Creativity is EVERYTHING Urahara is probably one of the most ambitious and experimental anime for Fall 2017 for LA with varying results. Urahara focuses on Mari Shirako voiced by Sumire Uesaka an amateur actress and the owner of PARK, Rito Sudou voiced by Luna Haruna, the illustrator of PARK and Kotoko Watatsumugi voiced by Manaka Iwami an eccentric inventor who helps around PARK. Harajuku soon faces an alien invasion where these aliens named Scoopers loves to steal the "creativity" and thus the members of PARK by gaining some supernatural powers to defeat these Scoopers so that they can keep their PARK and defend Harajuku. Urahara as an animeobviously has a pretty focused theme around creativity, with our main characters essentially being creators themselves with Scoopers wanting to steal that creativity and even this seeps into how the animation looks as well. However with Rito, Mari and Kotoko this also goes into their character development and the stages of grief with creativity in many ways.

LA cannot talk about Urahara without how it does it's plot twists and there are actually ALOT for what is a simple "magical girl-esque" anime about defending a city from creative stealing aliens. For one thing, Urahara does the entire "look beyond the cover" for such an anime and for LA at least duped LA into thinking this was a happy go lucky anime....it still is....but when it gets serious, they get serious no matter how cutezy they bring the atmosphere. How the plot twists keeps stacking up as well as this affecting our main trio also brings in their character development intrinsically linked to what else...creativity. From Rito's dilemma about her drawings, to Mari's popularity getting to her head and cling onto it to Kotoko wanting to help her friends in order to make her...her, because of how introverted and eccentric she is. LA actually got invested to Mari and Rito the most though LA's personality is similar to Kotoko in many ways as well. The plot twists "makes sense" as the anime unravels itself and soon enough brings us one of the weirdest true villain for Fall 2017 and actually becomes a threat to the plot.

The animation by Shirogumi and EMT² is experimental to say the least, by bringing us what is essentially a kids-book-ish drawings background that also goes into the character designs of the chibified comedic moments of the anime. The animation is obviously hard enough to used to, but LA got used to it if only because of the uncanny valley feeling to the anime, but oddly enough this actually becomes a PLOT POINT, so this wasn't Shirogumi and EMT² being lazy. So yeah Urahara's main draw and something to put attention to in Fall 2017 was the animation, no doubt for better or worse.

The voice acting has some problems for LA...yeah this was coming. First thing though would be that this is Luna Haruna's first anime appearance, you might know Luna as a Japanese singer who sung Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata's OP, now her performance all things considered, she sounded like an actual teenager which was rather nice to hear. Sumire Uesaka was also pretty decent as well. The "problem" however goes to Manaka Iwami as Kotoko and Kokoa Amano as Misa Maruno as they go into "squeak" territory and this was just LA but Misa's "desu na!" character tic got old pretty quickly to the point of annoyance. Luna Haruna obviously got best voice actor for Urahara with Sumire Uesaka being second. Nonetheless, the voice acting is decent overall even with the annoyances.

Urahara seems to be a love letter in a ways to those experimentally crazy fun animes or just to an ode to creativity and how great it is or how it can lead to problems. LA enjoyed Urahara for trying something utterly different for Fall 2017 and sticking to it's guns, sure it has some problems from the uncanny valley animation and slow pacing that would have put off audiences, but Urahara is fine nonetheless. Urahara is neither insulting awful or the pinnacle of greatness....it's just in the middle trying to tell a story of creativity.

Urahara is good. Urahara is CREATIVE thus, Urahara is good.