♪ Welcome to Your Slice of Life O.P.S.! - Natsu no Sora Edition
This is just a cheap ploy to prod at what really matters–when your HAL Film Maker (best known for the animated Aria adaptations) overlords work with Osamu Kobayashi (probably best known for his Gurren Lagann episode 4 nonsense to kids on the lawn today?) to create a very interesting mash-up between what is real and what is on the borderline of superflat, it turns into some kind of countryside magic about puppy love and the wonderfulness of youth?
It’s about this magical summer show–Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora.
But first thing first–which concatenation would you prefer? The official websites have dubbed it as “soramahou” so I think I’ll stick to that short name. “Let’s make this summer magical”? Or something. I’m up for a better one if you folks know what’s the standard/popular one being used around.
Anyways. As we know, the shtick about Soramahou (well, all the spinoffs of the series I think) is about some country girl who moves to a big city as a teenager and does stuff: a lot of heart, soil and toil, tears and some pretty magical fireworks to go with it. And as a character drama, its first order of the day is to sell us the protagonist characters. In the first episode, we learned about Sora, and I think she’ll be a fine undineprotagonist.
Memento says it as much.
I don’t think how a honest examiner of Soramahou can dodge the question about Osamu’s Photorealistic Shortcuts we see in the first episode. For starters, I call it a shortcut–but I don’t know if it really is a shortcut. Well, it is probably harder to draw it up like that from scratch ala. Makoto Shinkai or Ufotable’s Garden of Sinners. And if the illustrated parts of the background mean anything, there is a subtle tension between what is comic and what is not exaggerated. The random bushy grass really does clash with that concrete. And the tension increases multitudes more when you get your near-SD sketches moving in the foreground.
I have to admit however that the technique is not repulsive. In fact, it’s quite charming in its own way. The problem is more like it just stands out and viewers will just have to get used to it. Once the story kicks off as Sora lands in Tokyo’s cityscape, maybe things will get better as lifelikeness in a concrete jungle is a little easier to swallow than countryside scenery.
There is one thing I do like about the blatant use of those photo backgrounds though, and that is it really breaths depth to the scenes. If you are not watching this show on high definition, you are sort of missing out. It some ways, episode one was like the tourism video that Aria never was. Kudos to the director!
