It’s hard to complain about anything in particular in regards to any specific British element presented in the first episode of Kiniro Mosaic, where the shows prologue is set in England. By all reports, it seems that they fairly meticulously location scouted, so whilst I’d like to complain about the practicality of using a Morris Minor for transport (at least as a primary mode of transport), I guess there’s someone out there who continues to be crazy enough to do so. You also can’t really complain too much about how old-looking the furnishings of Alice’s home are given they’re basically a replication of a real-world location, though, despite indoor shoe-wearing being acceptable here (though I don’t tend to do it myself), I’d question wearing boots on the bed.

The episode did build up this weird image of Alice’s family shouting WE’RE BRITISH at the top of their lungs constantly, certainly more-so than most in this country would likely do, for me. It’s kind of a side-effect of the particular real-world location they modeled the house after, I guess – a certain amount of Fosse Farm certainly looks to have been decorated to play-up a certain image to their foreign tourists, given that seems to be one of the mainstays of their business, but it casts a certain extreme patriotism I’m not entirely sure exists anymore. It’s not my part of the country the show is set in, though, and they certainly look outside my class, so me commenting on this is probably kind of akin to asking a redneck hillbilly about the cast of Sex in the City or some such nonsense.

I’d also argue that Alice looks more Scandinavian than English, but that may just be the Brit in my holding my own nationalistic stereotypes. More likely, it’s probably just the creators realizing that using that kind of extreme blond is more or less the easiest way, beyond HUGE BOOBS, of making the character look extremely foreign – it’s a difficult task in anime given they get crazy with hair-colours as it is, and big boobs are really more of animes American stereotype than the British one. I guess the Secret Best Infinite Stratos Cecilla was blond, too.

It is pretty funny, however, that they have Shinobu marveling at Piccadilly Circus as her wonderful introduction to England – it’s faithful (though I’m not sure when the Criterion started using that particular 39 Step sign), but it’s also only a couple of minutes walk from a Japanese supermarket, a sizable Japanese department store and an otaku good store. It may be extremely English to her, but to me, it’s where I go when I’m in London and want to look at Japanese anime magazines…

I digress, though – for all the research they’ve clearly done for the show, it’s pretty surprising that they fairly constantly muck-up their rendering of the Union Jack. The red diagonals aren’t supposed to run along the center of the white ones as they appear here – there’s a very specific offset that makes it really obvious if someone has done something dumb like flying it the wrong way up. It’s a pretty common mistake, though, and hardly one what can only be leveled at KinMoza.

The OP (I presume) that they play at the end of the episode suggests that Karen’s jacket may have it wrong too, though, so it looks like this will be bugging me for episodes to come!

It was also amusing to see the somewhat Japanese-ified version of Fred, the Homepride mascot in their kitchen.