A review of seasons 1 and 2 of the Silver Spoon anime
For a lot of anime I have a hard time remembering what any of the characters are called once the series has wrapped up; I’m not especially bad with names, most characters just don’t make enough of an impression for me to recall their names. And really, that’s just a polite way of saying that for most characters in anime series, I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. That definitely hasn’t been the case for Silver Spoon (Gin no Saji) because apart from the horse, everyone’s names I find pleasingly easy to recall.
it joins Moyashimon in the niche “off-beat but brilliant” category of farming-based series
It’s a perfect indication of the gift that Hiromu Arakawa has for crafting characters that, regardless of their circumstances, feel like people more than just archetypes. She may have more experience with farming and agriculture given her being raised on a dairy farm in Hokkaido than alchemists and homunculi but Silver Spoon still has a sparkling sense of personality that renders it such a rare and enjoyable series. Spanning two separate seasons and only twenty two episodes and covering just two terms of Hachiken’s time at an agricultural high school, it’s startling how trepidatious I was when coming to the last episode; not because the series was building towards a climax, but because once I had finished it, the series would no longer be a regular fixture.
So I made a quiz from the episodes I've seen. Despite not having seen it, there is a Who is Imouto (Kono Naka ni Hitori Imouto ga Iru) question in there but that one pretty much wrote itself.
Eleven days, almost twelve and a half thousand words, nineteen videos, one hundred screenshots and ten anime later, the summation of a decade of anime is complete.
Describing microbes and bacteria as "cute" or "adorable" is not something one ever expects to do, but this is just one of the plethora of things Moyashimon manages to achieve without being overbearing or trite. With only a petite eleven episodes to play with, the first three are wryly amusing, frequently educational and, ironically for a show with a starring cast of fungus, remarkably fresh.
the first episode is surprisingly gruesome, featuring a seal carcass filled with deceased sea-birds
When the central characters of a show are the sons of sake and yeast producers, a mole-like professor with a perchance for sucking the bowels of fermenting sea-birds and a rocker-chick graduate student who is frequently treated as a missing persons case, the show is either going to be very weird or weirdly excellent. Moyashimon tends more towards the latter than the former and focuses on a young man, Tadayasu Sawaki, who can see, hear and interact with microscopic organisms such as bacteria and fungi. Far from the black-and-white electron microscope visions of these that we're used to, the microbes Sawaki sees are anthropomorphised versions, all bright colours and huge grins, they squeak and chatter about their business in a charmingly jaunty way.
