After years of wait, the second “Summer’s Day Dream” fan-made Touhou OVA has released at Comiket 82 – and it’s already available for viewing in full, looking quite impressive overall for a doujin work of animation.
It wouldn’t be too fair to stack this OVA against the other, and admittedly more captivating, doujin anime based around the Touhou series – however, examining this one for what it is, it’s rather fair overall. Putting together an episode like this is an achievement in itself – yet it remains worth noting that the visuals are not particularly sharp. Maikaze, the studio responsible for this work, have seemingly combated character design difficulties by watering down the characters in question to be very curvy and simple in composition.
Not to mention, the motions seen within the animation are quite standard – Maikaze didn’t depend on the characters to be stunning, rather, they seemingly attempt to boost a scene’s serenity by taking advantage of the other elements. They accent sound heavily at certain points – and they also make use of beautiful still backgrounds, and then merely style the character of the scene to fit within whatever manner would make for the most superb sight.
Even the more detailed movements, such as facial reactions, are visibly rather direct – lacking the delicacy of heavier refined animations, however making up for that through grander, more exaggerated, expressions. In other words, the animation attempts to not depend on anything subtle – instead making everything rather explicit, yet when it does occasionally offer focus on a more subtle moment, it takes advantage of all at its disposal to pull it off, and only keeps such going for a short while.
Similarly, as the studio likely lacks the necessary resources, one can also see that the characters seem to most commonly exhibit gesture from the more active areas of the human body in communication – meaning the hands, face, and relevant vicinity around them, there’s no gentle flowing of the clothes when standing in the wind.
In general, intricacies are lacking – and this applies to the backgrounds as well. Maikaze seemingly crafted a portion through regular means – however for others, utilized elaborate photographs or illustrations, and then blurred them in order to bring highlight upon the characters on screen, whilst simultaneously sustaining the complexity of the background, and also giving it depth it doesn’t actually have. They essentially countered having a flat paper effect through pseudo-depth.
One would like to say something of the action scenes within this OVA, although there aren’t any aside from a decent several seen within the opening sequence – which is perhaps the best animated portion of the entire video.
This OVA is definitely well-done for a doujin group – however, it certainly could have been far better.
A question can’t help but stem in contemplation as to whether they expended most of their available assets on ensuring the voice acting was at least average – attempting to show off their seiyuu casting, thereby not developing the animation as much as they could have. In fact, it should be noted that the voices do seem rather in sync with the mouth of the characters for the most part, despite the characters being quite stiff in nearly every other way.
With the available potential, and the actual result, the product is simply average.
Aug 11, 2012 @ 12:22 CDT
Hawkward will love this.
Aug 11, 2012 @ 12:50 CDT
I heard the seiyuu casting was voluntary on their part? If so, it has nothing to do with the quality of the animation at all (and makes the seiyuu’s who did participate more awesome for it).
Aug 11, 2012 @ 12:52 CDT
Not necessarily – let’s assume it was voluntary, Maikaze might have spent most of the time dealing with the voice acting in place of the animation. Although that was always speculative to begin with.
I’m not saying any of it is bad, as mentioned, for a doujin work, this is quite incredible – but I really feel that potential was not maximized.
Aug 11, 2012 @ 14:29 CDT
Hmm I enjoyed memories of phantasm more. I really it compared to summer days dream slice of life style. Plus the character’s from Touhou 6 are a bit stale… I’d rather have a story about 8 or 12. Loved those games and characters. But alas I have moved on to other things, like tales of and Pokemon.