The story follows Shuichi Shindou, a 19 year old vocalist trying to make it big in the music industry and Eiri Yuki, a young, cool and cold romance novelist and pretty much revolves around the couple’s careers, love life and past. Nothing complicated or confusing neither is it plot less or pointless. The series is short, only 13 episodes long but every episode is filled with quality; it’s well paced, never did it ever feel even slightly slow or boring. It's simply entertaining which is what an anime should be!
Shuichi is a generic uke; he’s loud, cute, innocent, has a feminine body (which he uses for his failed plans) and is quite open about his love towards Eiri yet he’s a loveable character. I don’t usually like characters with this sort of annoying personality but with Shuichi he grows on you, maybe because its quite nice to have such an energetic character as the main lead.
Eiri is….a cool guy, look wise and personality wise. He’s the classic “Tall, dark and handsome” character fan girls scream over. When I said before it revolves around the couples past, its actually his past that it’s focused on (I mean, seriously, you can’t expect Shuichi to have a dark past now could you?)
Other characters include Hiro and Suguru who are the other members of Shuichi’s band ‘Bad Luck‘, Mr K their manager, Mr Sakano their producer, Tohma Seguchi their boss, Eiri’s brother in law and a member of Shuichi’s favourite band ‘Nittle Grasper’ etc. The cast of Gravitation is likeable, they’re mostly used for comic relief and for a 13 episode show they all carry a decent amount of distinct characteristics. Tohma reminds me of some petite pretty boy gangster though, the way he handles certain situations and is one of the more serious characters.
Here comes the music. A very important part in any anime, even more so in this one since it’s a show all about music. The music and themes in this are just simply fun and personally I quite liked them - the opening and other songs the band sung had some techno in it which made the songs really funky, which I enjoyed since I don’t really listen to techno. The piano themes used when there’s a ‘heart-warming moment’ or whatever got me every time (in a good way) and the ending is used to create a cliff-hanger moment at the end of each episode.
However, it sort of annoyed me that they recycle the same song/scenes every time they showed Bad Luck singing - only a couple of other times did they use new footage or songs. The music aren’t masterpieces but it’s a great listen.
If outfits come under art, I would down rate the art because the performing outfits that Shuichi and Ryuichi wore are HORRIBLE. They look like some bad cop out from the 80’s which I don’t understand how it managed to find its way into this show since Gravitation came out in 2000. Then again, I don’t live in Japan so I don’t really know how singers dress there, though I’m pretty sure no singer in their right mind would dress like that. Other than that little critique the art was fine. The cover shown in the summary pretty much tells you what the art is like - bright, pretty and cute, so not much more I can really discuss on that.
In my opinion, Gravitation is one the best shounen ai out there to date. The only reason why I say “one of” is simply because I haven’t watched all the shounen ai out there, but even so it’s still up there because it also does well as an anime. It’s well funny, throughout the series I had had many good laughs. There are extremely lame and stupid moments (e.g. Shuichi dressing in dog costume) that had made me cringe but I guess that’s just part of the course. There are also shocking pause-the-screen-to-take-in-what-just-happened moments which either puts a huge grin on my face or make me look completely dumbfounded.
The music industry aspect is quirky, serving much humorous content with the sheer craziness of it all and does make the audience doubt the music industry of today if that’s how it’s really run. And even though it is shounen ai, don’t be completely put off by it - I guess if you ever want to explore this genre then Gravitation is a good or perhaps the only place to start.
