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Title Info
- seen: 1-4
- type: TV
- grade: watchable
- genre: shoujo
- made: unknown
- Review created: Sun Sep 17 23:42:40 EST 2000
- mod: none
An interesting piece this, and being unusual makes it worthy of attention, even though it may not be to the taste of many. The story follows the lives and interactions of a group of Japanese rock musicians who have dreams of finding their `sound', the ideal group to express it with and the ultimate dream of making it `big'. This is a fairly familiar story, but this is complicated by the fact that these are Japanese bishounen and they all have their own emotional quirks and complexities. Although to be honest the rest of the band can't hope to match up to the lead singer they want to complete their group. This guy is a brilliant musician, an amazing singer, attractive and egotistical enough to front the group they dream of. Unfortunately this guy seems to have an overdose of the artistic angst thing and then some.
Like I said, not a new concept. But it is fairly logical in some ways, the competitive nature of the music industry and the need to act as a group amongst the complex psychology of the members lead to a fairly intense environment. Meanwhile the `chasing the dream', and working out what that means, gives a fairly strong base to work from. Of course the pretty boy aspect is pretty pronounced and the atmosphere and dialog focuses on emotion and ambiance. This leads to a suspicion that like Weiss Kreuz the intended audience, other than aspiring rock stars, is primarily young girls. On the other hand this one has a fairly strong basis in the real world, making it a bit more believable. Although, as can be guessed, this reduces the action component to almost nothing (barring the drummers poor temper control).
The question then has to be how is the music? well, I must admit it did little for me. It's fairly straight rock music with angsty but largely meaningless lyrics, decent and sufficient but very familiar. The animation itself is largely the same, competent and sufficient, but not that impressive. The character design is interesting and strongly matched to their personalities, although perhaps a bit too effiminate for the bassist. The action animation is rare, but a thrown punch or riding a bike (didn't you guess the singer had a motorbike?) is done pretty well. The animation of the band playing is pretty repetitive and tedious, but then that's not unexpected either. The voices seemed pretty good.
At the moment none of the sites I source from have a review of this title. Thanks to Sarah from alt.anime.shoujo for confirming that the source manga ran in a shoujo manga title.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:20 WST 2009