Review of Natsume's Book of Friends

Let’s imagine, if someone has an eye which can see things that others can’t, how he/she will feel? No-one will believe it and no-one can. Natsume Yuujinchou is rather simple anime. In every episode, it has an individual story related to each kind of youkais written in Yuujinchou. It’s a small, and peaceful series that can be EASILY overlooked. NO. It’s filled with irreplaceable memories that you can’t forget. There is no plot for this anime (or whatever.). Of course, it’s slice of life anime, and it has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s hard to keep the genre of ‘supernatural’ and ‘slice of life’ at once, butNatsume Yuujinchou covered that nicely. All episode are simply beautiful and breathtaking.

Ah. Character development. This is what you expect when you watch this anime. Natsume is all alone boy who hates to interact with other people. He is gentle and kind. He tries to help EVERYONE. Well, you can call him hero in that aspect, but he actually thinks that he has no power at all. He keeps contradicting himself, about whether staying in human world, or being with Youkai like His grandmother Raiko did.

In each story, Youkai tells Natsume about kindness, humanity and other lessons that he has been overlooked or forgot. His side kick cat always scolds him about how selfish and bad humans are. When he first met youkai in his new town, most of their responses are "don’t believe humans". But in the end, he finds out that not all humans are evil. Youkai themselves also realises and learns about their mistaken view towards humans. Very optimistic stories, right? However, it is not that cheerful anime. Its mood is somehow down from the start to the end. That kind of ambiguous tone is the one that makes this anime more intriguing to watch.

There are evil youkais of course. They are just evil. Same goes to human. Some youkais also struggles like human. This anime contrasts and compare those monsters and humans. We can see how Natsume's thinking changes through the whole series. He feels empathy toward those youkais. Most of them has been felt lonely or have been suffered from the problems of themselves. It's Natsume's job to cure those suffering youkais and tries to prove kindness of humans.

However, there is some problems with it, too. I sometimes got annoyed by Natsume's reflection about how he was lonely or get ignore. He seeks for similar people as him, but not trying to create a new relationship. That theme of 'loneliness' is something that has been used so much in other animes, especially in shonen. I mean, he lost his parents. Yet, he seems to feel nothing about it all the time. He never even mention it. They should have gave more background information about 'who exactly is Natsume'.

Art, probably one of my favourite character designing I’ve ever seen. Pastel style drawing and cute drawn youkais are just gorgeous. You can’t see anything like this in other anime. Very, very unique. Most of the background is consist of soft lines and colours, which creates very gentle atmosphere; contributing to the story. Sound aspect also reflects its atmosphere really well, though I’m not to sure about OP and ED.

Voices~~ well there is only 2 notable seiyuus here because… others just are just all recurring characters. Kamiya Hiroshi did surprisingly well with voice of Natsume, and you can sometimes here his usual ‘ZETSUBOU SHITA!’ style screaming. It’s fun indeed.

Overall value and enjoyment on this anime was higher than my expectation. Although it keeps with simple stories with simple plot settings, it manage to bring some beautiful development on characters and creation of overall atmosphere. It’s calm and peaceful. Nothing like Shonen stuffs packed with fight. So, this is definitely number one priority for those who just started animes.