Current mood:	pensive
Current music:	Enon - Natural Disasters
Entry tags:	anime, review

Haibane Renmei, Serial Experiments Lain & Midori Days
I used to claim to be all into animé, and I fear at one time I was mostly just following the popular emerging trend amongst those of my age at the time, and this was largely due to the spawning of the Pokémon phenomenon on Canadian television. I devoured hours of animation without discrimination in terms of quality in either visual style or strength of meaning. This tendency died out when I tired of movies and series populated with gratuitous explosions and sexually enhanced visuals.

Flash-forward to last week, when I finished watching a series that had piqued my interest some two years back. Called Haibane Renmei, it's one of those quietly portrayed, slow-moving animé with a story entirely motivated by character development and exposition. In fact, the final episode is centred around the exposition of a character whose importance is so closely tied with that of the main character that the end effect is stunning, and prompts to mind such thoughts as "whoever wrote this story is brilliant."

The Haibane story centres around the arrival of a new young woman to a town surrounded by tall walls, where humans live in peaceful coexistence with a race of angel-like creatures who arrive in a state of amnesia, and eventually depart the world in a manner veiled in mysticism and myth. The new arrival struggles to understand her place in this world while at the same time desiring to repay the person who first cared for her upon her appearance in the town. Maybe it sounds as dry as a high-school literature assignment when I explain it this way, but suffice it to say it was nonetheless quite immersing about three-fifths of the way in.

The same concept artist also came up with Serial Experiments Lain, which is another animé I watched a bit of a long time ago and never had sparked the kind of mature interest I now feel for it. Like Haibane Renmei, this series exposes itself in layers as the series progresses. As yet I have only watched volume one, so I cannot say much about the series as a whole except that I already have fairly high expectations for the story development and depth of character. It already displays signs of poetry which I greatly appreciate in an immersing story. It shares something of the same degree of philosophical and metaphysical undertones with Haibane Renmei as well.

Lain explores the boundaries between belief and reality, focusing on the experiences of a young girl who gains a sudden interest in the world of cyber-culture after receiving an email from a so-called deceased classmate.

Midori Days is a far more light-hearted though no less enjoyable work than the above two mentioned animations. I hate to sound corny, but the characters are very heart-warming. Full of a romantic yearning quality, Midori Days offers a bizarre twist very early in the premise of the series to make even those with only a casual interest in animated storytelling intrigued enough to sit down and get involved in the story up until the end. My room-mates, whose attention spans are no better than my own, sat down and watched episode after episode once they'd seen the two main characters' relationship: the male, who has long dreamt of having a girlfriend, now has in place of his right hand a girl in miniature form who secretly fell in love with him from a distance before this all happened. He struggles to maintain normality while she seems oddly content with the situation, and together they eventually gain a deeper empathy for each other and a more comprehensive understanding of themselves. Highly recommended.

Well, I knew sooner or later I'd write an anime review; I just needed to watch one worth writing about, let alone three.