So as always, I’ve been watching a ton of anime, but this particular one has perked my interest quite a bit. Bakemonogatari, which is a play on the words ‘bakemono’ which means ‘monster’ and ‘monogatari’ which means ‘story’ is based off a bunch of light novels by Nishio Ishin. So essentially ‘Bakemonogatari’ means Monstory or Ghostory or something. Being unable to read Japanese and no english licenses for it, I don’t think I’ll get around to reading the light novels anytime soon, though I’d like to.
Back onto the anime though, if you watch it, you will immediately notice the use of a lot of vector looking art for the backgrounds and the interesting perspectives. You’ll also notice that the anime cuts to a lot of pages where all there is, is nothing but words. Bakemonogatari focuses a lot on dialogue in the interaction between characters – usually one on one as I have seen so far.
Again, the camera angles are different, but I think they’re designed so that you keep focus on listening to the characters speak. Also, the image on the screen changes a lot. This seems usually to be employed when the characters aren’t doing anything interesting except maybe having a conversation. It’s pretty unique and the fact that the style is almost always different makes it fun to watch.
Sometimes I find it hard to keep up with all the witty banter going on, but it’s very entertaining. I think I can attribute this to Nishio Ishin. There seems to be a lot of puns and word plays that happen, even when the characters are having a serious conversation. Each character also feels like they have a different style to them as well.
I’ve also noticed that there’s a lot of repetition in the environment in Bakemonogatari. It makes it feel as if the world the characters are in is sort of dull, but at the same time, the story focuses on oddities. These oddities (which mainly stem from Japanese mythology and folklore seemingly) are what pulls all of the characters together too, since the main character Koyomi Araragi is always running into them and can’t leave them alone.
Another example of a change in style. A lot of times when characters are explaining something from their past that is significant, it will constantly scroll through the art style on the screen and the way it’s produced changes as well.
And then at other times, it’s just for fun.
Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I feel like even though the background was made to be bland purposefully, the characters are what doesn’t stand out as much.
The use of color in this anime seems to be huge as well. There are very few times when an object will have more than one color (other than the characters). As you can see, the entire house is the yellow/brown, while the steel structure around it is red, and the birds are all blue. I haven’t noticed many difficult colors either – they all seem to be pretty basic.
I know I’ve been talking a lot about the art, but the animation is also pretty good as well. The story of Bakemonogatari is separated into 2-3 episode arcs. Each arc introduces a new character with a different oddity and the characters from the previous arcs seem to always play a roll in the new arc for solving the oddity. I think in this way, it makes it easy to remember individual characters. I can never seem to remember names when 10 characters are introduced at once.
The ending song for Bakemonogatari is pretty good too. It’s actually sung by Nagi, who is pretty popular on Nico video for her voice. It’s composed by Ryo from supercell who did a lot of music for Hatsune Miku (the vocaloid).
This series is definitely worth watching.
