Ginban Kaleidoscope

Information of Anime

Tazusa Sakurano is a 16 year old Japanese figure skater who's goal is to be part of the Japan Olympic team.  In one of her competition events in Canada, she fails to pull one of her moves & loses the competition.  Meanwhile, Pete Pumps, a Canadian air pilot, was performing air stunts in an show.  Tragedy happened as his plane had some problems, causing him to crash to his death.  Now, he is inside Tazusa's body for unknown reasons & has to stay inside her for 100 days.  Tazusa, however, doesn't like it.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I have seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

Throughout the show, we see how Tazusa struggles on getting a spot in the Olympic team & getting use to Pete's ghostly presences.  Because he can't control Tazusa's body, Pete must do pretty much what Tazusa does.  What she sees is what he sees, what she eats is what he eats, what she feels is what he feels, etc.  As she tries to get use to his presences, her goal to get into the Olympic team is falling.

Failure after failure, Tazusa gets surrounded by media reporters to get some dirty on her reaction about her chances of getting into the Olympics.  Life is hard on her until Pete decides to help her out even though he knows nothing about figure skating.  Although she doesn't want his advice, Tazusa slowly takes them which helps her Olympic chances.  She begins to accept Pete as he helps her out.  Later, she finds out about his past life as a pilot & realizes that they are pretty much the same.  With his advice, Tazusa gets selected on the Women's Olympic team for Japan.  However, some of the media tries to get her out of the position, thanks to a high up person in the Olympic committee in Japan.  However, she gets saved by a freelancer reporter, Kazuya Nitta who has been watching her from the start, by exposing the dirt to the public.

As Torino gets closer, Tazusa realizes that February 23rd is the same day where Pete's 100 days of possessing her ends.  Seeing that she loses focus & starts to get worse & worse in her skating practices.  When she decides to give up her representative position in order to help spend the remaining time with Pete, he stops her by saying it's his wish & fate to see Tazusa go to Torino as an Olympic representative of the Japan.  With this, Tazusa does her best to win the medal.  However, after giving a stunning performance during her 1st appearance on the Olympic ice, Tazusa's goal changes from getting the medal to performing a last dance with Pete.

Despite a a wonderful performance of Pete & Tazusa's last dance performance, the judges gave Tazusa fourth place which upsets the audience.  However, Tazusa doesn't care since she performed her best for Pete.  However, time's up & Pete needs to leave Tazusa.  As Pete disappears, Tazusa finally says her true feelings to him.  After the credit roll, we see what has happen to the characters after Torino 2006.

My Personal Review

From the looks of it, Ginban Kaleidoscope seems to be targeted to a female audience.  Originally, I misread the Kaleidoscope for the anime Kaleido Star.  However, it seems my mistake lead me to a fairly good anime to watch.

Animation

The character designs are a bit on the dull side, mainly because of the dull colours & clothing styles.  The characters have large eyes & fairly long oval faces.  Tazusa does look cute in a way thought.  However, quality goes down a lot starting from episode ten.  The faces start to go out of shape, making them look weird.

The backgrounds are good, but a bit lacking on the detail department.  This is probably because this is a low budget anime production.  Even the dull colours make it look a bit bad.  The skating arenas are dull like it has no life.  If it was brighter, it would look better in my opinion.

The animation movements are pretty good.  As a sports anime, you would expect a lot of detail work be done here & it shows.  The skating moves, such as the jumps, are smooth & flowing.  Even the falls are good.  Really nice work here.  There are times where silly movements occur.  This usually happens when Tazusa is trying to punish Pete physically in strange ways.

Sound

The sound effects are realistic & are projected well.  The sounds of ice being scratched by the blades of the skates are good & well timed.  Even the echoing effects are timed good.  There are times where we hear the occasional silly sounds.  They usually sound when a character is panicking, falls, or Tazusa hurting Pete. 

The seiyuus here aren't too bad, but the casting could have been a bit better.  Hiroyuki Yoshino, the seiyuu for Pete, does have that accent that makes him sound like a non-Japanese person.  But when he speaks English, it's not too good.  It's pretty sloppy.  I felt Tazusa's English was much better.  Speaking of Tazusa, Ayako Kawasumi, the seiyuu, didn't seem right for her role.  I love her voice works, but her role as Tazusa didn't feel right.  Tazusa's character should be like a snobby princess.  However, Ayako's voice doesn't really give me that impact.  It was more gentle than snobbish. 

The music is mainly ballads or fast paced music.  It pretty much depends on the skating program.  There are classical music, jazz, ballads, & soft pop.  Not a bad selection, but not very memorable.

Story

It's interesting to see how this self-proclaim $10 million lady struggles her way to achieve her goal.  Plus how Pete tries to help her out.  You get a good background on how the Olympic selection process works & the hardship of the skaters.  A lot of skating moves are mentioned as well.

What bothers me is how Pete is in Tazusa's body.  He can't move freely as he wants.  If Tazusa is standing in one position, he can't move from that position.  This is based on what the show is telling the viewers.  However, as the series progress, Pete seems to be able to move freely as he wants.  He stands besides Tazusa or sits across from her.  It seems he's no longer attached this body as one piece.  It's like he's on a chain now instead.  What makes it more interesting is the fact that it looks like she can see him, even though I assume she has no clue what he looks like.  Although it's not a heavy factor that affects the storyline, it's just hard to ignore.

Overall, the story was pretty good & didn't give some strange ending.  Pete left for good & didn't come back, which is good as the scriptwriters stayed true to the script.  Also, they didn't give Japan the gold which is a good call in my view.  They were realistic enough & didn't get full of themselves despite the fourth place outrage ruling.

Overall Conclusion

Ginban Kaleidoscope is quite an interesting sports anime.  Today, I think there are rarely any anime series that touches on the figure skating world.  However, people that aren't into this sport may find it boring.  If you are interested in know about the figure skating world or like figure skating, this is an anime you would probably enjoy.  I don't highly recommend it though, since it's not very deep at the moment.

Ginban Kaleidoscope receives a grade of eight out of ten.  The storyline is interesting, but it won't capture a lot of viewers due to it's sports theme.  However, watching the process of how a figure skater works his/her up the ladder to be part of an Olympic team is a nice change of pace.  Plus, it's actually well written & stays true to its ending goal.