I'm not saying that the drawings are carelessly done in Fruits
Basket. I'm just saying that the drawings are lifeless. In my
opinion, animation studios have to use at least 16 times more
resolution (4x4) of the final media when creating the master frames in
order to express the artists' drawings properly. That's 2880x1920 for
NTSC DVD. That's hardly a big task for today's computers. At
24-bits, it's less than 16MB per frame at 24-bit colors. 341GB per 30
minute segment if it were at 12 frames per second all the way through,
which it won't be. This is without any compression, either. That's
hardly an unreasonable number.
Storywise, it's obvious to me that only certain segments of the manga
were selected for animation, which is fine. The ending, however,
isn't from manga since the manga wasn't finished then. I don't think
it's finished even now. The whole "lesson" to be learned or the moral
of the story seems to be the same thing that previous works by
Daichi-sensei try to convey. It was convincing enough with "Now and
Then, Here and There," but it is not so with Fruits Basket. In the
end, if you're interested in this series, I recommend passing on the
expensive R2. And for those fools who say otherwise, this is
unmistakably a shoujo title. I believe Yuki, Kyou, and Momiji will be
popular among girls.
Limited Edition (KIBA-9662 instead of just 662) comes with 6 little partially transparent figurines of Shigure (dog), Hatori (sea horse), Ayame (snake), Kagura (pig), Hiro (ram), and Ritsu (monkey).