Now with videographix! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ0e-7SSI00
"Do YOU have magical powers?
Are you now or have you ever considered becoming a broke vagrant?
Well, fret no more! In Bum Simulator 2005, you can be all of these things- and for your troubles, a myriad of schoolgirls with health problems and terrible home lives will flock to you!
Such things like feeding yourself from the garbage and finding a dry bridge to sleep under will never be a problem again! They'll give youmoney, invite you into their homes, and feed you, all for free! Life has never been better!"
Until life hits you right in the tragedy.
Artwork and Animation: 7
Air is 10 years old this year, and while not a bad looking show by any means, it has moments of weakness. There are a lot of great qualities about it though, especially the backgrounds and scenery. Occasionally the character models fall off and drop to a very low detail level and there are more than a few stillframes and pans over them, but overall a nice looking show- even if I don't care for the enormous bug eyes that take up a third of each female character's face.
Sound and Voice Acting: 9
Honestly, this is about as good of a performance as one can get from Monica Rial and Vic Mignogna. Vic sounds appropriately indignant, bored, and playfully angry, along with an emotive performance, befitting of a young man who actually cares about his female companion's well being.
I've long maintained that Monica Rial was best in Panty and Stocking, but I might have to reorder my list after this. I did not know that she was capable of playing a dramatic, tragic, and nuanced role as she did in Misuzu. She was legitimately awesome in this; totally believable in the role of an immature, wistful, and sick, but hopeful young girl.
There were no hammy performances, and no false-feeling emotional scenes- every bit of it was all one could have hoped for in a heartfelt drama.
The music in Air is the true beauty- with soft, melancholy piano melodies, and a mixture of ethereal, airy sounding background music, including an excellently fitting opening song, "Tori no Uta"; (Bird's Poem) that combines danceable bass beats with the celestial qualities of the vocals and string sections.
Contrivances and Story:
I think the whole show could be described as a very long, very thin Red String of Fate. This theme of long distant past events affecting the present day is fairly common in media, however, Air's usage of it relies on several plot conveniences that I just cannot forgive. I understand that they were trying to make the plot into a tragic love story, but the means by which they use to get there are, honestly, poor, and would have functioned much better and been more believable with only very slight changes to the story.
I was following along well up until episodes 8 and 9. I lost it when the plot decides to make an unexpected jump off a cliff straight back in time a thousand years. That one paragraph of exposition at the end of episode 9 mostly straightened it out, but still, the show was about 70 miles into a 100 mile trip, flipped on the left blinker and cruised straight out of the country and into the ocean.
I was, and am certainly not alone in being totally lost in 8 and 9, didn't know who the characters were or why I should care that this character's mother died; I just really didn't know why I was supposed to care about these characters you force on me for two episodes in the middle of a story- with very little explanation as to why it's important, only to have the supposed importance of it absolutely quashed in the end in favor of a emotionally manipulating tragic ending.
The show had just spent the last 7 episodes building this relationship between Misuzu and Yukito up, only to hand me three new characters who, by the end of the show, aren't even that important.
Also, this trip in time was supposed to make me feel bad for the winged people because they were used as weapons?? What kind of tacked on tragedy is that? Why can't people just hate them because they have wings?? Why do these people even need to have wings? Why can't they be just some minority that the feudal Japanese of the time discriminated against?
This little episode also introduced the absolute thirstiest chick I've ever seen in anime.
Woman to her best friend's lover: "Ryuuya, there's only one way to help Kanna now, you and I must have a child together."
Okay seriously? The lover and best friend of the afflicted winged person have to have a child so that the child of their great great great grandchild's grandchild's great grand child MIGHT end up helping the reincarnated form of your friend???
What made them think that was going to work???
What if one of the kids 200 years down the line decides, "you know what, screw this girl in the sky garbage, who even cares?" and it ended there?
What about infertility?
What if one of the descendants got cholera and died before they had children? They didn't have Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccines back in 994 AD.
The show relies on this convenience heavily, only for it to totally come apart and mean nothing at the end!
The whole story could have been revamped with a much simpler, yet equally tragic plot without relying on these extreme conveniences for melodrama: make the main heroine just ill, with a hereditary terminal disease instead of inheriting a cursed soul that her body can't contain. Male character who's unaware of her condition and just thinks she's a bit strange befriends her, they develop a relationship, and then it changes from a cute love story to a terrible tragedy of lovers. The other characters do their best to help treat it, to no avail, and eventually (if you want your magic tie-in), through some circumstance, a miracle happens, and the girl is saved, or- maintain the tragedy and she becomes more ill anyway.
None of this thousand year old curse nonsense that even MANIFESTS ITSELF AS A DISEASE! No ridiculous "my descendants will help save this person's reincarnated form in the far future!", and no stupid reincarnation. Magic in shows is fine, but this show takes a couple pages out of the rule same book Code Geass got its internal consistency from.
Minor Gripe:
I don't even remember how Kanna KNEW WHERE HER MOTHER WAS! She said in the beginning that she didn't even remember her mother, and then she and her friends magically knew where to find the mother because of the female best friend's magical "woman's intuition" equivalent of GPS tracking.
And a guy becomes a crow.
Seriously, I can't make this up.
Enjoyment and Overall: 6
I want to like Air, because it's a pretty sweet story about tragedy, but there were some so incomprehensibly stupid moments about it that broke it for me. In spite of a forgettable cast of supporting characters and a few plot threads that really don't go anywhere, I'll give it a pass, because it's a nice little story, and I enjoyed it for the most part- it just could have done with some good editing before it was put to paper in the form it came out in.
"Y'know everybody holds the idiot ball from time to time. Except this one girl played keep away with it... Forever. She took it home and never gave it back."
