For Your Viewing Pleasure Part 2

Hellow and welcome to Don't Look Back... Again. Today we continue the countdown of my choices of anime series I think would be good for beginners. So without further ado..

#4: Fruits Basket



This series is one of the most sweet, dramatic, funny and weird series I have ever seen. The story follows a girl, Tohru Honda, who has lost her mother and lives in a tent in the woods. She stumbles apon the Soma house hold where she meets Shagure Soma and a classmate; Yuki Soma. They find out that she has been living in their woods and offer to help her out by offering her a room. This may sound like a linear kind of plot, but obviously there is a twist; the Soma family is cursed and whenever someone of the opposite sex (not of their blood) touches them they transform into the animals of the Chinese Zodiac. Hilarity ensues.

This series is easy for me to recommend as it has something for everyone. And when there are serious pieces there is usually something funny happening elsewhere in the episode to keep it well balanced. The characters are very well likable and it's hard to almost not feel bad for them when they speak of their pasts.

This series itself started as a manga and then adapted into this 26 episode anime. Like a lot of series that have done this, the anime and manga do differ. The main example of this is that the curse doesn't get fully explained in the show, which is kinda bad, but on the same hand understandable; there may not have been enough time in the length of episodes they had to do that part of the story justice. In my opinion though I would have at least liked to have seen them try; since it is the bigger part of the storyline's plot. Also aside from the dramatic parts, the anime is quite light hearted, where as I have been told the manga is considerably darker to the point of making it fit into a horror genre.



This is one of the only times I can say I wasn't too fond of the opening to a series. It never actually grasped my attention as "all right! the show is gonna start". Instead it actually started to put me to sleep as it sounds like a lullaby. With that said though this is one of the only anime that I have seen to have translated the Japanese song into English (Magic Knight Rayearth and Rouroni Kenshin being the other 2). It's a nice change of pace and I kinda wish more anime did this.

Dub or Sub? This one, for me was dub all the way. The Japanese voices were good, but I found the English voices to fit the characters a little more; especially for Yuki. I always have to admire the voice actors over here when they are cast when the original actor in Japan was a woman. (yes that is quite common over there to have a female voice actor portray a male character). And it was his voice that really fit.

So there is my number four, I hope you check it out for yourselves. See you all next time. ^^/