Ikoku Meiro no Croisee + Kamisama Dolls – Episode 01

And now we reach another installment of blogs on the Summer 2011 anime season following my opinions on Kami-sama no Memochou and Sacred Seven. This time with Ikoku Meiro no Croisee a Drama, and Kamisama Dolls an action show.

Ikoku Meiro no Croisée

Well, looks like we have another contender for show of the season from this end, and what a wonderful show it’s shaping up to be. Ikoku Meiro no Croisée is not epic, and doesn’t involve magic or sorcery, or anything remotely fantastical. However it has a lot of heart, something that you don’t see every day. It’s a drama about a young Japanese girl named Yune who comes to Paris in the 16th century to work at a metal shop as a maid / sign girl. The story comes with her introduction into this new world that she has never been to, and with the characters she interacts with. We don’t know anything about her life in Japan yet, nor her family. All we know is that she was brought to Paris by Oscar Claudel, a retired metal worker who lives with his grandson Claude at their shop “Enseignes du Roy”. The fact that he decides to bring her back to Paris after his travels to Japan is news to Claude, the current owner of the shop, who now feels in the position that this young girl has been forced upon him without his consent and he isn’t too happy about it.

The main criticism that I have with the show thus far is the use of language. The show takes place in France, meaning that all the characters are supposed to be speaking French even though the voice actors are Japanese and are speaking Japanese. But that’s not the fact that bothers me as it’s a very normal occurrence. What bothers me is that they make a point of saying that the girl Yune can only speak Japanese and doesn’t speak much French, so sometimes we can assume that people are speaking to her sometimes in “French” and other times in “Japanese” even though we, the viewers, only hear the one language and it’s hard to distinguish between the two.

I am curious however to know where this show actually plans to go. Because it’s a drama, it’s hard to tell. There’s no big bad to defeat like an action show. No puzzles to solve each week like in a mystery show. Just a brief look into the lives of these people, and the world around them. Which I think is equally as interesting. Here’s hoping it turns out all right!

Kamisama Dolls

Now here is another show that doesn’t like to explain itself that much, and probably won’t until later on with hopes that we’ll blindly follow along. The show starts off in the past (from what I can tell) as three kids run away from this big evil monster things with a giant laser that comes out of its mouth. There are a lot of flames and explosions and you can’t really make out what’s going on, most likely because it’s an incident that’ll be left unexplained until later, though by the end of the first episode you can pick out some things.

After the opening (which wasn’t bad actually), we get a flash forward to a party where our main character Kyouhei Kuga gets drunk and passes out while at the same time trying to ask out a girl he likes named Hibino Shiba. Luckily for him, after he passes out Hibino looks after him until he regains his consciousness. Unluckily for him, right after he does wake up, the two of them find a dead body in an elevator. And to add some salt in the wound, Kyouhei believes that the dead person comes from his village, the place he was quite glad to leave when he moved to Tokyo.

We find out later that his village has a secret. Apparently some members of the village can summon and control machine / beings / something (not really explained yet) called Kamisama Dolls. So far these dolls seem to have only one purpose, which is to fight other dolls, since the only thing that can match them in strength is in fact another doll (as is the case when an old friend of Kyouhei’s escapes from his apparent prison in their village to find and kill him). Luckily his sister Utao (who also controls a Kamisama Doll, though not very well) also arrives to give aid, for what it’s worth, by making her brother’s apartment explode. Fun times.

So the attacker gets tied up and sent back to the village and Utao gets to stay under Kyouhei’s care for a while for “training”. It should be mentioned that I do not believe that Kyouhei can control a Kamisama Doll himself, or if he could, no longer has the ability after leaving his village, as even in the face of death he never summons one. Anyways they end up staying at Hibino’s house (convenient) because her father apparently was born and raised in their village, so he offers them a place to stay, and after some introductions the episode ends.

I haven’t seen enough to pass judgment just yet, though I can see this going downhill very quickly if they don’t start explaining some things. For one thing, having an antagonist show up who apparently has a history is very distracting if we don’t know anything about said relationship. Here’s hoping it’ll be good, but until then I’ll just sit here patiently waiting for another episode of Ikoku Meiro no Croisée.