At the end of the 8th grade, a school friend of my son Eric recommended the 24-part Animé series Last Exile. Eric urged me and his mother to watch it with him, and we got hooked right away.
It became our “Last Exile Summer,” with Eric getting two of his cousins wrapped up in the show, as well. My wife and I particularly enjoyed the often humorous little teasers at the end of each episode. Here is one of them.
After a while of watching Last Exile it’s easy to pick out where the first-rank artists strut their stuff and where the less talents worked. At its best, the show displays great technical virtuosity, and I admire it very much.
I’m sure if Molly lived there, she, too, would be hooked. Right now all she cares about is “Fruits Baskets,” a more obscure anime series that had to go through ME first. It’s all pretty innocent. Some of the characters are cursed, and, if hugged by a member of the opposite sex, turn into the animal of their Chinese horoscope year. Molly particularly adores Momiji, the little four-year-old boy who turns into a bunny. He was rejected by his mother and lives with Sohru, an orphaned teenaged girl who is not cursed but lives in a group home with many other “cursed” kids. I got Molly the Momiji stuffed rabbit (it IS cute), and the COMPLETE SET of “Fruits Baskets” on DVD, but she won’t get the DVDs till Christmas. We’ve seen clips of them on Youtube, and they look EXACTLY like the one above, except the quality is MUCH crappier!