Would 'Shugo Chara' be in that list? I doubt. At least I didn't expect to see a 'PG - children' rating for an anime which goes beyond kabe-don scenes and scenes of 'he caught her when she was falling', introducing scenes of ear-biting, ice-cream licking, which don't really look vague at all, to say nothing of cross-dressing and a girl with a brother-complex kissing her brother in the lips.
I mean, this 'inserting a key into a lock' moment... Should it really be so obvious?
Unfortunately, 'Shugo chara' lacks originality in everything. This idea of a girl with a special ability to purify spirits, this search for a special something that has unique powers and can grant wishes, this school club that has a secret mission, and, as if these qualities were connected, a glass orangery with a small tea table.
This
is a warning to all anime directors on Earth: attempts to make short
anime out of long ongoing manga maybe more or less successful, but any
attempt to make an anime series longer than it could be if it followed
its manga source - be damned.
I've
seen it already in anime like 'Sugar Sugar Rune' or 'Kamikaze Kaitou
Jeanne'. Filling anime with fillers, forgive me this tautology, makes it
hardly watchable. 51 episodes were probably tolerable, but 51 episodes
followed by 51 episodes, which were, in their turn, followed by 25
episodes nobody really asked for, were a disaster, not only because
there were so many, but because there was hardly any story in them.
Compare with Sailor Moon, which has its own share of fillers, but
manages to present an exciting, developing (sic!) story including not one, but 5 arcs, while being 200 episodes long.
Why I didn't rate 'Shugo chara' as 1, or 'appalling', and gave it an 'average' 5, is because it was partially watchable, these watchable parts being the comic relief of moments that could otherwise overburden me with Spanish shame. Talking about saving the world is watered down by simplistic reasoning.
Discussing serious matters is interrupted by an angel adjusting her halo.
And 'dokidoki' moments are watered down by discussing the realistic aspects of 'hiza-makura'.
It never hurts to have just a little self-mockery.
In fact, 'Shugo chara' had much more potential than was used, thanks to the wonderful character design done by the original manga creators. Girls could find many various designs, not only girly frilly dresses or Japanese kimono, but also signature leg warmers, chokers and wristbands, with plaid pattern and 'Gothic' elements. As for men's fashion... I think I may have been missing slender guys in leather.
The only good thing 'Shugo chara' introduced, in contrast to borrowing from manga, was voice acting, since music was very, very secondhand. I was almost ashamed such nice seiyuus spent so much time voicing this nonsense. Here is the list: Aki Toyosaki, Saeko Chiba, Kanae Itou, Kana Asumi, Nana Mizuki, Yuuichi Nakamura, Akemi Kanda, Ayumi Fujimura, Junko Minagawa, Rie Kugimiya, Atsushi Abe, Mitsuki Saiga and many others. Akira Ishida was probably still bound by his contract of 'voicing a hundred of 'mystery-man-who's-watching-over-the-main-characters'. Not that I consider any of them my favourite seiyuus of all times, but they are good when together, creating that atmosphere of happiness, which was so abundant in 00s. Maybe they weren't absolutely special like older seiyuus I admire, but they have become kind of 'silver age' for me. The only exception was my beloved Miyuki Sawashiro. She stands out whenever she is involved. Even before I realised it was her, I was captivated by that voice.
In fact, that may be the reason why Yoru, the cute cat-resembling 'guarding character', became my favourite character out of all. I could literally give anything to stop this guy making such a sad face.
P. S.
I remember some maitres of anime describing how young animators should come out into the world and look at as many things as possible to be able to draw them naturally. Well, out of all animators who created 'Shugo chara' only one seems to know what violin looks like when played. And that is despite the fact that violin is not just an item for a single episode, but an important recurring theme.
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