White Album

*Zels short personal Review* 1986; the year this show was set in, and coincidentally also the year I was born in. These are my type of show, senien romances; no ecchi, no fanservice, drama packed and a slow maturing storyline. The story is about our main protagonist Toya who dates an upcoming idol star, as he has to deal with the obstacles, he has to face while dating a rising pop star; throw in a bunch of girls for distraction and that's our plot. But unlike most harems, this isn't for kids. As mentioned above, this is no panty flashing show. The storyline was prettyinteresting. I felt the relationship with our main protagonist believable. Aya Hirano was a great in voicing Yuki, and throughout the show it was interesting to see how Toya had to deal with his relationship with Yuki, as well as the other girls. Despite Toya doing things he shouldn't (wont spoil it). I never hated and felt disgusted for the guy. Sometimes I might have felt frustrated, but his feelings were pretty understandable and in a way, I could relate too, though from my point of view there wasn't a clear distinction between right and wrong in what he did. So what did I learn about the year I was born? Well, I appreciate a mobile phone, even more now. The amount of missed calls in this show is slightly frustrating, but understandable. Mobile phones in that year were bricks, and cost quite a lot. Even answering machines were expensive! Though despite the show being set in the mid 80s, it looked anything but. The show looked great, apart from a few scenes where it's obvious they cut corners. The music was great, and overall it was a pretty enjoyable show. I liked all the characters and really don't have a preference, despite all the female characters involved. One thing I do hate about this show though, is the damn Hiatus. Not sure why they they're airing the next half in autumn when they could have show all 26 episodes. No matter, it's something to look forward to. Overall a very good show.

*An underrated series with plenty of potential for its second season.* “The beginning has ended.” - White Album 1986 A year where internet does not exist. A year where cassette tapes still dominates in the media industry. A year where cell phone, the size of a brick, has just emerged in the market. A year where the story of White Album takes place. White Album often presents viewers with these muddy views of reality. There is often no clear distinction from right or wrong, good or evil. There is, however, often grief and suffering caused by various circumstances and misunderstandings. More often than not, people simply turn their head and walk awayfrom the show because people just do not get it. White Album is the type of show that likes to tell the story as indirectly as possible to the viewers. Little things that may seem trivial at first can come back to haunt the viewers, so make sure to pay 110% attention! While White Album is technically a harem anime, viewers will be disappointed if they are looking for immature ecchi scenes, for instance boobie grabbing. White Album is not ecchi and/or sexually oriented, period. However, there is one well made French kissing scene in a car. The story revolves around our protagonist whose life got turned upside down when his girlfriend became a famous national idol. He was forced to distance himself from her by the music company and that is when his nightmare begins. Girls from various age groups, some he knew from the past, others he met along the way all started to barge into his life. Some wanted him to forget his girlfriend by allowing themselves as replacement. Others want to make sure the protagonist remain faithful and loyal to his girlfriend, thus they began to have plans of their own. All the while the protagonist is trying to fight temptation, worrying about his father, completing his university degree, and keeping himself sane amidst these chaos. For a studio that is not particularly well known for high quality animation, Seven Arcs did a wonderful job in producing this series. In addition to the regular animation, often times the viewers will see characters in their caricatures (distorted or exaggerated), other times a scene may be presented with pastel-like animation. Simply put, the production crew of White Album did their job skillfully and flawlessly. The producers also have a knack in bringing out the characters’ subtle emotions: they don’t have to say anything about their feelings, their facial expressions speak for themselves, and this series has been really good at throwing these feelings all over the place. Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the show is viewers get to “read” the inner thoughts of the protagonist, rather than the traditional way of making the character goes into a long and boring monologue. These inner thoughts often reflect the ambiguity the protagonist has with his feelings and situation. With award winning seiyu performing the OP and various insert songs in between, White Album has at least one exceptional selling point it can brag about. After all, the story does heavily center on songs, thus it is only appropriate to get the most talented seiyu to do the job. Otaku should instantly recognize names such as Nana Mizuki or Aya Hirano, both have singing capabilities rivaling the top notch professionals. But perhaps due to over emphasizing on the songs, the BGM turned out to be rather lackluster (budget problem?). I had to do a quick re-watch of the series before mustering enough courage to write this review. In part due to its unclear way of portraying its characters and where they are heading. Please be mindful that season two, covering episode 14 to 26 will be airing in fall 2009, so don’t expect any form of closure to the story just yet. In fact, the ending was rather calm and did not do much to make viewers lust for season two until the final few scenes where things just seem to happen all at once around the protagonist. In a sense, this suit White Album just fine as most realistic/slice of life drama would have approached it in a similar fashion.

Cheaters never win. They just end up banging a lot of chicks. White Album is a true life story about what it means to be a guy in the real world. In fact, a lot of people will say that this anime is fake and that there is no way that, how many were there, three, no, SIX girls would want to jump the bones of Joe Average, but you know what?? It's real, kids! In fact, it helps a lot when said loser in question is a big tool. Girls like that stuff. What success that the main character of this anime is abig douchebag. So the story is about a guy (I don't remember his name, whatever, that wasn't important) who has a pretty girlfriend and just because he doesn't get to see her everyday, he decides to make use of all the other girls who are crushing on him. Instead of rubbing one out every night or just breaking up with the vapid, ignorant foolish girlfriend (who is a singer), he decides to scam on her body guard, on her co-worker, on their mutual school friends, and on a girl he is tutoring. This is probably the most realistic drama/romance storyline I've ever seen because you know what, kiddies? People love to cheat. What's even better about this story is that everyone knows that Touya (right, that's his name!) has no backbone and they KNOW he has a girlfriend, and yet they all lure him into sticky situations. Damn, poor Yuki! People who she trusted go on to stab her so hard in the back. It is so fabulous to see these girls watch Yuki in the face and feel vague amounts of guilt about it. Hardcore. And Touya, the lucky bastard, knows she is that much of a insecure loser to stick with him even if he does decide to cheat on her or not. Art is pretty good, though they kept sticking in these stupid watercolour bullshit in the middle of thing. It was pretty distracting and I don't know why they even bothered to do it. And the music was all right EXCEPT when anyone sang. Good God, no wonder Yuki and what's-her-face are mediocre celebrities--their music sucks. What brought this whole anime down was TOUYA. Oh unfabulous heavens, was he such a pitiful snivelling LOSER. I swear, he cried more than the girls did!! Instead of just growing some balls and dumping his girlfriend who he doesn't even see and just settling on one of the girls he sees all the time and clearly wants, he keeps on dating Yuki and doing awful crap to her. Hell, he took time out of his day to go give a present to a chick who secretly hates his girlfriend and doesn't take the SAME TIME to see his actual girlfriend? Can you be more of a wang, Touya?? Yuki is a moron. Leave it at that. Any other girl would know that when you catch your man giving other girls presents, when he doesn't pick up his phone, when you're calling him in the middle of night and he's not answering (most likely because he's sucking the face of one of your "friends"), then he probably isn't that into you. But no. Idiot. Then all the other girls are whores. No kidding. They disregard Yuki, they ignore the fact that weak willed Touya has a limp dick and would hump them like a dog in heat, and they come up with all sorts of schemes to break the two of them up. But what makes them interesting characters is that they pretend so well to be innocent. In fact, they disguise their cunning bitchery by second-guessing what they're doing, but the fact is they still end up ruining people's lives because each one is a selfish succubus that wants Touya. Why, who knows, because he cries like a bitch over everything. White Album has an amazingly real story about shitty people messing up each others' lives. Man, what a wonderful thing to witness.

I really feel I need to make a review of this anime. This is purely based on the first season, since I haven't watched the second season yet. I've watched and read a lot of harem anime/manga, some are good, but most are just shallow, comedy-filled, mindless ecchi fanservices anime that I can't stand watching and decided to drop. But this one is clearly different, I'd say that this is the best harem story I've ever watched/read to date. Whilte Album's story is very good, it's more deep than most harem anime. This story is very realistic for a harem anime (then again, harem itselfisn't very likely to happen in real life, but still much more realistic than most others). It's much more deep and portrays how complicated a human can be. The story is played very well, the events that happened can really affect the audience emotionally. Mostly made you grief, rage, or angry, but that's the point of this series. This was not meant to be those happy-go-lucky anime in the first place. Though this is mostly the reason why this series got less than 7 (by the time of writing), most people just hate this series because they do not understand it. Art is pretty nice, I loved the character designs. Backgrounds are well drawn. And there are times when the art changes to beautifully drawn pastel color animation. Character's thoughts are written in texts on the screen so people can see what is actually going on inside the said person's thoughts. Sound is also another plus. Nice VA, there are no annoying voice in this series. Songs are also good, most of the songs has lyrics that actually connects with the story itself. I find that these songs are also affecting me emotionally while listening (reading the karaokes' actually). I wasn't really a fan of Nana Mizuki or Hirano Aya but overall I really liked the songs here. Characters are where many people find this show to be terrible. I disagree, characters are the strong point of this series. Most characters are flawed, either they do things irrationally or some other flaws. Which is what makes many people hate this. Though I say, that makes them more "human". We see characters who do things that we wholly disagree. People bash on the characters. But really, are you sure you won't do the same when presented with the same situations? White Album is a series that really shows how complicated, weak, foolish, and irrational human beings and human relationships can be. Humans are not perfect beings who always manages to do the right thing 99% of the time. When being pressured, burdened, presented with many problems, most human will do foolish things even if they know themselves that it is wrong. And this aspect is really portrayed very well here. I really enjoyed the series, even if at times I feel angry or mad at some characters, I can't never bring myself to hate them, since I know that I myself might do the same when given the same situation. I've said that I dropped many harem anime, the main reason is because most of those are filled with stupid, mindless fanservices that really bores me to death. Fortunately, that kind of thing doesn't exist here. There is a few hot kissing scenes, but they are not mindless or played only for comedic effect, they actually contribute to the story and character developments. Overall, this is really underrated series. An deep, complicated, relatively realistic romance harem story that really brings out the human flaws in characters to the best. Though for some people, this is not their cup of tea, which is why it's rated low. Flaws are inevitable in human, that's precisely why we have the backspace key on our keyboard.

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