Bakemonogatari Initial Review

The ultimate benefits sedentarians have compared to most people is that we have so much time watching animes, mangas, playing otaku, cosplay even opening your own blog. Among the more recent animes that caught my attention is Bakemonogatari. You can find the anime detail at anidb.net. As you may notice the anime title are obtained by doing a superposition of the word "Bakemono" and "Monogatari" means literally ghost story, which the anime subbers (gg/raiz) flaunts at the beginning of its OP starting from the second episode. Bakemono meaning ghost and monogatari is a transliteration meaning story or tales.

Sorry for the small picture, I was lazy to edit it. As our policy dictates, laziness is prime.

As you watch the first episode, you are greeted with one second slow-mo panty shot of the girl you saw at this image whose name is Hanekawa Tsubasa (wings wrapped in feathers??? I really couldn't figure what her name means..).

kyaa...

Afterwards, there seems to be some random action scenes going which makes very little sense until very much at the end of first episode. I will comment on it later!! The most annoying is the eye shot (shots of Aararagi eyes - our protagonist) which came up quite often, but regardless Shaft (the studio) did manage to do an excellent job at cinematography which had matured and seems to absorbed more of the styles found in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Nevertheless I still miss the ambiance of Ef tales of Memories.

Eeriee...

After those rush of images, and things start to settle, only then do the protagonist encounters the weightless girl described in anidb summary. Although, the protagonist describe it as a mistake, he's one lucky guy to catch such shoujo dropping from the sky. That shoujo is our second protagonist Senjougahara Hitagi.

stunning bijin desu...

After that scene, the story again jumps to another scene with Hanekawa and Aararagi discussing cultural festival which inevitably leads to Senjougahara topic again and we get to know her background. This will later lead to an attack by Senjougahara on Aararagi, but after some pretty words by Aararagi, he managed to convince her to follow him meet Oshin to re-obtain her weight. On their way meeting Oshin, Aararagi told Hitagi his part of the story. That story had actually been depicted much earlier in the episode... Remember that blur of images after that panty shot. That's the whole story in compressed form.

From that point on, the agenda was to remove the curse on Hitagi with Oshin help. We will get to know Hitagi much better especially her background, the solution to their crisis however are continued into the second episode. Since this is just a review, I kindly ask all sedentarians reading this to imagine the continuation for themselves. Or you can wait for the anime to come from japan to your tv next year or purchase its DVD much later on. Good luck on those efforts. For me, I prefer fanwork I can download either from bittorrent, Irc or other p2p channels that I can watch now. As of this review, 3 episodes have already been aired.