The long-awaited AIR TV-series is finally out on DVD. It's animated by the same studio that animated "Munto," namely Kyouto Animation. I've never liked their character animation process all that much since Munto came out really lifeless, but they did improve a lot since then. AIR does _not_ have low frame rate issues, not that I care that much about frame rates. Still, since AIR has a lot of frames without any drop in individual frame quality, it is very pleasing to watch.
The commentary confirms that a lot of effort went into animating this, so the animation quality is not an issue, but I have a different problem to complain about. Object handling is sloppy! Image 4 shows Misuzu's school bag fairly close behind her. Image 5, which comes right at the same time does not have the bag. One can argue that she already moved forward, but if that were the case, then I would complain that the scenes did not flow well together. And this isn't the only example. In the scene where Yukito gets a cake from a stranger after performing his trick, the doll disappears! It was there in the wide-angle shot, but when the man is putting his cake down, there is no doll! This isn't an animation problem. This is a storyboard problem. Sloppy, I tell you!
By the way, I have never played the game, but someone from Korea sent me a translated (Korean) script of the game story, so I read some of it before. Since I had no visuals and the translation didn't read very well (it wasn't flowing well like a novel), I may have gotten the wrong impression, but being somewhat familiar with the premise seems to be helping. I can imagine myself being lost, kind of like when I'm watching "Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu," if I didn't have that exposure to the game story, so thank you to the person who sent me the scripts. I have the email address still, but I'm not sure if it's okay to put it up, so I'm going to be conservative and not mention it.
When I was reading the translated script, I had a TOTALLY different image of Haruko. This one reminds me of Kero-chan from Card Captor Sakura. Well, just replace the sweets with alcohol.
Background drawings tend to be very good and even the characters blend in better. It must be the extra effort thing since the process is probably the same for this show and {Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu.}
Evening shade. There're LOTS of shades for this show. Listen to the commentary.
