This anime has pretty good English here. Good to see Japan taking care of English seriously here.
After 3 beautiful reviews of titles in hi-definition, I return to the real world as I write this mini-review of El Cazador de la Bruja in SD (upscaled to higher resolution with ffdshow to give my LCD justice). It means that there are no albums for you. This is also a 2007 anime, so can Nodame Cantabile fends off a trigger-happy gunslinger girl with a witch sidekick?
Quoted for Truth
Story:-
A bounty hunter who occasionally posed as waitress in fast-food restaurants is given a job to protect a witch that has to do a journey to the south (thank god it wasn’t east or else there will be plenty of jokes there). Both of them have to dodge other bounty hunters, a mysterious organization, the CIA and also an insane superhuman maniac.
The story started very slowly and it takes 10 episodes (which took me 4 days to watch, that how awfully slow this story gets off the ground) for the story to get started. I watched the rest in the single day, mainly because it gets interesting from there. Looking back to those days, this anime did not really compare to its spiritual predecessor Madlax (watched before this blog started – and the reason why I look forward to this anime) which has much better pacing than this one.
This caused the flow of the story to suffer because it failed to attract the attention of the audience early, and I have actually considered dropping this series. But after the 10 largely pointless episodes the anime gets into gear storywise, and it moves along more smoothly towards the end. It wasn’t exactly a good story compared to Madlax (I have not watched Noir yet) but still watchable for an action series.
Unfortunately, the ending really stinks. What’s with the DragonBall-esque dead people being resurrected in quick successions? The ending is really ordinary, and the last episode is lame. This anime is really screwing up badly here. Madlax fare vastly better in this aspect.
Mobile phones in this anime has this extraordinary ability of being connected even out of nowhere.
Character Design:-
Very well done, a positive point for this anime (which really needs as much as it can get). There are plenty of beautiful characters in here, and each fit their roles perfectly.
Voice acting:-
Voice acting in this anime is good overall, with L.A. (yeah, this is the real character name, and no, it did not stand for Los Angeles) being outstanding.
I think I have seen this place before. Hmm… where is that?
Music:-
Another positive point of this anime, the OST is excellent and so are the OP theme but not for the ED theme. I would have like a couple of good insert songs like the ones in Madlax though. That would have been awesome.
If you work for a shadowy organization and need to operate in secrecy, it is best that you did not wear your organization signature uniform while on it. And definitely no masks while driving, it just make you prone to more suspicion.
Animation/Direction:-
This anime has great animation quality, even in fast-paced scenes (there is a lot of them here). Choreography is decent if somewhat ordinary (the awesome moves of the Madlax heroine would have been appreciated). The directing is good too, although it can do away with the inopportune usage of upside-down camera shots.
This upside-down shots was used too many times for my liking and in scenes that did not need it. Like the one above.
Conclusion:-
7 out 10. Nodame Cantabile successfully fends off the unlikely all-girls duo. And thanks’ god Myself, Yourself is still in limbo and does not need to be watched, yet.
It’s all in the day’s work.
