Animehouse

I’m just going to state this upfront: Whisper Me a Love Song is one of my favorite manga right now, and I don’t try to hide that. I show my love for my series very clearly, which you might have seen with my constant tweets and write-ups, mostly geared towards Witch and the Beast in Winter. This is another one of my favorites, and ironically, it also involves Yokohama Animation Lab- which was the bane of The Witch And The Beast anime. The direction and the art shined through, but the animation and overall consistency were what bogged the show down significantly. So I was quite nervous for Whisper Me a Love Song because I don’t even know the directors that well, which, did I mention, they changed mid-production?! So how was it?… It was surprisingly really good, in most aspects- except for maybe art direction, which is hilariously the opposite of the Witch and the Beast’s main problem.

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Movement is a great term to describe this episode. Unlike Witch, which feels more like a beautiful painting that never moves, Whisper Me a Love Song has fully embraced the anime format. Everything is so lively, not without some janky movements or a bit of off-modelness, but it feels so alive. The small hair moments when the character walks, the fun cut-ins to the chibi scenes – it’s a lot of fun, and that’s how I would describe this debut. It’s just a ton of fun. Xinya Cai, who was the original director for this show, storyboarded this whole episode, and I think she did a great job introducing the characters and even hinting at future developments. Especially, she excelled at selling their personality and the general expressive vibe that Takeshima (the manga’s author) exudes in her works. She’ll throw in random things like fun spark effects, and the chibi style also never really remains quite the same. Even if it didn’t have better animation, Sasakoi still understood more of what is expected from an anime adaptation than Witch did.

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The composition is really well done. It’s actually very heavy if you take a look at it from screenshots, and that was even my impression from the PV. But when I was watching the show, it just sort of worked? The background is odd; that’s my biggest complaint about the show. It can go from literally a white box to making the characters look like they’re in a prison school. The art direction is just a bit awkward, but somehow the compositing just blends everything together. It’s like this overwhelming force that covers everything, yet it’s a bit of a paradox in the sense that it makes everything come across as almost soft? Maybe that’s the word? It’s really impressive coming from a first-time Photography Director like Takahiro Kita. I stopped caring about the art direction after a while because of him. When you look at the characters and the backgrounds, it almost feels like they made them with his work in mind, which is not true but that’s just what it feels like.

The character designs, as you already mentioned, are gorgeous too, especially up close. Of course, it’s not as detailed as the manga, but they were really smart with how they went about simplifying it. They removed a lot of the outlines’ organic looks in the characters’ faces and other details, but they kept a lot of loose strands and lines around the hair that make the characters stand out. Minami Yoshida truly understands what makes Takeshima’s art so appealing, and she really brings the characters to life.

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That is the question, isn’t it? We do know that episode 2 is of similar quality from the early premiere assessment, but who knows after that? I myself am pretty hopeful though. The series was delayed 4 months, and that is likely to be a huge gift from its producer, Numanimation, who has been consistent in terms of the quality of production in animes that air on their broadcast. I hope that this will continue to be fun and end up being one of Yokohama/Cloud Heart’s best works. You can also just see the effort difference, or at least the staff allocation differences, just by looking at the credits. We have a bunch of talented animators like Kimiko Tamai and many more animators from Undead Unluck, Undead Murder Farce, and Call of the Night. Meanwhile The New Gate, which has the same studio combination and time slot (different broadcaster), is outsourcing most of the episodes to a Chinese studio. I’m trying not to build up false hope, as we can never be confident in an anime production nowadays. But what is there to distrust at the same time? It seems like the perfect moment for Yokohama/Cloud Hearts to produce something good again, and I think the delay in production, the seemingly higher-level staff, and the producer situation. I think it’s just a match made in heaven. I can’t wait to talk about this next week, in fact, I can’t wait to talk about it this week! Please expect my individual write-up sometime soon after this article.

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