Fruits Basket 9 Limited Edition

Created/Updated 2002-06-09



Animephile Rating: C (7.5)


Comments:

This series, overall, has failed to impress me. For one thing, the animation is done at far too low resolution. Cells have practically infinite resolution. As an anime art connoisseur, I can't stress enough how boring it is to see frames with no artistic lines and color boundary edges. With this kind of low-resolution cell-less animation, there's absolutely none of what makes anime so special. I know it is possible to do a lot better than this without using cells. Figure 17, for example, though not as impressive as true cell-animation, comes very close to what cell-animation can provide, at least under the limitation of a NTSC DVD (720x480) environment.

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).


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