Seishuu Handa a famous calligrapher with a respected style is on the path to find his own calligraphy thanks to an accident that forced him to leave his city and to live in a village to rethink his life. as you can expect the village is filled with bunch of weird people and Handa gets inspired by the way they live and think so another aspect of the story is simplicity. it focuses on it even more with introducing Naru, a wild brat that befriends Handa and through her simplicity Handa learns lots of things and we get to see the brilliance of a child's mind. also as it happens Handa is a natural with kids so he is always surrounded with a bunch of them. while the story is mostly presented episodically (stories feel separated) there is a good flow and each section got tied with others pretty well and if you didn't read the manga sometimes you probably won't notice that they just attached different events and mixed things. it is also sweet to see how Handa improves himself with anything even remotely related to Calligraphy (Writing on a boat with Brush)
Sadly because the anime is only 12 episodes they had to cut some of the stuff and that created some small problems specially with characters. there is a good amount of characters in the story and the anime doesn't have the time to focus on all of them. for example you get too see the teacher dude in the main story only in Episode 1 and after that he just make appearances in scenes after the credit.characters might not be unique and you might even forgot most of them after a while but they are well thought and real. they have their desires, characteristics and some of them grow along with the protagonist which is one of the strong points of Barakamon. so naturally expect a good amount of growth from Handa while he still stays the same person.
the animation quality is good but it is not anything special and character designs are mostly true to their original design (except for...for example Miwa, they probably changed her skin tone so people don't confuse her with Tama...). voice acting is pretty strong and i really like Daisuke Ono in this one and he shows he can handle anything thrown at him. although voice acting sometimes can feel off and sometimes it doesn't match character's expressions but overall it's great and obviously it is opinion based.
all and all Barakamon along with Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun are best comedies of Summer 2014 and if you are into emotional yet light stories i strongly suggest Barakamon. as i mentioned making an story focusing on calligraphy is hard and keeping the reader/viewer interested is even harder but you don't have to worry about that here.
