omorka | An Anime Review (no spoilers)

No one showed up for Movie Night on Thursday (PB was out sick; no idea where EW and Annoying M were), so the Spouse and I finished the last disc of Fruits Basket instead.

While there was a somewhat untoward amount of fluff in the series - in particular, there was one whole episode that focused on a tertiary character, and I could have thought of several other things that could have better used that time - I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. As I've come to expect from the better shojo shows, there were bishy bishy guys, a tolerance for HoYay!, an emphasis on kindness as the primary virtue, and non-binary relationship structures. Huzzah! While not quite as explicitly queer as CardCaptor Sakura, which for me is now the pinnacle of "anime I like" precisely because of all those factors, this one shared enough for me to find parallels. The change in tone for the final three episodes was handled very well, without impacting the overall tone for the series - we've had hints since the very beginning that this could get darker.

Minor complaints: the heroine is a bit of a dim bulb sometimes, and there are so many secondary characters that we don't get to know some of them very well.

Neither positive nor negative, just a comment: If I hadn't already seen Kodomo no Omacha, I think I would have been put off by some of the manga-y visual style of the series. Having said that, I much prefer this director's style to the Gainax-y Visual Crap (TM).

Overall, not my favorite show (that will be forever a tie between CCS and Mahou Tsukai Tai!), but way up there. Definitely an enjoyable series, and the dub does not suck.