Yeah, working in retail is busy, especially before the Christmas season. I finally got back into the animanga business after the New Year. Good timing for the arrival of my Clannad book!

The first page of the book is a delicious Kyou Fujibayashi conveniently locked in the gym equipment storage room.

This softcover artbook has 144 full-colour pages. The first 38 pages is a gallery of images of Nagisa, Kyou, Ryou, Kotomi, Tomoyo and Fuuko, these are the scans you frequently see on high-resolution wallpaper and scan imageboards like konachan.com and moe.imouto.org. As beautiful as these illustrations are, they arn’t the reason I get these artbooks, since these images are readily available for download from the aforementioned sites.

The following 34 pages are character bios and gestures. There’s a lot of Japanese text here, a lot more than I had anticipated. I’ll have to get my friend to translate it for me or teach me Japanese. The only information I can get out of it are facts that have to do with numbers, like bust/hip/waist measurements, birthdays, etc, but the sketches and miscellaneous illustrations are the main reason I get artbooks, since it gives a bit of insight into the design and development process of the series.

There’s a surprising amount of detail put into the character design, it is to be expected for a character-based show to have highly detailed characters but I didn’t know they would go to the point of making separate illustrations for Tomoya’s wristwatch, Nagisa’s shoe, etc.

All the supporting characters are accounted for and there’s also a section that goes step-by-step through each of the main characters’ stories. Again there’s a ton of text here and I wish I could tell you what all this text is explaining. They numbered each episode by character episode and by airing episode. For example, episode 10 is the 3rd part of Nagisa’s and Kotomi’s arc, the 4th part of Kyou/Ryou’s arc, the 2nd part of Tomoyo’s arc. I’m not really sure how this would be of use, but I might find it interesting when I start playing the game (which will be when After Story finishes airing.)

The Story section of the book is 56 pages long and covers the season on a per-episode basis. There are storyboards for the major parts of each episode. I find it amazing how the producers can show so much emotion in the characters from such simple sketches.

A small part of this section details the architecture used in the animation. As architecture student, it was this section that made me decide to purchase the fanbook (I glanced at scans I found online) as there are very detailed hand-drawn perspective illustrations of the school, the houses, and the rooms in the world of Clannad.

The last 16 pages is a staff and cast interview, unfortunately this is almost all text so again I can’t give any details here. But there are nice portrait photos of the main cast.

中原麻衣 Mai Nakahara (left, Nagisa Furukawa) and 野中藍 Ai Nonaka (right, Fuuko Ibuki)

At the very end there’s a small gallery of official collectible goods, like postcards, cell phone dangly-things, calendars, and other small miscellaneous accessories. I think the little card that comes slipped in the middle of my book is an order card, but since I don’t live in Japan it doesn’t really do me much good.

Another artbook review should be coming soon!

An unusually powerful aura for a supporting imouto character.

Episode 03 was a good turn-around from episode 02 and feels much more on route. I was not too impressed with the first bit of the episode where the two going out since it seemed a dry carry-through of the previous episode, but it really did illustrate Youhei’s awkward social manners and overall immaturity and depression. The story finally starting to kick itself back in in the playground scene through parallel events where Youhei and Mei’s histories start revealing themselves. We are reminded of the certain issue that prevents Youhei from playing in the soccer team, this was only mentioned once in a brief scene in the first season. The tensions further In Mei’s rant in the dorm at 11:11, I believe that it is none other than her brother that she is referring to, or at least the version of her brother that now exists only in her memories. Like I complained before, this arc is focusing on the minor characters, but even as minor characters I am finding Youhei as a character with a reason of existence for purposes other than comic relief, and Mei as a more and more powerful individual and no longer just “Youhei’s random sister” like she was in the first season.

I noticed both Mei’s voice actor and KyoAni’s use of camera angles to be superior this episode. I’m not an experienced seiyuu critic, so I’ll just point out a few lines I found particularly effective. At 14:14, Mei’s line “Gosh, he’s so hopeless…” is one of the most emotional lines, perfectly expressing the feeling of laughing one’s problems off. Compare to the same line at 10:19 which is said much more neutrally. Another particularly good script sequence is at 11:11 in Youhei’s dorm: “That’s right. But that’s not all” and the crepe/photo-booth lines are full of imouto goodness. I think the breathing has a lot to do with effective voice acting, I’m noticing a lot of little gasps and puffs and hiccups that make Yukari Tamura’s voice acting (for Mei amongst many other roles) much more effective and realistic.

On towards the camera angles, I find the choices excellent for isolating characters to show the feeling of being left-out. This is mainly Youhei in this episode, and going through these snapshots it really provokes one to think about how much he is hiding when he is his usual perverted smug self. I disabled the subtitles since I want to focus on the animation only; these are presented in chronological order.

Ending remark: What’s Ryou doing in the next episode preview? Everything so far seems unrelated to her…