Air

Air:  C

Air was originally a visual novel by Key Visual Arts, a hentai game in probably the least pure sense of the word, a 20+ hour story in which there are a handful of sex scenes that don't contribute much to the story.  The anime adaptation was made by Kyoto Animation, and so, since I've decided to watch everything KyoAni has ever done, Air was early on my list (since I don't want to watch all of Full Metal Panic right now, with some of it being done by not-KyoAni).

While I hadn't seen it before, I had heard of Key's work being heartbreakingly depressing, and it does hold up on that score, if you can follow the story well enough to understand why it's so depressing.  Of the original three female protagonists, two of them get rather short-changed in the story, with one having her arc resolved and one having her arc partially resolved, and both vanishing from the story after their stories are complete; yet another example of what I am now thinking of as "Fate Stay Night Syndrome" where a Visual Novel has too much material to make it into an anime.

To add to the confusion, we flash back to 10th-century Japan for a couple episodes for reasons which make sense only if you're willing to read between the lines and have been paying attention to the characters' occasional ramblings about their dreams, before returning to the present day at the beginning of the story, throwing another 'character' into the mix and going through one girl, the 'main' girl's arc again, very quickly with some minor changes and a conclusion that is somewhere between bittersweet and just plain sad.

A couple of extra episodes, "Air in Summer," are part of the flashback to ancient Japan, but while they expand on the characters from that story, they don't add much to the coherence of it.

Air is very pretty, but it comes up very short of a good story due, I assume to the translation from Visual Novel to Anime, which, in a story with multiple arcs which are theoretically based on the main character's actions and choices, are not usually well suited to transformation into a single linear story.  If you're interested in a lovingly animated, rather sad story about reincarnation, cyclical suffering and thousand-year-old curses, Air is worth a watch, but if you're hoping for a solid storyline or any sort of happy resolution, I'd recommend Kanon (see my next review) instead.