"Natsu no Arashi!" Talkback

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Alicia Arroyos

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Adapted from an ongoing manga by Jin Kobayashi (School Rurable) that is billed as a mix of drama, mystery and comedy, Natsu no Arashi is a new spring 2009 series that will be running for 13 episodes. This series will be streaming legally on Crunchyroll and the first episode will be simulcast today, April 5th, at 1 PM Eastern.

The story centers on a thirteen year old boy named Yasaka, who stays at his grandfather's residence one summer vacation. He soon meets high schooler Sayoko "Arashi" Arashiyama in a local coffee shop, at which point his life takes an interesting turn. Arashi, it seems, has a secret, and Yasaka will soon learn that she is far from ordinary.

Credits

Animation Studio: SHAFT
Director: Akiyuki Shinbo (Negima!?, Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha)
Character Design: Kazuhiro Ota (Negima!?)
Music: Ken Sato (Super Dimension Calvery Southern Cross)

Links of Interest

What anime series are you looking forward to this spring?
Episode 1 stream: http://www.crunchyroll.com/media-524876/natsu-no-arashi-1/

Comments?

Well, this is a dark horse show for me this season, but it's readily available and I'm curious. So, I'll give it a chance. I do hope that Random Curiosity's speculation is mistaken and that the show doesn't overplay the comedy angle, as I'm interested in mystery elements that the original manga supposedly has.
 
Oi. Well, this wasn't what I was expecting. For starters, whatever the manga is, this show indeed seems to be all comedy. I sure don't see signs of "drama," I saw that elsewhere on the net and am now at a loss as to where that came from.

It's definitely not a straight adaptation, because this series commits the mistake of diving right into a story--such as it is--without explaining anything. I can see some influence from Negima?! creeping in here in fact, given that at points the narrative often jumped from one point to the next without much warning.

So Yasaka is a devious little schemer that spent most of this episode trying to play the same practical joke on two different people, with rather predictable results. Time travel seems to be this series' gimmick. Arashi and this other woman Kaya are apparently able to travel backward in time and then back to the present again, although no attempt is made to explain how or to even mention in passing what they are supposed to be. It simply is, and that's all there is to it. The entire cast also gathers at this cafe which Kaya apparently manages, although why Yasaka and Arashi or any of the secondary cast happen to work there is just another thing that is not talked about.

Instead the focus is on Yasaka and his attempts to feed strawberries filled with nasty stuff to people that get on his nerves. The reasons, of course, are incredibly petty. This is followed by lots of leaping through time when a strawberry cake goes missing and Kaya starts going back to earlier and earlier in the day in an attempt to find it--she's got to have her sweets, you see. Yasaka tries to stop that with Arashi's assistance, since Kaya eating one of his bad strawberries will get him in trouble.

Yeah...that's literally the episode. I won't say I wasn't amused at times, but there certainly wasn't anything to make me laugh. It's also hard to get engaged in this in any way when absolutely no effort is made to get the viewer familiar with anything that is going on. It comes off as though they animated this for current fans of the manga, and if you don't fall into that category then you're basically out of luck.

I was hoping to like it, but while it's not outright awful I can't say that this gave me a lot of motivation to continue.

Grade: C-
 
I don't think anyone ever considered the School Rurable character designs to be extremely ground-breaking or OMG these are so well-done.

But man the character designs in this thing are pretty damn crude. Quite a few of the women have manly faces or just very oddly shaped ones.
 
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