Sunday 12 September 2010

Tamayura - Episode 1

I really should stop just picking up shows to watch and 'blog about on a whim, but here's another one - mind you, it's easy to make an excuse for watching a new anime when it's just a four-part OVA with a fifteen minute running time per episode, and even more so when said OVA is directed by Junichi Sato of Aria fame.

Given that previous work, it's no surprise to learn that Tamayura is a gentle slice of life affair, which I'm absolutely not going to call "K-ON with photography" because it really isn't anything much like that at all. The OVA's protagonist is Fu Sawatari, a rather oddball girl with a passion for photography, to the point where she's even going around framing shots while her camera is away being repaired. Speaking of which, said camera is an old 35mm piece without even so much as auto focus capabilities, a quaint far cry from your modern digital camera.


After the death of her father, Fu's family have moved to the quiet, sleepy town of his childhood, where her only friend is a girl named Kaoru Hanawa. I should probably mention at this juncture that all of the characters in this show are oddballs - Kaoru has a thing for how places and people smell, while a girl who they bump into and befriend later in the episode speaks almost exclusively in whistles, like some kind of moe Clanger. No, really she does.

Being a "healing" anime as it is, there isn't really a lot else to say beyond this - the show is deliberately set out as a light and fluffy affair free of drama or anything that would threaten to raise the pulse, even more so than Aria I would argue. The biggest problem with Tamayura so far is that it's almost trying too hard to make its characters strange outsiders in normal society - this does set it aside from other slice of life shows, but having a girl talking in whistles is already grating on me after only a few minutes of screen time. When something starts to grate in a series designed to chill you out and make you feel better about life, that can only be a bad thing, although I suppose at least the other girls strange personalities are a little more within the realms of plausibility. Overall though, this opening for the series is as forgettable as it is inoffensive.

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