Nodame Cantabile was a bad mistake on my part. The premise seemed completely uninteresting to me and I tuned out all the blogging about it. But in the event, it offers extremely entertaining character comedy. Especially Milch is an enigma and an amalgam of ordinarily incompatible traits. But everyone else is gold too. I melted when Mine winked at Chiyaki in ep.07, and the latter returned his O.K.

To reiterate, my acceptance of Nodame suffered from an excellent direction of rather dubious material: the arrangement which was impossible to appreciate without watching the anime. I would never believe any blogger, no matter what superlatives they used, if they described the little Gekigangar 3 inside Nodame. In any normal anime, the space candy would have fallen flat. Even now I do not understand exactly how Kenichi Kasai sneaked past my cynicism. I knew that it was corny when I watched it, and yet... it worked.

The art and animation are excellent, although it's not apparent in most screencaps. Also, here's one shot of Noda which looked strangely familiar:

It took me 30 second of intense concentration to recognize Kimikiss, only with eyes placed at normal distance. One look at ANN confirmed that both director and art director (Shichiro Kobayashi) were the same. I guess I'll have to give Kimikiss a second chance.