bingerama

I made TJ watch this and we finished it over the weekend, with me re-watching 18 episodes in the process. Sadly, most of these episodes were not as moving the second time around. Plus TJ has a heart of stone so he was quite unimpressed with most of the tear-jerking moments in the anime, which kinda spoiled the mood for me. =/

This would have ranked as one of my all time favourites, except that the ending was quite a let down. It felt like nothing was really resolved in the greater scheme of things, and no ultimate enemy was finally triumphed over. I would have let the lack of an explanation pass, if they hadn’t slipped in that little bit about the ‘Masterminds’, which seemed to imply that we would be getting a bit more information about the whole affair. But nope, 30 hour long fight and zip, ending credits. And what was with the half hearted flashbacks in the last episode that seemed to accidentally leave out half the cast?

I was also disappointed by the weak stories that Jun and Kanji ended up with, especially since they’d managed to groom Kanji into such a likeable character without giving him a real focus. He almost made my list of favourite anime characters, but his story turned out to be entirely pointless. Pfft. Thankfully, all these faults can be conveniently blamed on the fact that the manga is still ongoing.

I still really liked the individual stories. I think the anime did an excellent job getting you attached to the characters (some of them anyway) when there were so many sharing limited screentime. The general premise of the story is sad to begin with, and the way the characters were presented made it downright heartbreaking in some cases. Even the ending was quite poignant, despite its insufficiencies. I probably would have cried if TJ hadn’t been around making snide remarks.

What I liked best about this anime was the fact that it didn’t try to be anything more than it was. It wasn’t pretentious, it didn’t try to be different or unique just for the sake of novelty, it didn’t try to get you to like the characters by applying all the usual techniques. It told its story without fillers or fanfare and still managed to be entertaining and, in my opinion anyway, genuinely touching.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 1:55 am and is filed under Bokurano. 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.