Anime: Bai Yao Pu Di Yi Ce

I'm a sci-fi guy. What am I doing here? Ah, right. Reviewing a show that's totally worth your time. Basicly you have another one of those spirit stories again. What struck me is the classic way it presents itself. In modern shows things are very well researched and leave no room for breathing to the viewer. Bai Yao Pu offers a little going off-track and silliness to let sink thinks in and give the world a human touch. While ghost and spirit stories aren't particularly new, the point of view from a chinesse mythology gave things a whole different feeling. It goes in a story arch style and 2 episodes normally make one arch. You can easily compare it to Mushishi, but personally I like Bai Yao Pu better because of the characters. Ginko simply was too inhumanly calm and rational all the time. No flaws to be found there. Tao Yao on the other hand likes to gamble, is a glutton and so on.

Unlike most chinesse productions the voices aren't a mess, which was technically the first thing i checked before i even considered watching it. In general voices match the characters and no 16 year old school boy sounds like a emotionless office worker in his fourties (Yea, china really produced stuff like that). Also the music really underlines what happens. Honestly I don't they had a lot of money for this because you still hear stuff for season 1 in season 3. That isn't a bad thing. I like how much basicly everything suits the ancient china theme even if it got some mordern elements in the later seasons.

Another point that was really striking to me is the character design. The whole different style unlike any Japanesse Anime is one thing, but here it really feels like some sort of uniqueness for every relevant character. And doing so with no pink hair and no spiky hairstyles is challenging. Especially when you consider then they followed the guidelines of ancient china. By that i mean that technically everyone back then had more or less the same hairstyle or was at least aiming for it. Also the hair colors are black, brown and grey. Still they give me the impression that every character is different than the other. It might be a little bit of an illusion to the arch like story progression, but I'm not going to research every character from this show.

In the end I like to say Enjoyment comes from Emotion because Enjoyment is an Emotion. And Bai Yoa Pu has lots of it. So if you're not too cool for manly tears this is definitly a show you want to watch.