Apples!

So with my day off from school due to coughs and sneezes, I've chosen to finally catch up on some anime. Today I watched and finished an anime called Spice and Wolf.

Set in a historical European setting, Spice and Wolf revolves around main character, Kraft Lawrence. Lawrence is a 25 year old merchant who travels to different villages selling various goods so he'll get enough money to one day own a shop of his own. One night while he's in the town of Pasloe, he finds a young girl in his wagon named Holo who has the ears and tail of a wolf. Holo is a 600 plus years old pagan wolf-deity who is the town's goddess of harvest and has kept it blessed with good harvests of wheat for many years. Although she has a responsibility to this town, she really wishes to go back to her homeland in the north called Yoitsu because she believes everyone's forgotten about her, and she wants to see how the world outside of Pasloe has change in the past centuries. She manages to make a deal with Lawrence and ends up traveling with him. As they travel, Holo helps Lawrence increase his profits as a merchant, but also attracts negative attention from the Church because of her real nature.

Another great anime that made some friends of mine happy for watching. I looked online and saw that there's a second series so I may check that out as well. But anyway this is a great fantasy anime with a nice hint of romance between Holo and Lawrence. There's some slight nudity but it really isn't that bad. Another great anime to see.

~Liz~

Jan Ken Pon!

So some time ago my friend Travis told me to watch this anime called Nichijou. He gave me some hard drives with all the episodes available. And now that my brain is slowly settling so I actually have time to watch anime, I've taken an interest in Nichijou.

This anime is a slice of life anime where it follows the lives of high school students. It mainly follows three girls named Yukko, Mio, and Mai, three friends who have bizarre events happen to them every day at school, and an 8 year old Professor with her robot, Nano.

Yukko, Mio and Mai go to high school and have strange things happen to them that's oddly normal such as one of their classmates pulling guns out of thin air and the richest boy coming to school on a goat with his butler. Depsite these bizarre characters and situations that happen daily, they live life "normally" as they go through their lives as high schoolers.

Meanwhile, an eight year old scientist, known as Professor, lives at home without going to school living with her robot Nano and a stray cat she picked up she named Sakamoto who wears a red handkerchief that allows him to talk. Despite her intelligence, Professor still acts like the child she is which even includes adding bizarre functions to Nano without her noticing such as having missiles shoot out and having openings in her arms that pop out log cakes much to Nano's dislike when she wishes to be able to go to school normally especially without the wind-up key on her back.

This is by far one of the most random animes I've seen since Fooly Cooly, and THAT was random beyond belief. But it's a really really good anime to watch and is really funny with awesome characters to love. It's only available in Japanese with subs so if you like dubs better you'll just have to wait, but the original Japanese is really good and I still recommend it.

~Liz~

I put a jet pack engine at the bottom of your chair

So this is my first anime review since.. well since I started school. With my hetic schedule and amount of homework I get, by the time I get home I can't think straight. So I've been lagging on my anime watching for a while. But thanks to my three day weekend, I've been finally able to catch up on D. Gray-man, start two new animes, and finish Higurashi Kai. One of the new animes I got hooked on and am almost finished with is an anime called Angel Beats! (Exclamation mark included in title)

This anime is set in a high school that acts as a Purgatory (A state in the afterlife before going to Heaven. Look it up because it's too complicated to talk about.), where the students who've died and come here learn to give up on worldly attachments they had when they were alive before passing on to the next after life or reincarnation. The injury or cause of death is gone, but in this world, people can still feel pain and other feelings they had when they were alive, including death, but since they're already in the afterlife, they'll just wake up again some time later with their injuries gone.

The story revolves around the main protagonist Otonashi, a boy who lost his memories of his life before dying. Upon waking up in the afterlife, he meets a girl named Yuri and is invited to join the Afterlife Battlefront, an organization founded by Yuri where a group of students fight against God because of their cruel experiences when they were alive. Their only enemy is the student council president named Angel, a girl who possesses supernatural powers and fights against the SSS. It is believed that if one follows Angel and behave like a normal student, you'll eventually pass on. But if you're able to fulfill your dreams in the afterlife, you'll be able to pass on as well.

This is a really great anime to watch, and if you like Clannad and Air TV, you'll definitely love Angel Beats! Beautiful animation, great fight scenes, fun characters, tons of comic relief and of course character back stories that'll jerk tears out of your eyes. Recommend everyone to watch it now!

~Liz~