Skadi

I have to admit to being won over by Kobato before ever seeing the first frame of film. One look at the artwork for this series and Kobato's beautiful clothing and settings and I knew this was going to be something for me. Thankfully I was also rewarded with an enjoyable and heartwarming story. While Kobato doesn’t exactly break any new ground, it’s a light hearted series that should make anyone smile, with just a touch of drama to keep it interesting. Kobato herself begins as a bit of a mystery, tasked with a mission of healing the hearts of others in orderfor her to be granted her own wish. Despite being a hopeless idiot and incurably moe, Kobato does the best she can helping others. She is guided and protected by Ioryogi, an important figure from the spirit world who appears to Kobato in the form of a stuffed animal. The reasons for her mission, her origins, and the reason for Ioryogi's appearance are explained as the story unfolds. Most of the plot is going to be fairly predictable to anyone who's seen many series like this and the early episodes are a bit formulaic. However this does change as the plot thickens over the last half of the series. I found the pacing to be good and I never felt that it lingered or stalled for too long in any place for me to get bored with it. Maybe the only exception would be the first half dozen episodes, with their similar and episodic plotlines. I was never blown away with any of it despite Kobato's overwhelming cuteness, but the ending story arc is both heartwarming and heat wrenching. But I did like the ending overall and felt it wrapped up the series nicely and tied up all the loose ends. The main reason to watch Kobato is for the titular character. She is overbearingly adorable in every way. Her character design is extremely appealing and she has possibly the best wardrobe I have yet seen in anime. Kobato could be the poster girl for moe; she’s earnest, innocent, naive, lacking any common sense, and impossibly stupid. On the surface one would probably think she lacked substance as well. While you could definitely say this early on, due to the length of the series and the time spent growing and developing her character she eventually becomes a great all around protagonist, instead of just a moe figurehead. Kobato's main foil would be her guardian Ioryogi. A quick tempered spirit stuck in the form of a stuffed animal, he is constantly berating Kobato for her stupidity and chastising her for not staying on task. However despite his gruff nature it’s obvious that he really loves and cares about her too. The relationship between them is the source of a lot of the shows humor, and I found the pair to be quite a delight to watch. The other most important character to the story would be the introverted and standoffish Fugimoto. I am not really a big fan of Fugimoto's type and always feel this is an overused cliché, particularly in shoujo and romance anime. I don’t think I will ever understand why girls find this kind of guy to be appealing. Why would you want to break down the guys emotional barriers and deal with all his baggage when there are plenty of other guys who are actually nice to you? Someday I hope to understand this mindset. The rest of the supporting cast is handled well and for the most part quite interesting. Sayaka is the most important, as the head of the preschool that Fugimoto and Kobato work. The great majority of the story takes place at the school and revolves around their efforts to save it from villainous loan sharks. Sayaka is given some back story and development but most of the remaining cast remains mostly static. They push the story in the right direction when needed and then fade from view. This is a good thing since it allows the show to focus on those who deserve the screen time. I am not particularly a huge fan of CLAMP artwork and designs. While their drawings are undoubtedly brilliant and beautiful (particularly when drawing children), I never liked the skinny and malnourished looking characters. However, I was pleasantly surprised that this wasn’t the case in Kobato and the production studio opted for a more normal look. While everyone is still a bit too thin, they don’t look like they are starving to death. What really won me over and why I think this is perhaps the most visually appealing work yet was Kobato and her beautiful clothing. Also, being a CLAMP product you can expect are to see plenty of references and cameos by familiar characters from their other works. It is nice that at least for the important ones, they don’t seem to reuse the same old models with different names. This may or may not be a bonus to some fans, but for me it was refreshing. The series music, the OP theme and the in between songs are cute and very fitting of the series nature. In addition the acting is solid all around. Kobato's seiyuu is suitably adorable sounding and brings out her personality. Though it does become a bit grating and overly cute at times, it is a minor annoyance and it probably wouldn’t work as well with a more mature sounding voice. Overall I found Kobato to be a rewarding and wonderful viewing experience. If you like cute and adorable things, CLAMP, light hearted and touching stories with a hint of romance; then Kobato should be high on your list. If you really dislike moe or need action to be entertained than this is something you should stay away from. While it may not go down as an all-time classic, Kobato will leave you with a smile.

5camp

Some­where around about epis­ode 12 it hit me. No, not that the show had sud­denly become watch­able, that wasn’t to hap­pen for sev­eral more epis­odes. No, what hit me was a per­fect way to express what it was I didn’t like about this show. I had some vague review thoughts in my head (sub­con­sciously review­ing the show as you watch it; the curse of being a critic) but most of them revolved around bitch­ing about how stu­pid Kobato her­self was and how the show relied on cute­ness as its main appeal, some­thing I’ve just never really liked. But then it hit me. I read ona blog somewhere that the way the person got through a series they didn’t like was because they spent their time also play­ing Poke­mon. So I finally got around to play­ing Poke­mon Plat­inum after the first few episodes of Kobato (why yes, I am a game behind every­one else) because I real­ised I would prob­ably smash my laptop if I had to sit through another ‘Kobato Gan­bar­rebleargh~’ without some­thing else to occupy my mind. Now nor­mally this shouldn’t work unless I was watch­ing the dub. Mul­ti­task­ing while watch­ing subs is next to impossible. How­ever it did work because I actu­ally under­stood pretty much everything that was being said. Let me explain. I have never once made an attempt at learn­ing Japan­ese. I know about as much as any wee­aboo who watches subbed anime would know. Watch­ing Kobato wasn’t a sud­den grand real­isa­tion that I was now flu­ent in Japan­ese. It was the sim­pli­city of the lan­guage the char­ac­ters used. They all had just a few stock lines they would throw out in most situ­ations which meant that after watch­ing a few epis­odes pay­ing atten­tion to the subs you knew pretty much everything that they could say. This effects the anime in far more ways than you might real­ise. Of course you get the pain­fully dull and repet­it­ive dia­logue. Of course there’s the way every scene and every epis­ode feels the exact bloody same with no inspir­a­tion, ingenu­ity or ima­gin­a­tion, bar Kobato’s ward­robe. But along­side that you also have the actual ten­sion in the series solved using the same unin­spired meth­ods in every epis­ode. Kobato throws out a few stock phrases, Ioryogi mut­ters some­thing in the back­ground and all is right with the world once again. It lim­its the dir­ec­tion any epis­ode can take. But yes, it does get bet­ter. It may take until around epis­ode 17 before I actu­ally went through an epis­ode without hav­ing beaten 3–4 poke­mon train­ers while it was play­ing, but it cer­tainly did improve. Vastly improved. By epis­ode 20 I had shut that Game Boy for good and was actu­ally watch­ing this show for real. The show took a much more dra­matic and mel­an­cholic tone that suited the style of storytelling far more. After watch­ing the pre­vi­ous 16 epis­odes of failed com­edy (bar Ioryogi dodging cork bul­lets at the fest­ival. That was quite funny) and bland stor­ies that were sup­posed to be heart­warm­ing, the effect this change to a plot-driven story had on the over­all qual­ity of the show was phe­nom­enal. Let me talk about the MAL stats for a second on this series. There’s a very high per­cent­age drop rate to com­pleted rate, around 20% of the people who watched it, dropped it. And yet the anime is rated 8.07 at the time of writing, a very respect­able score indeed. MAL doesn’t count the scores once you’ve seen bey­ond a cer­tain num­ber of epis­odes so those who actu­ally sat through the entire thing were clearly rewar­ded for their efforts. It also shows the usual reac­tion of people to rate some­thing highly because the later epis­odes were bet­ter, much like After Story. It’s some­thing that bugs me a lot because I hate hav­ing to sit through sev­eral poor epis­odes just because ‘it gets bet­ter I swear!’. I don’t doubt it does. It’s just those earlier epis­odes are a right pain to sit through. Because Kobato is, for the most part, a poor anime. It just hap­pens to end on a very high note. Plus you can’t skip those earlier epis­odes the same way you the­or­et­ic­ally can for After Story. Without those earlier epis­odes the end­ing ones don’t work. It did turn me into a romantic sap though. Good old Clamp did it again. They made me believe that, through any­thing, love will pre­vail. No mat­ter what hap­pens to you, what you go through, what form you’re in, love will get through all that. It did the very same thing Chob­its did. It made me believe in the Power of Love. I came into this anime look­ing for some­thing to rep­lic­ate the feel­ing Chob­its gave me and, in the end, I guess it did exactly that.