As the opening to Amagi Brilliant Park is keen to point out: this isn’t a fairytale. The series certainly has fairytale elements to it with a princess, a castle, magic and a prince, but as Philip Pullman pointed out in interviews after his reimagining of Grimm’s fairytales:
there is no backstory, no complex motives, no internal life.
And those are things that Amagi has in spades, almost to its detriment. The story of an ailing theme park and the challenges faced by Seiya Kanie in bringing it back to popularity is, at it’s core, an old underdog tale. There’s the time limit to achieving the goal - 50,000 yearly guests by the end of July - the motivation - Seiya knows the owner of the park from his childhood - and the quirky, offbeat cast. To its credit, the series tells that story remarkably well and by the end of the twelfth episode you could leave feeling like you’ve experienced a jolly old yarn. Odd then that the series is in fact thirteen episodes long…
Angel Beats! has a very ambivalent opening three episodes: at times it's dealing with infanticide and domestic abuse, the next it's parodying the first Resident Evil film and punting schoolchildren out of windows with oversized mallets. Written and designed by two notable producers from the powerhouse Key, most often associated with the sad-girls-in-snow franchises of Clannad, Air and Kanon, the first episodes are a grab-bag of different influences and storylines which don't shy away from drama but never shed the feeling that there's a twist approaching rapidly.
a touching and emotive one-shot that demonstrates the series has more than just high production values
Otonashi wakes up with no memories of his past and a girl near him brandishing a high-powered rifle. The girl, Yuri, breaks the news that he has died and is now in purgatory, swiftly followed up by trying to recruit him into their fight against the overseer of the world: Angel. Disbelieving her story, Otonashi approaches Angel, a diminutive silver haired teen, who promptly skewers him with a blade which appears from her arm for his scepticism of whether he can die or not. Waking up unharmed in the hospital, it takes some cajoling but he eventually joins the eclectically organised group and, little by little, begins to discover their reasons for fighting and the militant framework which support their rebellion. Their fight against Angel is becoming more vicious, yet Otonashi's memories show no sign of returning and with the threat of death removed, the only thing he has to fear is disappearing.
It's hard to describe Lucky Star without using words such as "meta" or "proto", or comparing it to similar all-female high-school comedies such as Azumanga Daioh or School Rumble or perhaps drifting into expletives about the circular Suzumiya Haruhi references by Kyoto Animation. The concept to take away from Lucky Star is that it is relevant to compare it to all of these things, and brutally unfair.
some of the late-to-the-party characters seem ignored compared to the tried and tested Kagami x Konata tiffs
Lucky Star shines because it manages to not so much parody but lampoon modern otaku and anime by, paradoxically, being a fan pandering anime itself. The first episode was divisive in that many wrote off the long soliloquies as boring or blatantly obvious as to their purpose, this weaned off the Haruhi refugees like a brick wall. In retrospect the meandering script changed little in delivery or tone from the last episode to the first episode, unlike the aesthetics which, while universally well animated, showed how much the animators settled in to drawing the characters. The first episode did brilliantly in laying down the foundation of the rest of the series, characters were expanded upon and new ones introduced, but the humour and pacing remained.
