After watching the first episode of this series, I was hyped. The art, wordplay, cute main female and funny main male characters.. I thought I was in for a real treat. Well, that initial sweetness soon started to taste oddly sour. Which is a real shame. Let me elaborate.
Kyoto Animation provides us with stunning visuals in this series. I loved how the atmosphere is often dark and dreary, yet with a faint touch of light here and there, that glimmer seemingly attached to our heroine, ‘Miss Clumsy’ herself, Mirai Kuriyama (more on her later). The animation for battle scenes are spectacular, and had me rewinding many a time to relive a moment that just blew me away. The fluidity of bodies during action scenes is just so well done as well, with Kuriyama and the various youma being especially well animated. This atmosphere is torn up and thrown out the back window all too soon with ridiculous outfits (let's just say there is a maid outfit with bunny ears involved at one stage), situations and even entire episodes revolving around comedy and fan-service.
Instead of breaking up the darker sides to the story, it only made me lose any interest I originally had. Many shows keep a dark side all the way through and those who don't give in to fan-service are those that in my humble opinion, deserve the higher ratings. If a story on it's own can't stand up without the constant crutch of cute girls and innuendo's, then sorry to say but your story is terrible. And this show's story is, well, yeah it's not good.
At first, I found the OP to be mediocre, but as the show progressed, so did my taste for the woman’s voice in the opening song. I ended up watching it every episode, and not skipping it like I do with many other anime. But I will say, it certainly doesn’t fit the shows feel quite right.
The ED is just wonderful.
The music that plays throughout the show is something that really stood out for me. Instead of being there, the tracks used set the mood for scenes near-on perfectly. Action scenes really *feel* like good old down-to-earth ACTION scenes, and coupled with the animation, I couldn’t help but be completely immersed in them. In the calmer parts of the show, the music is less influential, but certainly fits just right. When the story was lacking (and it did at times), the sound was there as a crutch to put a bit of feeling into a scene, and this is evident throughout the entirety of the show. The music is very well done.
The characters in KnK are very 2-dimensional, in that any development is only either very minor, episodic or forced. Kuriyama's character is honestly frustrating to watch, because, I adore her character design. The hair colour and shape, red glasses and just being generally kawaii (ha), but from episode 1 to episode 12, she doesn't change hardly at all. Yes she cries a lot, shouldn't that give her instant development-points? Not at all. The reasons behind the emotion in this show are honestly nothing for the viewer to care for - only making those that cry seem weak and annoying and those that get angry seem hotheaded and unintelligent.
Side characters are plenty, and most serve a similar function of being plot devices, which is fine, but repeated all too often and only makes the storytelling evidently weak here; having to rely on temporary characters with convenient back-stories.
This show had good promise in the first episode, but quickly tripped over it's own laces, with 11 episodes of rolling further and further downhill.
But it wasn't all bad; it made me giggle and laugh out loud, “awww” at Kuriyama’s clumsiness and gasp at the action scenes. But the sad emotional scenes KnK force-feeds the viewer really put me off. I feel like this show tried to be too many things in too short of a time-frame. This show would have greatly benefited from having a 24-episode running, so plot and character development could have been drawn out well enough for me to actually care what was happening.
Individual ratings are as follows: Story - 5; Art - 8; Sound - 8; Character - 3, Enjoyment - 5; Mean total - 5.8 (rounded to 6))
