Well, I told Author I had every intention of watching it once I had the opportunity, but having actually said that, I now feel obligated to actually post something about it. Honestly, I was kind of hoping that all the complaints from paying Crunchy users about being unable to watch the second episode due to it being blocked for European users would continue to be a constant as it moved into the free-to-watch domain, meaning I’d be able to get away with moaning about that for a while without having to actually post about the content. Alas, unluckily for me, they seemed quite happy for me to watch the shows second episode, which now means I’ll actually have to find something to say about it.

Which is kind of a pain – I tend to avoid actually talking about the content of shows because I find it somewhat difficult to actually make comments of any kind of interest regarding them. Kind of makes you wonder why I have a blog, eh?

As a result, don’t expect me to draw any kind of conclusions from my viewing of these episodes, only a whole bunch of random comments.


What is kind of hard to miss, even as soon as the OP starts, is how incredibly disparate the character designs in the show are. Arashi and Kaya display curiously elongated facial features – Aroduc referred to them as Horsefaced, which isn’t exactly an invalid assessment. Saying that, I do find it somewhat reminiscent of the kind of character designs typically seen in 70’s shoujo manga. This may well be intentional – the second episode reveals that Arashi (and presumably Kaya) are, in fact, ghosts, though it’s not revealed specifically from what era, and we also know they can travel through time. I’m somewhat presuming it’s part of a sustained effort to invoke some kind of nostalgia in the viewer – the OP sequence starts off the characters posing on what becomes a series of vinyl record covers, before turning into one of those travelling sideshow picture story things that I can’t remember the word for (which is also used in the episode previews), then there’s the ED with Arashi somewhat mimicking the iPod averts, only she’s carrying a cassette player. Their school uniforms are fairly old-fashioned as well.

Not that 70s look is consistant amongst the female characters – Yayoi in particular has fairly big, dopey looking eyes, which results in her having a slightly more contemporary feel to her. The Master and the other waitress seem to come from different schools of character design as well.

The male character design is equally as inconsistent, from the four men we’ve seen thus-far. Hajime and the detective-guy are a lot more caricature than we are used to seeing in late night anime as of late. Hajime’s design actually reminded me initially of Hajime from Shingu, though the characters couldn’t be much more different, and the comparison doesn’t really hold up all that well when you compare them side-by-side. The rounded nose on Arashis Hajime is pretty unusual for this kind of show, though.

The other two male characters are rather more conventional fair, though. It’s hard to draw any conclusions from this.

Speaking of things it’s hard to draw conclusions from, I really don’t know what to make of the way they try to draw attention to the characters in this show.


Consistently throughout the first two episodes, they bring focus onto the characters by through the use of light, using odd polygonal shapes where the colouring is different around the areas where characters or the focal point of the scene is present, or in such a way that the character stands out from the background art. It’s odd, because it’s the opposite of what Shaft has tended to do in the past – they’ve typically displayed a love of creating odd focal points in their shots, holding characters off-center or placing other items in the foreground in an attempt to draw your attention.

Kind of like that – also note Shinbos traditional stained-glass window in the background there. Otherwise, this is just peculiar. I do wonder if it’s just a way for them to reduce the amount of work they have to put into the background art by reducing the amount of detail required in some areas. The faded out areas seem too minimal for that to really be worthwhile, though.

In sharp contrast, in those areas where they do have fairly detailed backgrounds, they had a habit of actually drawing your attention purposefully towards them rather than the characters by utilising a lot of crazy, often nonsensical parallax scrolling techniques.

As for the content of the show, it was entertaining. Author compared the first episode to Haruhi 00, which doesn’t seem entirely accurate – the Haruhi episode doesn’t really do much to actually introduce the characters or premise behind the series, rather it was a big joke that only those already familiar with the franchise were really in on. Arashis first episode is probably a little more analogous to that of Berserk, which actually started with a story beyond what the anime would eventually cover before going back and explaining how things got there. The Haruhi episode, by being a filmed version of fictional events, was essentially irrelevant to the story altogether – it’s how it was filmed that was more relevant. Arashi (and Berserks) first episode mean to hook the viewers by showing what the show will eventually become. Haruhis first episode means to hook the viewer by confusing them. Haruhis first episode was a gimmick. Arashis probably wasn’t.

The first episode was a fun little caper, though. The use of the time travel gimmick was pretty well done – it could easily have become obnoxious if they’d tried to be too clever with it, and if they’d overdone it then it could easily have turned into the whole Bill and Teds Bogus Journey “When I win, I’ll travel backwards and…” ending affair where it’d just be really annoying. Thankfully, it had just enough complexity in the situation for it to be interesting without it falling into those traps, though I suspect mileage is going to vary in this regard.

That being said, I hope they’ve got most of their short-period time-travelling japery over with now. It was fun for one episode, but I wouldn’t want to see a whole series built around it. I’d rather see the whole time travel thing only used sparingly, and perhaps not in most episodes at all – it should always be in the background, something you know could be used should the situation arise, but I wouldn’t want the show to center around this. It’s not really used in the second episode, other than with Arashi confirming that she can travel back in time by reacting with Hajime, and I’d kind of like it to stay that way. We’ll see, I guess.