天下制覇

Is that even a bad thing?

Impressions:

You’ll excuse me if I’m still in a bad mood from some halfwith reporting the Neuro OP as copyright infringement, resulting in my entire account getting yanked… and him not even citing the correct companies holding the copyright. That doesn’t exactly put me in the best mood to impartially review a show aimed at people half my age and without a Y chromosome or the dangly bits having it entails.

Shugo Chara actually isn’t that bad for what it is, I’m just not even close to the target audience. If I were a 12 year old girl, this might be right up my alley. If it starts developing a little more darkly, it could even shape up as something like Full Moon Sagashite or Gakuen Alice. As it seems to exist though, it appears to just be the really emotional and angsty Amu learning to appreciate the little egg/spirit things.

I do take exception to the voice acting. The little spirit creature is immensely irritating and the Amu’s voice is just off. Her VA just does not fit her at all and very obviously sounds like a 30 year old woman in what is supposed to be about an elementary school girl. The other production values are fine. Animation is decent, though there’s a lot of stylistic switching. Art is consistently good throughout.

The problem really just remains that it’s a show for little girls to feel confident about themselves and nothing you can do with the production values can fix that. Everything is pink and happy and so sugary that it’ll give you diabetes. Hell, the bishonen villain turns into a catboy when he goes off to do his dirty work. It’s possible that this will turn out to be a really good show, but it’s just the wrapping that sort of confuses and disquiets me. Still, I’m intrigued by where they’re going with it, and if it does develop some deeper angles besides “Amu learns to be happy about being Amu” it could actually be a very nice little show.

Believe me, I’m as shocked by this as you are.

No summaries for the first episodes. I write as I watch, and I don’t know if I’ll care about a show until after the first episode.

Shugo Chara OP