07-Ghost – 09

You know what? Who cares about the cheese! There is good cheese and bad cheese, while most of it falls into the bad category: overblown and overly sappy drama that you just can’t take seriously. There are cases in which the cheese is meant to be overly emphasized and becomes awesome to watch because of that (any Hiroshi Watanabe-series, especially Suteki Tantei Labyrinth), and there’s a very select amount of series in which the cheese is actually played straight… and yet somehow works. And what do you know: for me, 07-Ghost turned into one such series. The bond between Teito and Mikage really was adorable, despite the sappiness of it all.

I must say that I really feared the worst when I was spoiled about how Mikage was going to reincarnate. I was ready to expect a very overdrawn death scene of his… only for him to get back to life at the last possible moment. But really, the creators handled his resurrection very well: I never expected the bugger to return as a stuffed animal-like creature. And with the church and all, the whole reincarnation fits perfectly into the setting. I’m usually very much against it when anime bring back a dead character, because it often nullifies any sort of impact that their deaths would have had, but here you can still see Mikage’s sacrifice.

And on a completely different note: the animation sure was awesome in this episode. I don’t mean that in the same way as Eden of the East, in which there was a lot of detail in just about every movement, but there were so many creative poses and camera-angles. This episode had lots of really cool shots that really made this episode a feast for the eyes.

Now that the Mikage-arc is over, I’m curious to what the rest of this series can offer. It’s really building up Ayanami as some evil overlord, but thankfully the creators fleshed him out nicely enough. In fact, I’m always waiting for the guy to make his move again, because whenever he does you can be sure that it’s going to result in a very interesting and exciting fight. As a villain, he has presence, I guess.

Rating: ** (Excellent)
As a series with a lot of emphasis on building up, the climaxes are of course very much worth it. Also, the animation direction was really good.