Yuichi hasn't seen his cousin Nayuki on years. Now that he's back, all knowledge of ever visiting has vanished. He tries to adjust to the vaguely familiar surroundings, but the gaps in his memory haunt him as time grows short. The pieces of the puzzle have appeared – an eerily silent beauty with blazing tresses, the mysterious girl with the winged backpack, and the sword-wielding demon slayer – but it's up to Yuichi to discover how they fit together.
There isn't really anything about Kanon that stands out as being exceptional. The story is pretty standard harem stuff, with the lead male Yuichi being surrounded by a bunch of potential mates. Yuichi himself is at least somewhat interesting with his snarky remarks and generally sarcastic attitude towards everything around him, but the girls are pretty much all archetypes. We've got the mysterious quiet girl, the amnesiac girl, and various other character archetypes, all of whom are mysteriously connected to Yuichi's past. It's fairly standard harem stuff that you've likely seen dozens of times before.
Of course, the series does throw some new things into the mix to at least try to keep it interesting. The whole story has sort of supernatural overtones. For example, Makoto initially seems like a simple amnesiac girl from Yuichi's past it's eventually revealed that she's something different entirely and not exactly human so to speak, and Mai just seems like a strange quiet girl, but it turns out she spends her nights hunting demons at the school and has some mysterious powers of her own. These supernatural overtones are a nice thing to have around, but sometimes things are just downright silly and make it hard to take the series seriously.
Even with these somewhat silly elements, Kanon can still manage to be emotional at times, so long as you're willing to let yourself get swept up by it. Sometimes the series does clearly try too hard to be emotional and sad, with every girl having some sort of tragic element to their past and this can really detract from the series at times. If they had just played it as a pure romance without the supernatural elements and focus on just one girl Kanon could probably pass as a decent romance series.
Of course, it would also pass as a decent romance series if Yuichi actually interacted with the girls in a meaningful way. For the most part all he does is sit there while whichever girl the series is currently focused on talks. A lot. These girls tend to go on and on about their incredibly sad lives while Yuichi does nothing but listen to them and occasionally pipe in a word or two. Although this is understandable at times, when a girl is talking about the time she almost slit her wrists any person would be at a loss for words. The relationships between Yuichi and the girls always seem somewhat forced given that he rarely actually does anything besides listen to them talk.
There is one major issue with the storytelling of the series. The episodes are essentially divided up so that each girl gets several episodes that tell her story. The problem with this is when one of these stories has a sad ending it's somewhat cheapened when Yuichi goes on to be perfectly happy spending time with one of the other girls like nothing sad happened at all. With the series focusing on Yuichi's past with most of these girls it really would have worked better if it had focused on one girl instead of trying to cram several unrelated stories into one and have the overall plot suffer because of it. These stories clearly weren't meant to be told like this and they don't mesh very well.
There really isn't anything that could be done about this in a series like this, but a better idea would have been to do several different OVA series about it. Having a separate OVA for each girl would allow the story to be done properly and there wouldn't be the issue of all of them not meshing together well since they wouldn't need to.
Kanon does try its hand at comedy from time to time, with varying results. It's never really hilarious but it does manage to at least be mildly funny on occasion. But like the plot, some of the comedy falls a little flat and tends to be somewhat tired and played out. It's still good for a laugh every now and then though. There was one particular scene where Yuichi finishes reading a manga and remarks, “That story was just one dumb cliche after another,” which really made me laugh, though not for the reason they had intended.
Kyoto Animation is well known for their excellent art and animation, and Kanon is no exception to this. The animation isn't as good as the studio's most famous work, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but it's still good and never has a noticeable drop in quality. It's very apparent with the character designs that they were really going for the cute moe thing, which is good or bad depending on who you ask. They really try to grab you with the cute thing though, with most of the girls doing silly things that we're all supposed to go “D'AWWW” at, but I honestly found that it kind of takes away from the story. I don't hate the attempts at making the characters be cute and silly, but it doesn't really do anything to adhere me to them. Having well written and developed characters does that better than just making them cute.
I'm pretty sure Chris Patton is slowly starting to become a favourite voice actor of mine, as I've yet to hear him in a role that I didn't like him in. He gives a great performance as Yuichi, easily bringing out the characters natural sarcastic and teasing side, as well doing an equally good job with the character during the emotional scenes. In a series that tries as hard as Kanon does to be sad it's really important that you have actors who can play those emotions without seeming exaggerated and cheesy, which Patton does very well. The girls are all voiced fairly well, though none of them really stand out. Caitlin Glass gives a surprisingly good performance as the sometimes cold and mean Kaori, surprising because she seems more suited to play a cheerful squealing happy girl than a mean one, but she pulls it off. Hearing Brittney Karbowski actually play a girl in this has made her role as Black Star from Soul Eater sound less like a girl than I had previously thought, so that's good I guess.
The dub remains faithful to certain character traits, though whether that's a good thing or not is entirely up to you. Ayu still regularly blurts out her verbal tic “uguu” in the English dub, and it doesn't really sound all that bad and is actually much less grating in English than in Japanese. One thing that bothered me was Sayuri's habit of referring to herself in the third person, it just doesn't sound natural and seemed entirely pointless. While it was nice of them to take these verbal habits into account while doing the dub, they aren't really important to the characters or plot, so they really could have gotten rid of them without hurting anything. But I'm sure plenty of people are glad that they kept them in.
There are no extras to speak of on these discs except for textless opening and closing themes and a few trailers, and they aren't even trailers for new or upcoming releases. Though I guess I can't really complain about that too much given that this DVD set only cost me about $20.
Kanon does suffer from storytelling issues, as well as some cliche characters, but it's still at least somewhat enjoyable. I'm sure there are better romance series out there, and probably better harem type shows as well, but I still found Kanon to be worth the watch. And with it being in Funimation's new S.A.V.E. line of series you can easily find it for $20, and it's at least worth that much. I can't honestly say I recommend it, but if you've got the time and the money there's certainly worse things you could spend it on.
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