House of Five Leaves 01 - An oddly relaxed show, but hard not to love

This may end up being one of my favourite shows of the season.

Thoughts -

First thing I have to say is that the OP music is amazing, I love it more than Arakawa under the bridge's OP, I demand you enjoy it too. (If any of you want to get your hands on the song it's by Immi - Sign of Love, and it's being released this month on the 19th.)

Now this was one show I was really looking forward to, it has a unique style and appeared to also have a unique story-line. Although the style may feel weird or uncomfortable at first, you later begin to grow accustomed to it and even start to appreciate it.

So far not much of the story line has been given away, in fact i'm not sure whether this show even has a driving plot with it, it seems like we'll just be following the main character and his experiences with the House of Five Leaves group. This isn't really much of a problem, I don't expect every anime show to feed me an epic plot, in fact anime like this can be a welcome change of pace.

In fact the pace felt quite relaxed and slow, it never really got flashy or grippingly exciting (there was a fight scene if you would call it a fight scene that is.) But despite the quite relaxed tone and low action I found myself weirdly compelled by this show.

Searing hot magma like leaves were an issue in the olden days of Japan.

I'm honestly not too sure what I liked about this show, was it the awesome OP? The unique art style? The relaxed atmosphere? The Characters? I'm not sure what it was, but I do have a habit of being drawn to shows that can be quite un-usual (Bakemonogatari being a good example.)

Speaking of Bakemonogatari one of it's voice actors are in this anime and I have to say I do like his work a lot, he has a very diverse voice and he really does sound like the most relaxed guy in the world (Ironically he was quite energetic in Bakemonogatari.) Suppose that's credit to his skills huh? The other voice actors aren't all that bad either and they also retain quite the relaxed feel.

I'm not sure whether she's meant to be cute or not.. the art style doesn't make the characters attractive but more mutant-like.

The animation quality appears to be fairly solid, the tiny action scene didn't really show us how good the animation could be, but it never dis-pleased me. I have to mention the background scenery though, if you take your time to see the world around the characters at times you'll see how heavily detailed and well realized the backgrounds are, it's quite captivating.

The character designs are of course odd but have a certain charm to them, at least we can assure the show won't attempt to dish out any fan-service.

The two main characters we've been introduced to are certainly interesting though, our Ronin Bodyguard Akitsu, a very strong samurai although his personality would not suggest to, he appears to be very cowardly and does not like drawing attention to himself.

Our other main guy Yaichi is the leader of a group named 'Five leaves' who go around kidnapping peoples children, and in return get ransom money. However we see his group's intentions may not be as cold as we think, and he doesn't seem all that bad either, i'm looking forward to seeing more of him.

Who doesn't enjoy eating a nice twig now and then?

As much as I liked this starting episode I wouldn't say it impressed me, I feel as it progresses though it's going to really become something special, and I can't wait to see how this show evolves.

It seems Akitsu may be having sex in the next episode, although with his personality I'm sure he won't.