stands in her path. She will just push and push. There is no can't only DO. So with that mentality of hers it was easy enough to make Mugi be the best that she could be, or at least to TRY. Honestly though everyone had a great roll to play in the series.

If there's one thing to take away from this anime it's just to do what your heart and willpower tell you to. Don't let anything stand in your way.

* Story 8/10
* Animation 9/10
* Sound 8/10
* Characters 9/10
* Overall 8/10

Working!! 01 PreRelease

Oddly this is the show I've been looking forward to the most for the upcoming Spring season and I gotta say I'm still interested but I was expecting more for some reason. It's only one episode so far though so we'll see if it turns out to be a hit or miss.

Taneshima Poplar (17) is a very short high school student. She is ordered at the beginning of the episode to track down a new worker for the "family restaurant" by the assistant manager.

Takanashi Souta (16) is the new recruit Taneshima found on the street by randomly bumping into him. He took her for a 12 year old lost little girl at first.

Shirafuji Kyouko (28) assistant manager she's kinda lazy and gives off the impression that she doesn't really care about what's going on. She mostly lets taneshima do everything

Satou Jun and Souma Hiroomi are cooks. I can only imagine what trouble these 2 guys will get into. Satou seems distant yet awesome and Souma seems to be a happy go luck kind of guy.

Todoroki Yachio a bubbly happy girl who is the main chef. She just happens to have a samurai sword... Interesting and weird. Wonder when she'll use it on Souta.

After some introductions and some training the characters start to blend together in an interesting way and odd personalities start to shine through. Especially with Shirafuji Kyouko. She turns out to be super awesome yet has a very cranky side to her. Souta randomly asked her her age. When she said 28 he called that "old" so now he gets to work everyday as punishment for like 2 weeks. Never call a lady old. Remember that boys.

"But anything over 12 is too old"

She then comes to the rescue of Taneshima whom was being harassed by customers. They were pulling on her hair and calling her a child... WHO DOES THIS?!?! Manager sees this and goes barging over with a huge kick to the face for one of them simply saying "Violence is bad". She is definitely going to be my favourite character of the series. She reminds me of a cross between Mitsune (Love Hina) and Nobue (Strawberry Marshmallow).

Inami Mahiru has a HUGE fear of men and is what seems to be the last character introduction for the first episode. She will hold much laughter I'm sure.

"Will a normal person be able to survive in this environment?" says Souta.... Yet he is far from normal himself! This anime holds potential! The ED was cute but forgettable. Bring on episode 2 in a month or so!

Kanamemo

I picked this up not expecting anything special. Slice of life has never really caught my attention for new shows but I'm happy to say this one was worth the watch. It started off pretty slow and meh like but quickly started to make me giggle joke after joke after gag. There was one episode in particular that I loved.... and this is weird cause I generally dislike singing in anime... yup it was a musical episode. There was nothing special about it but every song sung was hilarious to watch and hear. Pretty hilarious.... LOL The characters were all wild and wacky always helpful to each other with some added shoujo-ai on the side which proved to be quite interesting and funny. I suggest checking this out if you need to laugh.

Asatte no Houkou

Overall: 4/10
Story: 3
Art: 5
Music: 5
Characters: 4

Nothing was special about this one. I liked the idea of child turned into adult and vise versa but that's about it. Oh the ending was nice. Which is hard to believe cause I've seen a lot of pretty bad-mediocre anime. It was a nice little surprise and that's where half the points come from.

Art and music were nothing special. They weren't bad they weren't great. Definitely not worth mentioning really. They were pretty much the same as every other slice-of-life/drama anime out there.

Karada >.< yeah she's a child and it sure does show....even if she's an "adult".... die die die! >.< I really hate annoying main characters.

Hiro needs a good kick in the ass. He knows what to do but never does it till he's forced to. So lame. So typical really. He was always on the brink of being really cool but always seemed to mess it up.

Shōko is where the rest of the points come from. She was well done and not annoying. She was the only one of them to actually have "balls" I thought she was going to be an annoying character before I started watching it but I'm glad she proved me wrong and was the best thing about this anime. I'm glad she was there to drag a little bit of the annoying out of the other characters and make them seem a little stronger.

I say don't bother watching this unless you've watched everything else and have time to kill.... I suppose if you like drama it takes a cute interesting route to entertain the view from something slightly out of the norm.