Nanya’s Crazy Reviews

GHOST HUNT

For more information about this anime, please check out THIS ANN ENTRY.

Title:	#01 悪霊がいっぱい！？
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SYNOPSIS:

Adopted from a series of novels by Ono Fuyumi (The Twelve Kingdoms or Juuni Kokki), the story is exactly as the title suggests, a.k.a. GHOST HUNT. It begins with the heroine Taniyama Mai and her friends talking about ghosts in the AudioVisual Room. They talked about the old school building where a teacher committed suicide by hanging himself. Since then strange accidents happened whenever they wanted to do construction work on the old building. The principle then brought in a bunch of experts to get rid of what they believed to be ghosts or spirits that caused these strange accidents. The experts brought in include a ghost hunter and owner of the Shibuya Psychic Research (SPR) Shibuya Kazuya, the miko Matsuzaki Ayako, Takigawa Houshou, a bass musician who also gets rids of spirits, Hara Masako, a cute Japanese doll looking girl whose mouth can translate messages from the spirits. Finally, there’s John Brown who is a foreigner (obvious) and speaks Japanese with a Kansai accent but he’s really a good exorcist.

Mai got caught up with this bunch of weirdos when she accidentally hit a camera in the old building. The action caused the shelf behind her to fall. Luckily, Lin Koujo, Shibuya’s assistant who got injured. Since she could not pay for the expensive camera and Shibuya needed an assistant, Mai became his assistant. Shibuya’s a horribly narcissistic…to the extent that Mai called him Naru-chan. In the first episode, they set out to investigate the strange incident when the girl Kuroda kept insisting she has spiritual powers when the experts declare she has none. Now that the crucial players gathered in episode one, it’s up to the next episode to see what’s it’s ALL ABOUT.

The animation is by J.C. Staff and I find the quality to be very beautiful (that is considering the scale of the project). The characters are kinda generic … a cool handsome hero and a cheerful but strong headed-heroine. You also have your dose of loli and shota, and oneechan and oniichan. Since the story is still at the beginning, we’re pretty much just introduced to a bunch of characters. What impresses me I must say is the voice actress for Kuroda (Sawashiro Miyuki). Her sudden change in tone for Kuroda is really amazing! The rest of the cast is also quite good and the music is beautiful. Neither the opening and ending themes have vocals (quite rare these days) but it doesn’t matter to me because I feel it fits the mood of the anime, especially the opening. It’s better with no vocal than poor vocal sometimes. Unfortunately, neither the OP nor ED feature any character in the animation and I find that a bit… weird. If it were sometime innovative like Dramatic in Hachikuro, I wouldn’t mind but in this case… I must say the OP and ED animation do not quite match and could be better.

BOTTOMLINE:

I’d say above average and actually it’s quite interesting though the characters are very much PREDICTABLE. It’s definitely on my list to watch for this season!!