Anime Meta-Review
Di Gi Chara
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Title Info
- seen: 1-8 of 16
- type: mini
- grade: flawed
- people: Daichi
- Series state: Don't intend to watch more.
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
I give this anime a solid slapping in the (probably vain) hope that this tendency towards short and shallow anime will end. These episodes are less than 5 minutes long which heavily limits what can be attempted. Not that this anime seems to mind, because it isn't trying to do very much. Basically the anime is a vehicle for three `cute girl' designs to be animated. One is an energetic cat-woman alien, one a quiet, strange alien and another a `villain' with bunny ears. They are given a stage, a gaming shop, and then proceed to be involved in various mindless stories. Various other stereotypes are introduced and demolished as needed.
This really has the feeling of a bunch of students sitting round egging each other on to come up with `funny' ideas. And like most of these lightweight off the cuff ideas most of them don't work. And given the lack of logic and structure, and the episodic `nano-stories', it can never build up into much. Story, character, scene, action, atmosphere...all the elements involved in focusing the power of anime exist only in their most shallow and primitive forms. It tries to do cute (basically hamstrung by the animation) and funny and largely fails at both. Criticising this anime is itself an exercise in futility, there simply isn't anything there to get too excited or critical off. This is simply mindless eye-candy, not unpleasant in itself, but more as a complete waste of time for both the producer and the viewer.
The animation delivers another blow. This is crude, crude stuff. It looks, once again, like a student project. The evidence of computer generation is everywhere and unpleasant. Detail is low, with the normal level of representation being below the level of Super-deformed and more into the realm of symbolic or even childish. For example people are simply a sausage shape with a primitive face on them. The main characters are more detailed, but still very sketchy and deformed...and lacking in cute. Action is likewise primitive. Backgrounds are almost non-existent. The characters and voices are so undeveloped that `cute' sentence ends are applied for each major character. The animation fits the level and sophistication of the stories being told, but that isn't intended to be a compliment.
The Usenet poster Shoichi Takeuchi has some more interesting information. He says, "IIRC, `Di Gi Charat' was originally created as a mascot character of Japanese game shop `GAMERS' (is it GAMERZ ? I'm not sure ...). She had (or still has ?) a manga series on a game (?) magazine, and then came out on trading cards. since the trading cards succeeded much, she made her debut on tv anime series (5min each, 16 episodes). It's a pretty good nonsense anime series."
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:17 WST 2009