bingerama

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=6200

Last night I watched another episode of Saiunkoku Monogatari Season 2 after a long break (I’ve been saving them since I’m close to running out), and was reminded of how much I adore every bit of this anime.

Because my immense adoration of this anime cannot be easily contained within one entry (along with the immense number of screenshots I would like to put up), today I will content myself with talking about a small part of it - the audio.

The cast is pretty star-studded, or what I would consider to be pretty star-studded anyway, in that it features a lot of prominent characters from the 20+ anime I’m currently watching. =p The thing is, somehow every actor manages to sound better in this show than in any other role I’ve seen them in. Take for example Kouyuu and Ensei, who share the same voices as Ikkaku and Renji respectively. They sound almost exactly the same in both roles, except that they’re oh so endearing in SM, and are pretty much morons in Bleach. A lot of it probably has to do with the script. All the dialogue is very calm and intelligent sounding, with very little panicked or angry yelling (no, for example, BANKAIIIIIs). Which also has a lot to do with how the story is presented and what the characters are like, but I’ll have to get into those another day…

The soundtrack is another thing I really like. The pieces are pretty varied, and the Chinese orchestra ones fit the mood of the show really well, especially compared to some of the other pseudo-Chinese animes I’ve seen. My favourite tracks are Ryuuki, Nukumori and Namida no Pavane; coincidentally (or not) they’re played during my 3 favourite scenes in Season 1, which I still tear up when watching even though I’ve already re-watched them 91423555 times (free lunch if you guess what they are!) I’m a huge sucker for sad quiet piano pieces, and these hit just the spot.

I started on this anime a few months back, when I hadn’t really immersed myself in uberotaku-ness yet, so I thought I was impressionable and that there were plenty of other shows out there of similar quality. Having sampled a lot more anime now, it still feels like everything else I’ve seen so far seems to fall short somehow. I know a lot of people are wary of Saiunkoku cos it seems totally girlish, but it’s really not what it looks like. More convincing arguments will follow, but in the meantime, give it a shot if you haven’t! O.o-b

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 2:57 am and is filed under Saiunkoku Monogatari. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.