Telepathy Shoujo Ran - Episode 1

Our protagonist for this new Summer season show, Ran Isozaki, is (as with most series) a relatively ordinary girl, who has just started high school and lives with her pretty run-of-the-mill family with a couple of somewhat embarrassing parents (not to mention an overarching love of pickled food).

At least, Ran thinks she's just a normal middle school girl... Until she starts to hear voices. Despite trying to shake them off as simply her imagination, things only get worse, and the whole situation takes a major turn when a new transfer student in her class (it's always the transfer students who are suspicious, Haruhi Suzumiya was right) with a newly familiar face called Midori Naha enters the scene. Meanwhile, the news of late is filled with nothing but bad news from around Ran's town - Fires, deaths, a man attacked by dogs. Of course, all of these things are completely unrelated...


Telepathy Shoujo Ran feels in many senses like exactly the kind of thing you've seen a thousand times before - A normal school girl dragged into extraordinary circumstances for some reason or another. However, despite all that I have to confess that there's some potential for the telepathy hook of this series (although it seems like the two female lead's skills extend beyond just reading minds), so while it's too early to see whether anything interesting can be done with the premise, this opening episode has interested me enough to want to see more. The animation is an odd mix of really quite basic simplicty with the odd touch of class, and indeed the characters also look very typical, meaning that there's nothing that really makes this series stand out visually. This may well prove to be a good thing if the actual storyline is up to scratch, but only time will tell. Still, Ran herself seems like a decent enough lead character, and her childhood friend Rui will either turn into an annoying cliche or someone equally likeable I would wager.

Thus, this series has made the kind of solid start you might expect without giving too much away, leaving us to wait for its second instalment to see if it can move forward positively with the groundwork it has laid before us.