Screenshots aren’t going to sell you on the latest Yozakura Quartet anime: Hana no Uta (Song of Flowers). The borderline lazy and haphazard line work and wildly varying character styles between episodes will be enough to turn anyone with a jaded artistic eye away. If you actually watch it though, well the animation still errs on the side of janky, but aesthetic issues tend to ebb away when it becomes clear how refreshingly playful the thirteen episode series is.
a teenage ogre at odds with her power? Hey wait is that a witch in a pink mini-skirt?
This starts with a cast that is comprised of nothing less than a cat-eared telepath, a pair of terrifyingly strong ogre siblings, a half-demon who can summon objects with just a word and a nurse descended from Dr Frankenstein. Eclectic to say the least and the kind of barely restrained bedlam that constitutes interplay within the core group can range from dancing to a Wii fitness game during a town meeting to mock battles overseen by a lackadaisical town spirit.
The proliferation of maid shows is a peculiar phenomenon that seems to have sprung up in anime in the past few years. The watershed perhaps being Mahoromatic in 2001 (itself adapted from a 1998 manga) and then picking up speed with He Is My Master in 2005 and exploding recently with a bevy of series such as Hand Maid May, Mai-Otome and Ladies vs. Butlers as well as ancillary shows such as Hayate the Combat Butler and Black Butler. The premise invites branching out into the aristocratic area with series like Princess Lover as well as the host-club dynamic with Ouran Highschool Host Club and this season's Kaichou wa Maid-sama!. The fascination with maids always bugged me, especially the recent maid café situation; coincidentally, reading up on the hikkikomori syndrome lead to a theory.
I have purposely refrained from comments on the ongoing anime blog tournament as I wanted anyone visiting my site for the first time to get a feel for exactly what this site is about rather than intimating that some sort of introduction was necessary beyond the about page. In short, I didn't want the first post new visitors saw to be about the tournament. I've also kept away from discussing the tournament on the hub itself, but that is for more complex reasons.
