Aria the Animation Ep. 1-5

I've been on a slice-of-life kick lately, it's like I'm allergic to plot all of a sudden. The newest I've added to my long currently watching list is Aria the Animation. The first thing that caught me was the color pallete. I know, odd right? As an ex-fine art major I'm very into color theory and I know which shades appeal to me personally. Lucky Star does, Sketchbook ~fullcolor'S~ does, and so does Aria. It's also a bit of fun color theory that all three of those series share an easy going slice of life theme as well.

The setting is certainly unique. Hundreds of year in the future a girl chases her dream of being a gondolier ... on Mars. It took me two episiodes to get that Aqua = Mars, which I think is delightful. Any sort of typical sci-fi esque voice over explaining where mankind currently stands wouldn't fit with the mood. And mood is one thing Aria has. It starts with the color pallete of soft almost sun faded colors throught out and extends to many wide panning shots of water and city scape of the sort that you'd expect in a French indy film rather than an anime. The animation is top notch. The show is just down right -pretty-. There's an almost fantasy like theme throughout, the combination of sci-fi and fantasy that the Japanese excel at and which sadly there is not nearly enough of, with different professions in Aqua taking on mythological names. The gondoliers go by the term Undine with the three best being known as the Water Faeries to the Sylph who deliver mail via airbike. 

It's much less character driven than other slice of lifes like Lucky Star or Azumanga, unless you count the abundance of adorable scenes centered around the cat President Aria. The characters are much more low key than most anime and very believable. Humor is present, I've gotten plenty of giggles thus far, but it's less slap stick and usually contained in odd facial expressions or the adventures of Aria-sato. 

If you don't like the slice of life genre chances are pretty good that you won't like Aria the Animation. If you do, or if you've previously enjoyed artsy foreign films, you'll probably like it. I'm very quickly becoming a fan. 

Yakitate!! Japan and PAX prep

For some very odd reason, I can't stop watching an anime about bread.

I picked this one up while looking for blog themes, I found one based on this anime and thought "Alright. It's about food... sure". After one episode I told Brit that it seemed too over the top and shonen like for me, but that he'd probably get a kick out of it's satire and comedy. He watched the first episode and didn't really like it. Yet now for some reason I keep watching it...

The central storyline is about a boy with magical "Solar Hands" who has a dream of creating the perfect japanese bread. The title is a pun, and puns are everywhere in the show. Pan means bread in Japanese. So calling his dream bread Ja-pan ... well, you get it.

It pokes fun at the over the top, action oriented shonen genre but does it in such a way that I'm pretty sure that somewhere there's a group of ten year old boys who take the show very seriously. If I didn't realize that it was a satire I'd likely have thought it very, very stupid. But as someone who admitedly loved Naruto but rolled her eyes as it's fights that lasted half a dozen episodes and entire episodes where nothing really happened other than to up the stress level of whatever seven part fight was happening at the moment, I can get that Yakitate!! Japan makes fun of itself while succeding pretty well at being a shonen anime itself. It includes overly frequent references to the lead characters warmer the normal magical Solar Hands, campy cut scenes of the wonderlands that good bread apparently gives you when eaten, a character who's sword doubles a rolling pin etc. 

The only question that remains is ... why am I still watching it?! I don't know. Maybe I have a soft spot for Japanese insanity or maybe I'm just nuts enough about food to actually enjoy the educational rambles about bread making. Scratch both those maybes. It's like ... Iron Chef meets anime.

Silly bread-anime aside, I'm gearing up for PAX starting tomorrow. I'm excited and feel really spoiled that such a big gaming con takes place ten minutes away from me. Friday is opening day which means waiting in line since we didn't get to pre-pay. That should be fun. Turbine, the developers of the MMO we currently play, is throwing a party at Gameworks after the exhibit hall closes which I am hella looking forward to.  Free food, free drinks, games and lovely lovely swaaaaag. I'm also looking forward to meeting Critters from NC Soft/Tabula Rasa who I worked with back when I ran a roleplaying fansite for that game after beta. Pictures will follow, if I can find the usb cord for my poor old camera.