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This season, Kyoto Animation is showing its latest series, Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai (The World Reflected in the Eyes of the Sky-gazing Girl), also popularly known as Munto TV. This series tells the story of a girl who kept looking at the sky because she saw what other people could not: another world, made of magical floating islands. The floating islands were constantly in a state of war with each other, but King Munto, the ruler of one of the islands, discovers the girl, and finally ends the conflict using her power. Interestingly, 7 years ago, KyoAni released 2 movies named Munto as well, which told the same story the TV series will tell.
Yumemi is the Shoujo in the title, and thus the heroine. To my surprise (at first) the artwork in this show is quite retro, but that didn’t stop Yumemi from being cute and pretty. After I finally watched the 2 Munto movies that KyoAni made back in 2003 and 2005, I realized that back then, KyoAni had already achieved high levels of good artwork, but bringing that into 2009 tended to show the the drawings’ age. Essentially, what I’m trying to get across is that the TV series is actually made up of scenes and animation cut out of the movie, with some additions made recently to fill in the blanks and lengthen the story.
King Munto (the hero)’s level of GARness is the typical DragonballZ-age heavy eye-brow-inward-slanting-eye type. Although not really the title character of the TV series, Munto is still the same arrogant but powerful force he was in the Movies, typically doing things that most normal people in the show wouldn’t do, such as going down to places where he could easily perish in order to save his kingdom.
However, because of the retroness of the artwork KyoAni used to save costs, there inevitably are striking inconsistencies between artwork here and there. Compare Ichiko in the OP and in the actual show, the technicolor fade compared with the rich computer-assisted cel shading and modern KyoAni-style moe drawings differs hugely. Very unlike KyoAni. But since the OP should look a bit better than the rest of the show in general, I guess this is something we could overlook. Below is Yumemi being drawn differently too:
Apart from the huge difference from the OP(picture 3), perhaps they really did not have access to the drawing techniques of the day, so they decided to make do with the drawing techniques of today(picture 1), and attempt to fade it a little to fit the colours in with the parts taken from the movie(picture 2). They have succeeded to some extent, but the differences are big enough for people to notice, and I must say it has somewhat reduced the quality of the experience watching the show.
Anyway, enough talk about the animation quality. Here are the other main characters that have all appeared in the show already since the first episode.
Gass, the Guardian of Space and Time, was meant to prevent people from meddling with the wall that separated Earth from Heaven.
Ryuely, the diviner of Munto’s kingdom. She sacrificed her eyes in order to show the future of the kingdom to Munto.
Leica, the frontline commander of the Alliance. The Alliance was formed to destroy the countries that were sucking the Heavenly World dry of Akuto. Munto’s kingdom being one of them.
Toche, the apprentice diviner and shota requirement of the show.
Gunther the (obviously) villain, who seeks to crush Munto and his immense power, using any excuse available.
Little Shanas. XD
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