Hello everyone,
Here we are to talk about another series of this very packed summer season named Dantalian no Shoka based on an original and rather successfull light novel series by Gakuto Minumo. (By the way this is our 300th post! A small, but nice achievement!)
This series sports GAINAX as animation producer that is clear when you watch the blending between real life shots and animated parts that really make this series stand out from the others of this season. (I just hope they won't pull another Melody of Oblivion though...)
Let's start with a synopsis :
Hugh Anthony Disward inherits an old mansion and a personal library from his grandfather. In the basement of the mansion, he meets a mysterious girl—Dalian. She is a Dantalian and a gateway to "Dantalian's bookshelf", which stores the prohibited books of the demons.
Till here its not very different from many series that we see everyday (Gosick included), the real difference in this series is that finally our main character is not your incompetent Kujou, but a rather knowledgeble and powerful guy that is able to kill a magical lion with a gun without many problems.
The first episode of this series is focused on showing us our main cast of two characters and forging their relationship that will likely be the main focus of this series together with Dalian's past/future. While this may be alloted as a detective anime as well, I'm not very sure about the direction it will take as it looks to me more like an action series with detective elements rather than the contrary.
This series will likely have an episodic approach featuring the boss-of-the-week (in the form of a book), but I'm expecting some rather weak link to merge them together in a grand finale that will likely explore more of Dalian's situation. (Or maybe show some other girl like her as an antagonist...)
Great care is given in the voice-over in this series and we see two of the most talented and popular seiyuu working on this project that is Daisuke Ono in Huey's role and Miyuki Sawashiro (Mint from Galaxy Angel and Shinku from Rozen Maiden) in Dalian's role. I'm really loving both voice, but I'm reserving my final judgement as it looks we'll have more central characters introduced to us soon enough.
This series while the last to be aired it is surely one of the most interesting of the bunch that with a combination of decent action, a bit of mistery and great characters can surely become an hit of this season.
I'll be following this series till the end and probably blog again about this in the future.
See you soon,
feal87