Clannad

Length: 23 Episodes (+1 OVA episode)
Episode Length: 25 mins
Genre: Drama, Romance, Comedy

Tomoya Okizaki is a Senior in high school, he is also known as a no-good troublemaker. When he was young his Mother died, and his father started drinking and gambling. After a short while they started getting into fights. One day his father and he get into a serious fight and Tomoya's right shoulder is injured. Since then he has become the trouble maker he is.

Current day, Tomoya is on his way to school, when he sees a girl standing on the side of the walkway up to the school. Her name is Nagisa Furukowa. This series is a story of Tomoya's and Nagisa's time during senior year in high school, and their fun times (and sad times) with friends they make throughout the year.

Grading Scale: 1 to 10

Visual: 10
Plot: 8
Sound: 10
Follow Through: 8

Visually, Clannad was perfect, characters had diferent faces, different styles and they even made cities, and buildings look unique. It is difficult to come up wiht much to say here as all I can do is praise the effort put into this series.

Plot is one of its downfalls, if you can call it that. The main plat is there throughout most of the series, the only times when it isn't present is when you learn things about each characters past. The biggest flaw in this is that how they represent this story is by revolving the stories around secondary characters, and how the Main characters deal with them.

Sound, like its visual quality was incredible. Each character had a voice that sounded like their own character, and no one person tried to make themselves stand out by overdoing their voice-acting. All the sounds in this series follow along with what is going on and I must say that they cover all aspects very well.

Follow Through is where you could say the biggest downfall is, but it is still worth an 8 not only for effort but for getting so close to making a series which could fit three different genres in almost all of the time. Clannad is a romantic comedy, but with a lot of drama in it. The problem is comparison from the aspects of drama. All romantic comedies have some drama in them that is how romantic comedies keep people interested in the romance. However, Clannad comes more than the romantic side of Drama. They cover despair, loneliness, and even fear. This series does a great job of incorporating it into the series. One of the reasons this series lost a point in this aspect was because of the OVA. The OVA episode is completely different from the main storyline and even goes against what has just happened in the series. It was a good idea in itself, and does cover an aspect of the story people would like to have learned about. But it does not fit in with the rest of the story line.

Clannad got a bump down because of episode 24 (also known as an OVA episode), since it did not follow with the original story line, and added no useful effect to the story (in my personal opinion).

Clannad gets an A-.

Chance Pop Session

Length: 13 Episodes
Episode Length: 22 minutes
Genre: Drama

Chance Pop Session is an anime following three young girls attempt to rise to pop fame. The series starts by introducing one of the young girls, and how much she loves music. You learn a short time in that she loves music by a singer named Reika. This young girls name is Akari. She spends most of her time helping her foster father around the house and with his work. One day a friend of hers shows up at the door. He has a surprise for Akari, he has tickets to see Reika live in concert. Akari is overjoyed and while her friend says that he is unfortunately unable to go with her, he gives her the tickets and she goes alone.

The next girl you meet is Nozomi. She comes from a wealthy family, and she is obsessed with Reika. Nozomi is much more simple than most at first. It seems that she is happy as long as she gets to listen to Reika, and now her father has bought her the best 2 seats for Reika's concert. The butler for the family is to take her and keep her from harm while she is there.

The last girl you meet is Yuki. This girl actually works with the people backstage in Reika's crew. Yuki couldn't afford to go to the concert, and has a love for music. So a friend of hers who works in the crew offered to let her help out with the concert setting things up, and then watch the show from the lighting and sound booth.

Each of these girls inadvertently meet each other, some in ways better than others, at the concert. Then during the show all three girls declare a wish that it could be them singing in front of thousands of people at some point. Thus begins the story of Akari, Yuki, and Nozomi and their attempts to become a famous Pop singer.

Grading Scale: 1 to 10

Visual: 8
Plot: 8
Sound: 7
Follow Through: 5

Visual:
Chance Pop Session is well done Visually. The style of drawing done for peoples expressions were different from what I was used to, but I have seen it before. Eventually this style grew on me, and is much more realistic than most anime character drawings. Also, when they showed cities and towns, you could tell that the people had put time into it, as it was not just repeating the same 1 or two slides over and over again all the time. The overall combination of styles here created a good mixture, until it came to the concerts or singing in general. While in many music videos around today there are videos where the lips of the singer do not match the lyrics, it usually doesn't happen too often during concerts or during practice sessions. The biggest problem with this anime's visuals were that during concerts the "lighting" on the singer was never quite fitting with how it lit them up, and that they never came up with different or interesting dance moves.

Plot:
The plot of this story would have normally got a 10, however, the main storyline seems to be more of a distraction from the underlying plot. While many animes are like this in the sense that they try and disguise a major plot twist in the anime, this anime seems to focus too much on the underlying plot twist, in which helped me figure out the whole thing before I had gotten half way through the series. Overall it was an interesting storyline, but not as well presented.

Sound:
This should probably be rated at a 9 or10, but I marked it down for a very similar reason for visual. Singing was something of a disappointment. The combination of sound and visuals were not the greatest I have seen during singing animes. I did judge this part harshly, but only because I think it could have been fixed easily by checking it over one or two more times.

Follow Through:
This really is the biggest flaw for this anime. The Plot line was well written, the styling was good, the voice actors were great, and then they tried to condense a series worth the time for 26 episodes into just 13. The series rushed through too many of the plot points, and while I know many people complain about filler in an anime, it is a good thing because it keeps people guessing on the big plot and keeps them intrigued. Chance Pop Session tries to skip all the unnecessary information, and in the process, opens all the doors for people to see right through to what they are trying to hide.

Overall this anime was good and I am very glad to have watched it. It was my kind of anime, and I must admit that also helped its Final overall Grade. This anime is something that I think all people would like and I highly suggest people to watch it.

Chance Pop Session gets a B-.

Blood +

Length: 50 Episodes
Episode Length: 22 Minutes
Genre: Action/Horror


The Series starts with flashes of the Vietnam War with a young girl with long flowing black hair, glowing red eyes, and a samurai sword attacking anyone or anything she sees. This girl shows a lot of hatred and anger in her eyes and face and keeps attacking people whether they attack her or not. Also, however, you see her attacking what seems to be very strange monsters. At the end of this scene you see her just standing there with an army of these monsters walking behind her.

This series is based around a girl who looks to be around the age of 16 years old named Saya (Sigh-ah), who lives with her foster father George, and her foster brothers, Kai(older) and Rikku(younger). Saya is spending time with her friend after school practicing the high jump. Afterward you find that she is at a hospital getting a blood transfusion and you learn that she seems to need this to stay alive. As she heads home she hears a Cello player in the streets with a crowd around him. This man looks to be around the age of early to mid twenties, the one distinguishing fact is that he has a bandage over one of his hands. As Saya stands there listening to him play she starts having visions of someone walking down a corridor. Quickly she starts to panic and freaks out and begs for the music to stop, you also notice that this man seems to take interest in her when she yells. Later on, once Saya makes it back to Omoro's, the bar that George Owns, she notices that she seems to have left her gym shoes at school, and so she decides to head back to grab them alone. Once she is there she is unable to find her shoes, but does hear strange noises, when she is talking to her gym teacher she sees him attacked by a horrid looking creature. Saya's friend from school arrives at Omoro's to give Saya her shoes, and when George sees he sends Kai after Saya to bring her home. By the time that Kai gets there, Saya has run into the School and is doing all she can to avoid being killed by the monster. As Kai arrives at the school, Saya is trapped in a lab room with this monster and the Cello player. This man uses a small Metalic Coffin to attack this monster and when he puts it down for a short period of time, he opens up the coffin, and then opens a secret compartment inside. You see a long Samurai sword, that seems to be the same from the first scenes of Vietnam, inside. He pulls the sword out, and cuts his hand that the bandage had been around. You see that this hand is very similar to that of the monsters he is attacking, then he tries to feed Saya his blood. After but a few attempts and dodging ensuing attacks from the Monster, the man puts the blood in his own mouth and kisses Saya to put the blood in her mouth. He speaks the words "Saya, it is time for you to wake up." and then something happens to Saya. Her eyes start to glow bright red, she picks up the sword as if it were natural instinct, puts her blood into the sword and starts obliterating the monster that had recently been attacking them. Kai arrives just in time to see the end of the fight, and Saya standing there covered in blood. Shortly afterward, Saya falls unconscious and the strange man leaves with the Sword. Thus continues the story of Saya's life destroying more and more of these horrific monsters.

Grading Scale from 1 to 10.

Visual Effects: 8
Plot: 7
Sounds: 10
Follow Through: 6

Visually, Blood + could have been better, It was still one of the best aspects of this anime, however, the way they had this shown was not the greatest of ways I have seen. It was obvious that the people were very focused on Faces and surprisingly Blood. Not one person seemed to have a similar type of face, everyone was very unique above the neck. Also, they were very accurate with the amounts of blood you would expect to see from things of a certain size, also they showed blood running down arms of from wounds as you would expect them in real life. They focuses on these things very well. However, when it came to figures of people and buildings. Most buildings looked very similar to others, in fact many towns looked the exact same but with buildings rearranged. People were also a problem, they focused a lot on the faces, but the bodies were a completely different story. They basically designed 4 different shapes and then added color and re-sized them, so that everyone seemed to have essentially the same type of body.

Plot was one of the things that they needed to spend more time on, This series was unbelievably repetitive. While most anime along the lines of action are, this anime took the same plot line, and ran it 5 times through with approximately a 1 or 2 episode break for following along with random things which you would prefer to learn progressively, rather than skip a lot and learn it all at once. Blood + was still a great story, however, they seemed to just use the same short story board too many times.

Sound is probably the only thing that makes this series go from Good to Great. I couldn't find a problem with it. Every Character had a different voice, and the voice acting seemed to fit in the the characters and their situations. Also, the sounds made by the monsters and people were well done, however much time they may have put into this anime sound wise was well worth it. I have to say that this was the best aspect of this show.

Follow Through is someone difficult to focus on for this anime, as it is both Horror and Action. While the action aspect was consistent throughout most of the series, the Horror part did seem to turn a lot into mystery instead. It seemed more that the Horror was based on that there were monsters, but it was more focused on showing the action and trying to make you guess at things or show what sort of information the main characters were missing. This anime does a good job at supplying action to its viewers and dispersing it jst long enough for you to want more. The big problem was the avoiding by the creators to really get into the horror aspect of this show.

Overall Blood + is a great anime series, and is well worth watching. However, some aspects to this show were a little repetitive, and could have been fixed if the creators had perhaps just spent another short while on it.

Blood + gets a B+