stats
# episodes: 22, oct 2007 – mar 2008
anidb rating: 8.64 (333 votes)
my rating: 9.50
thoughts
another fabulous production by kyoani – have never been disappointed with their works, actually! lest i start sounding like a fanboy, let me justify why i felt clannad was really really good.
it’s hilarious! i always look forward to the scenes featuring sunohara youhei and sakagami tomoyo. in the earlier episodes, sunohara vainly tries to challenge tomoyo-chan’s physical supremacy with supreme comedic effect. that got me very into clannad in the first few eps, and after they stopped fighting in the later eps, i tickles me that sunohara still cowers in tomoyo’s presence.
the furukawa household is another big source of comedy, especially from nagisa’s father, akio. his trading of jabs with okazaki tomoya, loud declarations of affection for his wife sanae and his doting of nagisa makes him an interesting character indeed. his serious side was revealed more towards the end of the show, adding to the depth of his character!
tomoya’s pranks while fuko’s in her dream-like state never fails to make me laugh too!
it mastered the art of inducing tears from the audience. i hate to admit this, but there were two occassions where i couldn’t stem the flow of my tears – the first one was when fuko’s final disappearance at her sister’s wedding, and the second was when akio was berating nagisa that she shouldn’t feel guilty of destroying her parents dreams when she was on stage. kyoani’s really good at making tear-jerking anime – air, kanon and clannad were all able to make me cry! my theory is that it boils down to making the audience feel a deep sense of loss when an important character dies/disappears. develop the character enough, don’t hide the fact that she’s going to die/disappear, and then show the reactions of the people around them when they eventually go away. for instance, in clannad, people started to forget about fuko when her condition deteriorated, and the main characters were shown to be in tears when fuko disappeared on the day of her sister’s wedding; in kanon, makoto started to forget things after her bouts of fever, and yuichi was shown to be crying when she was finally gone.
the only grouse i have about fuko is that she makes very random cameos after she has supposedly disappeared from everyone’s memories! man, i wish kyoani made her disappearance permanent – not that i hate her or anything, but i actually felt cheated that i cried over the thought that she died/lapsed into a serious condition in her hospital bed! maybe her random cameos were to show that her condition was improving – in computer graphics terms, the transparency of her sprite is proportional to her health =P
great art! i have always liked key/visual art’s character designs (not that i play their games), and kyoani’s animation of their stuff is just icing on the cake. i’m not too picky about art, but i like it when the background drawings are excellent. two thumbs up to clannad’s animation!
last but not least, extreme kawaii-ness! the dango song was strangely hypnotizing for me. when i first heard it at the end of the first episode i went – wtf? because it hadn’t been revealed that nagisa digs animated moeblobs. needless to say, the song rapidly found its way onto my playlist.
aww, i feel your pain.. the fujibayashi sisters, while somewhat doomed to side character hell, were awfully cute in some scenes. the one that immediately springs to my mind is the scene where kyou gets locked in with tomoya in the gym equipment storage room. heh.
i guess the only drawback to this anime is the lack of a strong story. it’s too segmented – it’s as if the different arcs are fully standalone. the fuko arc can be removed without damaging the storyline too much, and the same goes for kotomi’s arc as well. that’s why i was reluctant to rate the anime 10/10.
looking forward to the next kyoani release! (suzumiya haruhi season 2, presumably =P)
ps ok, no biological fact-of-the-day this time round, just some random scientific musings – are kotomi’s parents involved in string theory research? the way they try to explain their research to the young kotomi makes it seem so.. pity the plane crash prevented us from realising 22nd century physics a century earlier, heh.
