Beyond the Boundary

KyoAni strikes again. They've created a beautiful and immersive fantasy world based upon the hunting of "dreamshades" that really pulls the viewer in and almost makes it seem like all these things are possible. This is a bit of a darker anime compared to what we are used to from KyoAni (thankfully with a lack of half-naked gay swimmers) but they still manage to instill their patented charm and humor into it all. The animation, art and music (love the soundtrack) are top notch as with all KyoAni productions. The fight scenes are epic. I honestly love all the main and supporting characters in particular the four main leads (along with Ai-chan) especially with their "megame" (glasses) and "siscon" (little sister) personas. Kyoukai no Kanata may start a bit slow but stick around till about episode 4 for things to really heat up. Now, I can't wait for each week's new episode and what's going to unfold next. Watch it.

This is a series I really wanted to like more than I ended up doing. I like KyoAni, and their works tend to have very high production values and (usually) pretty solid writing. I wouldn't say the writing was bad here, but it always felt to me like the story was aspiring to be more epic than it actually ended up being. The fight scenes were pretty good, but part of me kept thinking back to the imaginary ones in Chu2Koi, a series which kind of took the piss out of that sort of thing, and here we are now presenting it in an unironic and serious way. Perhaps it's not fair to compare the two series like this just because they're by the same studio, but that's how I felt. And it probably didn't help that they attempted to cram a lot of "comedy" in too, like Chu2Koi, but here I felt the comedy fell flat more often than not and just made the differences between the goofing off and the serious parts all the more jarring. Overall certainly not a terrible series, but sadly it left me feeling underwhelmed.