Quick info: Produced by Nippon Animation as one of the World Masterpiece Theater series. Directed by Isao Takahata. Loosely based on a chapter from an Italian novel called Heart.
Expectations, etc.: I’ve been intending to start watching this series for years now, but I’ve been too lazy.
I’m expecting it to be what I saw in promo pictures: a boy wandering around the desert (for some reason I remembered him riding on a donkey, but now that I look at the promo picture again, there’s no donkey there…). And, well, what can you expect from a series like that? Hopefully it won’t bore me too much.
Impressions: When the episode started, all the ominous mentions that would get cut short already made me think that Marco’s mom is terminally ill. I’m really tired of dying mothers leaving their little boys behind, but while I was rolling my eyes there, characters informed me that she’s not dying, just leaving for Argentina. That sure fixed the situation for me, but then the main character started acting really annoying.
For a few seconds there I actually praised the show in my head for that, because I’m tired of unrealistically mature little kids too, but then I noticed a little problem. Marco acting realistically for a child his age just made me angry with him. This made me reconsider about whether I really want to watch a series with a little boy as the protagonist. Probably it’s better if I don’t, but I’m most likely going to give this series one more episode to convince me to continue watching.
Rating: 6.5/10 (I think I’m starting to notice a pattern here: In old anime, not much happens during the first episode. So very little, actually, that you aren’t even sure what to think of it. A perfect ploy to make you watch the second episode, why did anime creators stop doing this?)
[...] etc.: I don’t know a thing about this anime. It was in the batch torrent for an another anime so I decided to give it a try. I have absolutely no idea what to expect, [...]