You know, it almost feels like cheating for me to do a Mikan Watch post for Genshiken, not least because I’ve mentioned it before. That wasn’t in a Mikan Watch post, though, so I’m doing it anyway.
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From Episode 11 of the Kyoani version of Kanon, this one is rather hard not to see given it covers pretty much the entire screen. Still, you have to be impressed with the versatility the Mikan Box displays here. It may have been mutilated, but it’s proven it’s worth as a quick and easy solution for basic school repairs. Mikan box, we salute you!

It’s little hard to make out in that image, but it’s the box on the left.

I’ve been procrastinating over watch 5cm for a little while now, but it ended up working out for the best – I had the opportunity to watch it on a 50″ screen instead of my usual 32″. It’s definitely the way to watch it – on as big and high quality a screen as possible. The animation is pretty outstanding, particularly the use of light and shadow which has pretty much become Shinkais trademark. It’s hard not to be impressed when they throw around so many of the kind of light effects that you don’t see much of in anime due to difficulty in achieving it.

That said, I wasn’t really all that enamoured with the content. Sure, I was impressed by the candid realism of the ending, but otherwise it was only really the second of the three segments which I found particularly endearing – the first segment, essentially an extended monologue, started to grate on me after a while, whilst the musical montage the third built up to did nothing for me (it probably didn’t help that I didn’t really like the song).

Ultimately, The Place Promised is the only Shinkai work that I’ve really loved thus far. I really need to get around to re-watching that…

From episode four, this is how Kazuki had assumed Tokiko had been living. I’m not quite sure why Tokiko is so annoyed – surely it’s better than living in a plain box?

Oh, well, at least they weren’t ambiguous about it here.

I don’t really have much else to say about the series. There’s nothing notably wrong with the Viz release of the show, though I guess the pretty reasonable price ($50/13 episodes RRP, obviously way cheaper online). The show itself is merely entertaining – it manages to make itself seem marginally less trashy and shallow than the manga version, but aside from that really not being a remotely difficult task, from what I gather that impression is unlikely to last.

This is from Episode 14 of Blood+. It doesn’t actually say mikan, and, on closer inspection, I’m not actually entirely sure if it’s an orange or a apple, but I’m claiming it.
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