Monday, October 1, 2007

Shakugan No Shana Movie 2007: Shorter but better


There are two types of anime movies: a special event from the tv series (or OVA), or a shrunk down version of the full series. Shakugan No Shana is the latter.

Obviously, a movie is going to be shorter than a tv series, much shorter. In my opinion, some series are not fitted for shrunk movies because the plot line is way too complicated to be compressed into a reasonable time. Before I watched Shakugan no Shana Movie 2007, I would have thought that's the case for it. However, Shakugan no Shana Movie 2007 did such a good job of cutting irrelevant stuff out and keep important stuff in, I actually think the movie is better than the tv series.

Of course, to shink a 26 episode series into a 90 minutes movies, some subplots have to be cut, even some important ones. Even so, Shakugan no Shana kept most of its core plot and only very few loose ends are left open.

Shakugan no Shana Movie 2007 servers as a precursor for the up coming Shakugan no Shana II tv series which will premiere October 4th, 2007. In fact, if you have missed Shakugan no Shana season 1 and want to catch up quickly without having to go through the entire first series, the movie is quite a good choice. There will be some missing links, but I think it'll be easy to figure out early into the second series.

Score card (full score is 5):

Drama: 4.5 (Tight, very well built)
Comedy: N/A
Action: 4.5 (I like the visual apparance of the actions scenes)
Art/Animation: 5 (Beautiful color, lovable characters arts)
Sound/Music: 4 (Good, but I like the original tv series' better)
Character: 4.5 (Very good character development)
Plot: 4 (There are some unexplained stuff, but mostly minor)
Re-watch value: 3.5 (I think it's still enjoyable to watch it again once a while)

Overall (not average): 4.7

Recommendation: Definately one of my top picks of this year. If you're interested in watching the second tv series but missed the first tv series, this movie will bring you up to speed.

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