Kannagi - Episode 1

Don't you just hate it when your just-completed art project suddenly turns into a cute girl who wants to live with you? I tell you, it's happened to me more times than I care to remember... No wonder I didn't do as well as I could have in my Art A-Level.

Anyhow, it seems I'm not the only guy to suffer from this problem - Jin, the protagonist of Kannagi, has just finished a sculpture for a district art exhibition, and a fine piece of work it is too. There's only one problem - He's made it from the remains of a sacred tree that was cut down as part of some land restructuring. Thus, said tree is inhabited by Nagi, a kind of "Mother Nature" of the local area, who morphs into a girl by inhabiting the wooden sculpture created by Jin.


Really, the rest of the episode from that moment forth is utterly, utterly predictable - Jin finds himself having to coax fish-out-of-water Nagi through everyday human tasks, while her living under the same roof already causes him all sorts of problems even in this first instalment. It's been done a million times before in anime but hey, that doesn't mean it isn't fun, right?

For all of its predictability, I really rather warmed to this opening episode of Kannagi, from it's rather cool opening sequence (think Haruhi's end credits and Lucky Star's opening, it was created by the same person) through to what is looking like a genuinely likeable pair of main characters thus far. I would wager that it's equally obvious where the rest of this series will be heading without referring to the manga upon which it is based, but if it manages to keep up the half-decent animation and mix things up enough to keep the basic premise interesting without descending too far into cliche, then it could well be on to a winner. As I will doubtless say far too many times during the opening weeks of this new anime season, only time will tell.