Genji Monogatari Sennenki 11 (End)
Screenshots and my brief review.
The main reason why I watched this anime is the Tale of Genji novel. Unfortunately, the anime didn’t deliver.
It is important to set the scene well, and some dramatization effects in animation can enhance overall experience, but when such techniques are abused, the effect is opposite of what is intended.
While the anime was ok to watch in the beginning, overuse of lens effects, glowing settings, multiplying images, sliding shots, unnecessarily shots shown at relatively high frequency, and blatantly redundant repeats of the same shots was very irritating to watch and significantly reduced my enjoyment of the series. Also I didn’t like highly saturated and, in some cases, not very well matching colors, along with cheap filters that turned some frames into “pencil drawings”. It is a shame that such an important work received such a poor treatment. However, Genji Monogatari Sennenki did have some positive parts.
I liked music, background art, and cast. Probably, music was my favorite part of this anime due to nice traditional melodies 🙂 (except horrible OP >.>) I definitely have to check out OST. Background art was also great, as you can see from the first image in this post. Finally, I enjoyed these seiyuu the most:
- Eriko Hirata as Aoi no Ue
- Kenyuu Horiuchi as Kiritsubo no Mikado
- Aya Endo as Narrator
Kitsune's Thoughts 
after watching your screencaps from the first episode (or was it the trailer?) i decided this wouldn’t be a good series for the same glazy-hazy reasons you discussed.
anyway, how could they do justice to genji in 11 episodes??
Yes, 11 episodes may be insufficient, but there was even a movie version in 1987. It seems as if they didn’t care too much how it will turn out because people will watch the anime anyway due to its historical significance. They were right actually – the anime is in top 10 in popularity. However, popularity does not mean quality…
I prefer Genji Monogatari nover to the anime. But the anime was very beatiful work. 😀
Yes, some background art was great 🙂
It’s obvious they can’t contained an entire novel into an 11 parter so basically, they featured or select just the very main parts or plots which they think will carry the gist of the story. I still find it visually artistic in a different way and thought it good. Love the background, the voice acting and the music. Overall, I enjoyed the series but I want to re-watch again when the whole thing is fully subbed. Let’s just say some of the dialogue is lost on me…lol. Btw, my favourite episode is the one featuring Lady Aoi – Aoi giving birth to Genji’s child and her death are two of the events that can be seen as somewhat significant in Genji’s life…so it gets featured.
Adaptations are always difficult. They highlighted some of the parts, but didn’t include all the abuse that was going on in the novel…. They did ok, but some of the choices were quite poor, such as a fighting scene in the last episode among other things.
I also liked backgrounds, voice acting, and music 🙂
Yes, some of the dialogue was not clear to me as well, but I got the gist. I have to read the novel now 😛
Ah, yes, Lady Aoi is one of my favorite characters in that anime 🙂 Another character is Genji’s stepmother. It was very sad seeing her suffer so much…
I just want to add another thing…the anime in a way sparks or renewed people’s interest in reading the actual novel itself. I see quite a few people say they want to go read the novel…so that’s a good thing…I supposed that’s one the intention as well.
Yes, that is very true. I hope people around the world will read the classic novel 🙂