Hey, look, a reset end. I guess I didn’t waste my time at all with this show!

I had a more detailed look at the series done, but Yukan! had some downtime in the middle of me editing this post, so I’ll make this short.

Birdy will forever go down as one of my most disappointing series. The first episode had style and flair, great animation and a good premise, but as soon as we got deeper into the (if you could call it this) plot, everything started going down hill. Why? Because of the focus on Senkawa, a crappy lead, his relationship with Nakasugi, and their interesting boring and irritating high school compatriots. I can completely understand wanting to develope characters in a story, but when you take side-characters who have no relevance to the main storyline whatsoever, have no redeeming qualities and let them and their lives start to take centre stage, it’s not a good sign. But I could have even put up with that if it weren’t for Senkawa. He is a completely useless whiny weak sidekick that really dragged the show down. I thought it was going to be fun with mindless action and some comedy, but instead I got the 2dimensional character of Senkawa who has no idea what he’s doing half the time. He actually had trouble fighting statues in the last episode. Immobile objects.

The other characters are even worse. Half of them are completely irrelevant to the plot and did NOTHING in the overall scheme of things; if the creators had trimmed the fat cast wise, then maybe the story would have had a lot more momentum. Like the time they went to abuse space dogs, what the hell wasthat about? Or when we suddenly had some sort of random irrelevant ghost story. They should have at least kept the effiminate goth manager (poor Tute)/ Arita Shion angle just to keep some comedic value in the show.

Shyamalan ended up being a horrible protagonist, I don’t care about the ironic message him being destroyed by that which he created, I just thought that his was building up to a more significant climax only to see the guy who kept stripping off his glasses in an eviiiiil way and looked like a crazy badass to be turned into dust in seconds. Hell, the Ryunka was a better protagonist than him (and beter at being a crazy badass). It’s one of the few times I’d wished a series would have ended with the world being obliterated (like World Destruction). The music was good, except for the fact that what happened in the episodes was didn’t suit the grand scale of the soundtrack half the time (Senkawa! Running through a hall! PLAY EPIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.) The art and animation was all over the place, great at some times, horrible at others.

Overall, Birdy’s potential was slowly being destroyed the longer Senkawa spent on screen, the longer we focused on his meaningless friends, and the longer the series went without a decent action scene (there weer actually 2 good fights out of thirteen episodes. What a severe underusage of Birdy’s crazy power). I’ll check out the second season in the feeble hope that it might return to the glory of it’s first episode, but there’s no way in hell I’ll blog it.