Review of Maria Watches Over Us

I wasn\'t sure I was gonna like it at first.. I usually judge anime by watching the opening theme, and I thought it was so dreary because it was all instrumental.. After watching the first two episodes I was satisfied and decided to watch the whole thing. It brought back memories from my high school days, since I came from a private catholic all girls school, much like the one in the anime.. We didn\'t have a soeur system, but there were other similarities, such as girls crushing on other girls.. There were a lot of french terms used, but you didn\'t really need to learn howto speak French to understand the story.. the only french words used in the dialogues were the titles, such as rosa gigantea en bouton, and soeur of course, and they weren\'t used much after the first episodes. The episode titles are also French.

There was little lesbian action going on, but it was very discreet so it didn\'t really scare me too much.. The only character who was openly gay was Sei, and the rest of the cast didn\'t give off any impressions that they were gay. There is a big shortage in men characters, the only male characters were Sachiko\'s cousin and fiance, and Yumi\'s brother.

The visuals were amazing. All the characters were beautifully drawn, which is one of the reasons why I decided to watch this. All the women were beautiful, but I get the feeling that if you took out their hair and gave them identical wigs, they would almost look the same.

The storyline wasn\'t bad - It was mainly about Yumi\'s character and how she tries her best to get along with her onee-sama, Sachiko. During the series, a few episodes are dedicated to Rei and Yoshino\'s relationship, as well as Sei\'s history. We also see some side stories about Sachiko and Shimako.

As I\'ve mentioned, most of the music were instrumental, and there was only one song with words in it, which was Rosa Canina\'s rendition of \"Ave Maria\". Still dreary, but the story does make up for the lack of better music choices. However, I do think that the classical music fits the storyline well. It is a rather serious storyline.

All in all, I have to say this is one of my favorite series. I have watched many slice of life series, and this one is the best among the rest. It is definitely as must - see.