Ef - a tale of memories review

Ef - a tale of memories

Story: 7.5
The story of the anime is confusing at first because it seems that two unrelated stories are told. It seemed like a puzzle at times. I watched some bits, not knowing where it would lead to or what it has to do with anything basically. But slowly more pieces of the puzzle were falling into place and I wanted to know more, I wanted to finish the puzzle.

This anime has a very original way of approaching the events that are happening throughout the series. It is mainly because of this that I found this anime very interesting to watch. One downside of the way of story telling was that when one story got intense, it switched to the other story. The story mainly takes part in present day, but sometimes there are flashbacks used to connect certain characters to each other. Mostly the story was told fluently and though I wouldn’t call this anime fast passed, it was never boring. There were a few scenes though that dragged a little, making me want to skip the whole scene. This was only on 1 or 2 occasions though.

I have to say that I found the story around Chihiro more intense and more interesting to watch then the story around her sister Kei. Chihiro’s story was more unique than Kei’s story to my opinion. Kei’s story could have been about every average teenager, which compared to Chihiro’s story felt too plain.

Animation: 7.5
What really catches the eye are the interesting scene transitions. For example black and white drawn scenes are thrown in to create a different atmosphere. They play a lot with shades to lay accents on certain events. The backgrounds are done beautifully. There are a lot of scenes outside and they used amazing colors to capture the sky and sea.

On the other hand the character designs are a bit plain. One of the male leads has this weird pluck in his hair that every real life guy would have straightened out. They aimed for the cute look in this anime and they managed to do that quite well.

Audio: 7.5
There are several opening and ending songs. I find this a really good point for a short series like this one, which makes it stand out. Most short series only have one opening and one ending song so I was pleasantly surprised about this, especially since I actually like most of the songs.

It seems to me that they were experimenting with all kind of sound effects and most of the time the sound matches the scenes well. On one or two occasions I found it very distracting from the original scene. To my opinion, that scenes were intense enough as it was without annoying high sound effects.
The voice acting was ok, but not outstanding. However the voice actors did manage to get the emotions of the characters across.

Character development: 8
The characters development is a thing that is hard to describe in this anime since it is exactly about the opposite at some points. They main question of this anime was: Will certain characters develop and how will they manage to do this? All main characters are struggling at some point and they have to overcome their fears in life to reach their goals. With some characters this development is more intense then with others but they all go through the same progress in their own way.
The good point about this anime was that even though there are 5 main characters and only twelve episodes, all characters got the attention they deserved.
To my opinion, the character development alone makes watching this anime worthwhile.

Overall: 7.5
As mentioned above this anime stands out because it dares to experiment. They do this with the animation and audio alike. This mostly gives interesting results and a fresh outlook on what otherwise might have been a plain romance story. At some points they are a bit off, but since this is only on one or two occasions, this flaw is easily forgiven.
If you are into the romance and slice of life genre I recommend adding this to your watch list.

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February 10, 2008 :: Drama, Reviews, Romance, Slice of life ::