A little review for those who have not picked this one up yet.
It’s huge fun.
Longer review: It’s about half way through a 24 ep run. The story centers around a fine arts college, so a tolerance, at the least, for classical music is kind of a must to enjoy this one. Fond memories of high school band or fine arts camp will likely make it a shoo-in. The style is rounder and more ink-y than ultra-shoujo releases like, say, Code Geass. The characters actually look like they might conceivably be Japanese. Most episodes feature an annoying amount of still frames while people are playing music, but every now and then we’ll get the playing animated in detail and it is glorious.
Our Hero, Chiaki (voice by Seki Tomokazu, incidentally) is fantastically talented and equally short tempered. What’s not to love? He’s a nitpicking perfectionist control freak and a merciless music critic. He wants to be a world famous conductor. As is the way of these things, Our Heroine, Nodame, is also extremely talented, but one of those wild and wooly musicians who plays by ear and totally fails to follow little technicalities like tempo, volume, etc. She also tends to utterly ignore other little things like cleaning her apartment; or herself, if she’s really caught up in the music. Despite this absorption, she has no ambition to speak of. She drives Chiaki up the wall just by breathing.
They’re falling in love. You expected that by now, right?
Nodame is adorable in an absent-minded but not air-headed way. The romantic thread is funny without being too slapstick, especially when Chiaki winds up feeding and cleaning up after Nodame, growling and snapping all the while. She’s very naive without being an idiot, and humanizes Chiaki astonishingly.
Yaoi fans are not left out, though, and should have no trouble at all slashing Chiaki with Mine, another wild-wooly type in a bleach-blond rocker sort of way. The really obvious buildup between Chiaki and Nodame will have to be ignored, but that should be a familiar maneuver. There is also an official gay male with a crush on Chiaki, but he’s a bit over the top and doesn’t get nearly the chemistry that Mine does.
There are several groups subbing this. Froth Bite is usually the fastest, but their translations are excessively idiomatic and interpretive. I recommend C1 for your permanent collection. I cannot, alas, review A-Keep’s releases, because they are such huge mkv files that my computer can’t play them, even with everything else shut down.
