Kurenai - Episode 1

Shintaro Kurenai is an 'expert' (or rather, a wannabe expert at the tender age of sixteen) in 'conflict resolution', working for a woman called Juusawa Benika. Upon asking for some bigger jobs to get his teeth into, he finds itself left with rather a handful, in the form of a child who has been secreted away from her rich family for reasons that are made clear enough early on in this opening episode.

While this pairing of poor teenage boy and rich young girl is obviously going to be the major focus of Kurenai, there's still plenty of other potentially interesting plot points for the show to get its teeth into, perhaps most importantly Shintaro's body, which appears to have been 'modified' in some as yet unknown fashion which doubtless will come to light as the series progresses. There are also plenty of other characters that might well keep things intriguing, but only time will tell.

Thus far, I've found myself really rather engaged by the opening episode of Kurenai - Shintaro himself is a likeable character who clearly has some pretty 'heavy' history yet to be revealed, and the early relationship between him and Kuhouin Murasaki is warming up nicely, without mentioning any of the show's other minor characters or Shintaro's 'special powers'. The fast pacing of this first episode worked rather well, and there's plenty of room for this to turn into a great series, with some pretty good animation to boot, so hopefully it can built on this early promise moving forward.