Review of Bakemonogatari
STORY - 6 ART - 6 SOUND - 7 CHARACTER - 7 ENJOYMENT - 6 Bakemonogatari is the first anime of the Monogatari Series that I've watched. I'm looking forward to what will come next as the anime has this unique atmosphere that made watching it quite enjoyable. The anime started out confusing at first, there weren't really any clear storyline. You follow a boy who survived a vampire attack as he tried to solve supernatural problems of five girls on their own arc. The simplicity of the entire thing is a good thing, you see the characters develop and interact with each other in an interesting way. Comedy was prettyaverage, romance different from other anime and all in all, it was fun to see the characters. As the story was mainly dialogue-driven, it may not suit everyone. It's fast-paced and sometimes the dialogue was boring and unrelated to the point where your mind wanders of elsewhere. But when it was good, the dialogue is thought-provoking, giving off interesting information about the supernatural of this anime.
The story is backed by the abstract and surrealistic art style. The minimalistic feel suited Bakemonogatari. Animation was pretty fluid most of the time but it's really good at action scenes. There was a lot of symbolism used and for me, a lot of it was difficult to grasp but that's generally not a bad thing because the whole weirdness of it all did engage my brain. The sound in this anime didn't really stand out for me and it was not distracting. Voice acting of each characters was done well, suited to their personality. I enjoyed listening to the opening songs but the ending song takes the icing on the cake, especially after I found out the meaning behind supercell's beautiful song.
Overall, Bakemonogatari was enjoyable to watch. The anime is unique to others and that's what captivated me as I watched each episode. The story was simple and you get to enjoy the characters more. Some parts did felt useless to watch which did kind of drag on. What was the strong point of this anime? Definitely the character interactions and development.