Recent Viewing: Someday’s Dreamers

Over the last two weeks I watched Someday’s Dreamers. Someday’s Dreamers is a property released by Sentai Filmworks, and the series was animated by JC staff and Viewworks in 2003. I decided to watch the series, based off of last week’s post, about animation in real life. In Someday’s Dreamers, they use several known areas such as Shibuya Crossing and also the Tokyo Tower.

The story focused around a girl who was going to begin an apprenticeship to become a certified mage. Its a pretty short series, only lasting 12 episodes, there is a second season/storyline that I didn’t view at this time.

The story itself isn’t anything revolutionary nor do I feel that it has much replay value as well. It is a short series with not a whole lot of character development. There are really only 4 or 5 characters in the series and really only two characters show depth at the conclusion of the 12 episodes.

From a production standpoint, Someday’s Dreamers falls into the years of growing experimentation in CGI in anime, early 2000’s. At this time, CGI was used mostly for environments, effects and sometimes robot characters, which move rather awkwardly and stiff. The characters are all hand drawn with environments being painted as well. The use of 3D is used in 2 major areas, the starting of the series and the final couple episodes.

In the first episode the cars in the Shibuya Crossing are 3D, at this stage its pretty obvious they are b/c of their robotic movement in the way they are controlled by the character Yume. We see 3D again towards the end of the series when one of the mages loses control of their power and twists the Tokyo Tower. In my opinion, these are some of the best animated shots in the series.

Some of the characters magic effects also see the use of some CGI effects. One of the characters, when using magic, has a snowflake particle system that appears. When Yume uses a certain level of magic, their is a CGI dolphin that is rendered in a blue wireframe. The mages all have rings, so the mages can be tracked and monitored. With these rings, there are more effects that appear as if they are flat layers from a program like after effects and just rotated in 3D space to give them a skewed appearance.

I’d suggest Someday’s Dreamers if you are into magic series, or if you like viewing transitional 3D titles from the early to mid 2000’s or if you want to check out what I have been watching recently.