Customer Reviews

Kamichu Box Set

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Saw this last year on Youtube. Animation is very well done,
especially the accurate landscape shots. This a a very cute
slice of life anime with inventive fantasy elements woven in. Yurie's school life is complicated by her two girlfriends attempts to benefit from her new godly status, and Yurie's tentative romantic pursuit of a clueless male
classmate whose first love is calligraphy. A very sweet and
original anime, highly recommended for those tired of mechas, swordfights, and ecchi stuff.

Herb the Librarian

Due to its complexity, Blassreiter is not an easy series to watch. You have to be very sharply focused on the unfolding drama in order to understand the story. Good guys become bad guys, and bad guys become good guys very quickly during the course of the episodes and the explanations are subtle for these changes. The line between good and evil become blurred, but if you stay focused and follow the story carefully it's very entertaining and fascinating conceptually. This series contains one of the best combinations of computer generated animation and sophisticated hand-drawn animation that I've seen in quite a while. The basic concept is that attacks by dangerous powerful beings known as Amalgams are causing destruction and death as they invade cities and towns. Amalgams are genetically enhanced human beings who have been forced into an advanced evolutionary stage by artificial means. Normally, Amalgam is a word that defines a mixture of metal alloys tempered with mercury in such a way as to make it liquid or solid according to external temperature. This is fitting, since in the series Amalgams can change between their advanced form, and thier normal human form when the situations become hot or cold..., so to speak. Eventually it becomes clear that there are different types of Amalgams. There are good and bad, those who want to reshape the world according to their own rules, and those who want to save and preserve the world to follow its own destiny. As the series progresses the complexity of the characters develops and the series grows dramatically. I recommend this series, but you do have to be attentive to the rapidly changing plot or you may find yourself confused quickly. The disks performed perfectly, the color , the sound, the video quality was all excellent.

- Mike Silverman

I bought my first Pioneer (Geneon) product back when Pioneer laser discs were nearly the only way to find anime translated into English. Tenchi Muyo was the anime that had me hooked. I was saddened but not surprised when Geneon left the US market, because none of its later offerings, including later Tenchi series, were as good a Pioneer's first offering. I was very pleased to discover Kamichu as one of Geneon's final offerings, and this turned out to be the best anime series the company ever offered. No fights. No giant robots. No sex. No gore. No whacky space aliens. Just three Japanese junior high girls who try to cope when one of them announces that she, inexplicably, has become a god in the Shinto sense. This is a very sweet story, so sweet it may induce cavities or a diabetic coma. The animation is among the best cell animation I have ever seen, with no shortcuts taken, and no mismatching computer animation jammed in here and there. The voice acting, on both the Japanese and English tracks are among the best i have ever heard, and is age appropriate to the characters. If you want family-friendly anime, or a anime series to introduce your lady friend to your anime hobby, this may be the series for you. If all of Pioneer - Geneon's offerings had been the quality of Kamichu, the company might not have found it necessary to leave the U.S. Market. Short, Sweet, and among the very best!

Let me firstly say that this anime for what it was, was quite good. I especially liked how midway through, large changes were made. First of all I'd classify this kind of anime somewhat in the Guyver/Witchblade category. There is a fair amount of gore. Lots of fast action for one and characters I grew quite attached to, which doesn't happen often for me since animes like Gantz for example really slap you in the face with mass character killing. Not to mention the blend of CG and standard anime style was very adjustable. The story came right to point, there are monsters that kill people and a task force is used to stop them. It gets a bit complicated with monsters coming from infected dead bodies and later infecting the living as well. These monsters go on killing sprees to infect or destroy people, they can also meld their bodies to other devices such as cars and such to repair themselves. The interesting part occurs when the task force finds that one or two of these monsters are killing their own kind. I wont go too much in detail since that would ruin too much and be very boring to boot. Trust me on this though, each character involved in this anime gets their shining moment, be it sad or happy it's up to you to find out. I have to say it started getting really good when this mid point of the story occurred, and the playing field became a much bigger ball game you might say. Over all I feel this anime deserves a solid 5 because, it took the time given to bring up some very wonderful characters and provide a very sad but interesting story that doesn't just punch you in the face outright.

If you are a fan of Miyazaki's work you will love this anime. I found it hard to believe it wasn't a work of Miyazaki. It is beautifuly animated, with charming characters and music.

Though it feels like a ton of filler stories of the life of a middle-school god, Kamichu is really a bunch of insights into the life of a wonderfully socially-awkward girl. My wife and I have both enjoyed watching this show, and the odd humor that exists both in front of and behind the camera.

I am an avid NetFlixer and after I watched this once, I couldn't get it out of my head. So I bought it. Amazon gave me a great deal (way cheaper than Frys by about $40)! Now I watch it all the time!

When this was delivered, I opened it and felt as though a different world landed on my lap. The packaging was done with care; and the shipping time was more than sufficient. Overall, I would say this buyer is great and I would difinitely feel comfortable doing business with them again.

To begin with, after an expectation lowering opening episode, I thought Blassreiter had the potential to be something special. The first half was lacking in terms of main plot details (basically, it came down to an evil scientist lady handing out happy pills to the despairing), and Joseph - the supposed lead - remained secondary to other characters throughout the entire show, but these 'flaws' actually did a lot good for the show. During episodes 1-12, three subplots got covered, and caring about the characters involved so much as the events linked together to form a web of misery made it easy for me to forget there had been no explanations about the evolution from man to machine-person. And the slaughtering in episode 12 was the icing on a very tasty cake.

Sadly, right after that, it all went wrong. Horribly wrong. Joseph's history with Xargin - the main villain of the piece - got explained as follows: Joseph lived in a modern German town where the rich are allowed to abuse the poor as much as they desire. In Blassreiter's Germany, the poor are fire-bombed in a church after flooding, and scholarship students researching a method for the poor to survive using nanomachines (...) are beaten to death/probably raped simply because they come from poor backgrounds. Xargin helped the poor; Joseph was poor.

Like Blassreiter's story in general, the back-story was horribly written. Xargin went from an overly helpful nice guy to fire-wielding God-speaker within minutes (with a horse, 'cause the whole 'Horseman of the Apocalypse' thing needed illustrating), and Joseph was randomly given a bike by the evil director of the nanomachine project which, of course, WASN'T REALLY INTENDED TO HELP THE WEAK AND WAS MEANT TO TURN MAN INTO MACHINE. "Go chase after the now clearly evil Xargin, using this hi-tech bike I pulled out of my arsehole!"

Following the flashbacking, out of nowhere it was revealed that Blassreiter's Germany is run from the shadows by Zwolf: a religious organization with its own military. The dead were revived to battle anew as Zwolf's triple, Power Ranger mechas entered the fray. Joseph continued being useless all the way to end as the revived dead continued to try to settle outdated issues. The under-developed characters got a few minutes dedicated to their pasts (in one, a horse was killed because old men don't like girls caring about horses, or something.) And, finally, everything ended with a terrible end duel to the death.

You know how, in your typically horrible anime ending, spirits give a show's lead some vocal support in his head, during his moment of need? Well, in Blassreiter, since its lead sucks so much arse even at the very end, he got owned within five seconds and needed DEAD PEOPLE to enter his body to fight for him. Then, after they lost, Joseph himself resumed the good fight, somehow getting an 'OVER 9000!' power-up... and got owned AGAIN; this time after telling Xargin he had no chance against his 'OVER 9000!' self.

.....

Without wanting to ramble any further, I'll put it simply: Blassreiter got worse the further it went after the halfway point. How well the struggles of the 'subplot leads' were presented made me think of 9/10ing it. But then it became obvious that the plot hadn't been planned out, the dead kept coming back to life, and it ended fittingly poorly with a character actually saying "Let's keep fighting the good fight!", followed by the dead all reappearing... or something.

On a happier end note, the CG looked extremely attractive throughout - blending with the 2D animation superbly. I wasn't taken with it at first, truth be told, but that was more to do with me starting an anime TV series and getting non-step CG shoved down my throat from the get-go. My only complaint is how zoomed-in and frantic some of the battles were; them giving off a hand-held camera impression and making it hard to tell what was happening.

My advice is as follows: buy the first half of Blassreiter, watch it, and convince yourself it ends with episode 12. Much like with Code Geass, it's MUCH more satisfying to live in blissful ignorance; unaware the writers were actually clueless tosspots in need of shooting. Repeatedly.

I diddn't really enjoy Blassreiter much. This came as a surprise to me since I tend to gravitate to sci-fi and action titles. It does have plenty of action for the adrenaline junkies, but the story is nothing special, being a run-of-the-mill monster infestation tale with assault teams trying to fight the threat. Also, there is a massive amount of CGI animation in Blassreiter, which is a big turn-off for me. The CGI looks dumb and sticks out badly from the 2-D animation, save for a few little action scenes here and there that actually look dazzling (namely one towards the end of episode 16 which even then is ruined by some awful, totally unfitting j-pop track in the background). The Demoniac designs are good enough but don't expect anything massively intricate. The worst Demoniac design is that of Beatrice. It looks really stupid. (mecha-ish female with... a dress!?)

But that isn't the worst this series has to offer. It is also depressing as hell and over dramatized. For example, one character gets constantly tormented by a group of bullies and by the second encounter with the bullies you are BEGGING to see them die horribly. Now I think its great that they put out an ugly portrayal of bullying, but these scenes are just overdone and way too frequent. We get the point already! On top of that, episodes 13 and 14 are the most depressing things I have ever seen. They are depressing enough to put The Road to shame. yeeeeessh. If you have those episodes, show them to your doctor first, so he can prescribe you some Prozac prior to viewing. I'm not necessarily trying to be funny here. This review could save lives.

Blassreiter may be only worth watching if you don't mind an abusive amount of CGI and depression, and if action and blood mean alot more to you than the story.