Original text at the nekoheadz.org forum

Okay, so my review of Windy Tales wasn’t so hot, but neither was I that day. I donated blood, switched over to a nocturnal sleep schedule, blah blah blah. It wasn’t that bad, review-wise, just not terribly entertaining. I’m well aware that I write a lot for these and the only way I expect you guys to actually make it through is by making it fun to read to the end. Also, it’s a lot more fun to write these when I get all pissy and mean. Too bad there isn’t as much to get pissy and mean about again for this review. I need to stop liking some of the stuff I watch.

As you guessed from the title, I’ll be telling you about a little 13 episode series called Sketchbook Full Colors (put your tildes and capital letters where you like). It’s another slice of life series in the same spirit as Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star. Sketchbook (as I’ll call it from here) is about high school sophomore named Sora Kajiwara, art club member and all around super shy girl. When I say shy I don’t mean that bats her eye-lashes at you from across the room and talks quietly shy: our first introduction to Sora is her hiding behind her sketchbook when a little girl starts talking to her (Sora’s name on the cover serves as her introduction to both us and the little girl). Anyway, all thirteen episodes meander about as we follow Sora and the rest of the club through a few seasons and vacations and such. I think it might actually go right up until just before graduation, but more on that later. The episodes focus mainly on the art club with related bits of the everyday lives of Sora and to a lesser extent some of the other people. And cats.

The animation in Sketchbook is pretty standard, for the most part. However, that’s not to say it’s bad. If I had to describe it, I’d call it a cross between School Rumble, Azumanga Daioh, and Lucky Star. The ultimate result of that is a show that is terribly cute without being nauseatingly so. The animals are cute, the characters are cute, the backgrounds are pretty, and what things need to be animated are done smoothly. There are a lot of cats in this show (five actually, and three dogs and a chicken; not to mention all of the chicken plushies), and they are as cute as they can be without being overly so. There’s a wonderful sense of moderation in the character design that keeps things from getting overwhelming in the cute department while keeping everything interesting to look at. Unlike the other three series I mentioned earlier, there is absolutely no sexual content in this entire series. Well, that’s a lie: there is one tiny little moment of a guy walking into a locker room early in the series, but it’s more comedic than racy and actually the fantasy of one of the girls because she wanted to see the spectacle of it. Other than that, though, none of the characters are buxom (i.e. jiggly), the clothing is actually clothing and not cleverly placed rags and well, you get my point. Actually, there are a couple points where things seem like they might take a racy turn, but then there’s one of the characters with full clothing on under a yukata or a bathing suit on while she washes a cat in the shower, all of which are there as if to say “ha, too bad for you, but this scene is still funny with clothes on.” Sketchbook is cute, pretty, and has no interest in being anything else.

The music in Sketchbook takes a page or two from Azumanga Daioh, with light, fluffy bits of music with the occasionally ill-sounding tones. The opening and closing may lack any of the crazy energy we got in Azumanga or Lucky Star, but they fit the series to a ‘t.’ The music is actually pretty mellow and keeps the pace pretty slow; which is what we want from a show trying to make everyday life look appealing. See, I actually own an Azumanga Daioh soundtrack and sometimes load the songs into my little pink shuffle, but that’s a bit of a stretch even for that. Sketchbook music is considerably closer to lounge music and it suffers a bit for it. The themes are simple with the occasional vocal track. If you ever watch this series at night, you are going to fall asleep. So, yeah, the music isn’t all that and a bag of chips, but it fits the series very well, albeit following Azumanga Daioh just a little too closely without the energy to pull it off. Also, what is with a short series having a new opening exactly once? I don’t mean just the animation changing up a bit, but an entirely new opening theme and animation. There is exactly one episode with a different opening in this series, and while it fits in Sketchbook, I can think of plenty of series where it doesn’t. I just don’t get that.

As I tried to allude to in my summary, the story in Sketchbook Full Colors is pretty standard for a high school slice of life. However the story revolves almost entirely around Sora, with the other characters and events acting as measuring sticks and tools to further her character development. While it’s nice to have a mostly single point of reference, I almost wish they had given us more of a glimpse at a few of the other characters since they were so interesting. That said, some truly unique and great moments emerge, mainly through good characterization. The art club teacher has a thing for chickens, she thinks they’re cute to the point where her car is filled to the brim with plushies of them, she has a live chicken that she keeps with her all the time and sometimes wears as a hat and often jokes about eating. The cats actually talk to one another and have their own sub-plots; the first time they talk was ridiculously funny and the writers did a great job of running with it until the end of the series. Each of the art club members is eccentric almost to the point of absurdity, keeping them interesting in a way I could understand. As a high school slice of life comedy, there’s actually very little high school in it: Exams get a brief mention only as part of the characterization of the main character. The school sports fest and culture fest are left in hanging in the breeze. There’s a summer festival, but only for part of an episode. There are even a few school trips, all of which are actually to the school because of the club’s miniscule budget. Despite all of these wonderfully original things, I can’t help but feel we’ve seen this all before and better. The funny moments are great, but nothing quite as memorable or energetic as some other series I could mention. Sketchbook is above average at what it’s supposed to portray, but it doesn’t excel at it. If it weren’t for the slightly clichéd but interesting characters and some clever writing, Sketchbook would be little more than a clone of some other really popular series.

Up to those last few sentences, you’d probably guess that I was going to be pretty nice to this series for the conclusion. I liked Sketchbook. I really did. But that’s not going to save it. See, when I said Sketchbook was in the same spirit as Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star, it really just wants to be those series. It wants to be those series so hard, but it can’t openly admit it by giving us catchy dance numbers or anything like that. What it can do is give us characters that are quirky to the point of being not quite realistic and giving them a high school setting and disguising it all with an art club motif and an even slower pace. The entire time I watched this series I couldn’t help but be reminded of Azumanga or Lucky Star, eerily so now that I think about it. To a certain extent, it’s okay as Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star were fantastic series, and any series trying this hard to be like them and succeeding (for the most part) can’t help but be enjoyable. But as you’ve read in my other reviews, I’m pretty hard on that kind of fan-pandering. However, I can forgive Sketchbook for all of these faults: the slow pacing, the blatant ripping off of other series, the almost-but-not-quite-there music, etc.: I can allow all of these things because the ending was genuinely good and gave us a bit of a unique way to end a school days show without using a graduation. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the last episode has all of the closure, all of the nostalgia, all of the character growth, all of those things that make slice of life high school anime great. By episode 12 I was planning out just how thoroughly I was going to smash this series with the harsh criticism bat, but most of that desire went out the window by the time I reached the end of the last episode. Sketchbook is more of the same, but it keeps things fresh enough and ends on such a high note that I can’t help but recommend it, even if you haven’t seen Azumanga Daioh. I also can’t get enough of the talking cats.

~Whim

PS – I watched this series as a fansub from Spoonsubs.
PS2 – This series has a lot of potential for awesome icons, avatars, etc.
PS3 – Takino-sensei from Azumanga Daioh and Kasugano-sensei (the art club teacher) are so alike if they ever met I think the universe would implode.
PS4 – I’d like to thank those of you that have read these so far, especially if you’ve read all of each of the reviews.
PS5 – I’m thinking of doing a little mini-review thread where I can post first impressions of things or those reviews of the shows that were so bad I had to stop watching them. If I do so, it’ll probably start with Heroic Age.