Lucky Star

Being not able to watch a complete anime series for a long time, my officemate let me copy his sister's copy of a series called 'Lucky Star'. Not knowing anything about the series, I decided to give it a try.

The series is about a group of young girls from Saitama showing events from their everyday life as they go through highschool. Along with special occurances in their school life, are ordinary and mundane scenarios that are a bit perked up with one-liners or situational punch lines. There are also some situations whose logic is questioned through the naive point of view of an innocent, truthful child.

At the end of each episode is a short skit called 'Lucky Channel', which is made to appear like a talk show starring the idol Akira and her assistant Minoru. Although Akira is a typical Moe idol, she acts all sarcastic and mean around Minoru.

The primary characters almost represent the most common moe stereotypes with a few sprinkles of surprises up their sleeves. There's the athletic Konata Izumi, who is ,in every sense, an otaku mainly because of her father's influence. Then there's the polar opposite paternal twins Kagami and Tsukasa Hiiragi. Kagami is responsible, smart, straight-forward and a realist while her sister, Tsukasa, is mostly like an airhead, emotional and easily drawn in to Konata's antics. Then there's the well endowed Miyuki Takara which is like a walking depository of trivia and knowledge who is also very mild-mannered, kind and polite.

The first few episodes were very uninteresting...it was very painful to watch, I basically watch them to help me fall to sleep. Then I found out that this anime is primarily based on a comic strip. I thought," So that's why there's no plot or story development...its essentially a four panel comic strip being extended to a 30-min anime". And using one voice actor for all the other extras, male or female, is so annoying...there's no variety, mostly ending up sounding like a tranny trying to sound like a girl or a boy.

But a redeeming factor is the opening theme "Motteke, Seira- Fuku", sung by the voice actors from the series. It became an instant favorite of mine the moment I started watching episode 1 because of its upbeat tempo and funky basslines. There is no ending theme, it usually ends with the girls in a karaoke room singing different songs and anime themes.

The series picks up around the 5th or 6th episode showing more character and story development, with more fast paced comedy which is more entertaining than the previous ones. Theres also a lot of reference to other anime series, showing over the edge voice overs and action. I really loved episode 6 where they parodied Initial D. And later episodes shows live action songs by the voice actors at the end, mostly by Minoru Shiraishi, which are very funny and leaves you wanting for more.

Cute character designs, funny subplots and running gags will make this anime series worth watching...at a leisurely pace.