Oldtaku: Anime for Grownups

This came about because I just finished Yakushiji Ryoko’s Case Files, which is a great example of this. Card Captor Sakura is another.

Basically it refers to a series where the first several episodes are aggressively, even boringly, formulaic, then they hit you with the real plot.  CLAMP stories are perhaps the best examples of this – Card Captor Sakura, Tsubasa, XXXholic, Rayearth, etc., but it also seems to be a requirement for most magical girl shows like Pretty Cure. They lull you in, then wham.

I’m not sure if this is exactly good or bad – it’s certainly bad during the forumlaic setup where you’re thinking ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, she has to capture another card’, but in the case of something like Ryoko’s Case Files where the last third of the show suddenly turns into a sprawling epic where they bring in all sorts of bits from the early episodes that you’d thought were just throwaway, it’s actually kind of fulfilling.

This is felt much more strongly in shoujo anime, so I’m going to say this is linked to shoujo cliche – the first several eps are designed to lull the viewer into a sense of familiarity and security before they can get into the real plot.