The Essentials
Name: Someday’s Dreamers: Summer Skies
Genre: Romance, Drama
Episodes: 12
Aired: July 2, 2008 – September 24, 2008
Based On: Someday’s Dreamers: Summer Skies manga by Norie Yamada
Director: Osamu Kobayashi
Produced By: Hal Film Maker
US Distribution By: Not Licensed
Cast
| Character | Japanese Cast | English Cast (N/A) |
|---|---|---|
| Sora Suzuki: | Kana Hanazawa | |
| Gouta Midorikawa: | Tomoaki Maeno | |
| Seiichirou Hara: | Rikiya Koyama | |
| Hiyori Yamabuki: | Mikako Takahashi | |
| Honomi Asagi: | Marina Inoue | |
| Kouji Kuroda: | Daisuke Namikawa | |
| Mage Kawada: | Yoko Soumi |
Review
Someday’s Dreamers: Summer Skies is about a girl, Sora Suzuki, who travels to Tokyo from Hokkaido to train as a mage. She soon runs into a boy, Midorikawa, who is also attending mage training because his father was a mage (unbeknownst to him until recently), despite the fact that he can’t seem to do any magic himself at all.
The series progresses – slowly – as Sora learns more about the world, helping Midorikawa come to grips with his magical power along the way and creating a romance between the two along the way. However, unknown to Midorikawa, Sora has a special reason why she wants to train as a mage.
This series, if viewed from very high, may not be all that bad a work, but once you start watching the episodes, several problems immediately start to show themselves. First, the pacing, as a alluded to above, is slow. Very slow. Painfully slow. I usually have a problem when doing episode reviews of having my reviews be too long and having too many screenshots. This series presented me with the opposite problem: so little happened that I struggled to even write about what was going on.
While the development that did happen in the first 3/4 of the series of so is pretty good (however much of it there was), the last quarter of the series took a turn which turned the entire series on it’s head, and not necessarily in a good way. Some people may like the twist at the end, but I found it needless and counterproductive.
This is all on top of the fact that the animation isn’t all that good. The character animations look somewhat cheap, and the background animation doesn’t really impress either once one realizes that they’re essentially photoshopped real life photos. If one likes really slow Dramas with romance thrown in, then you might like this, but this show might be a bit too slow for most people.
Scores
Story: 2/5
Animation: 2/5
Music: 4/5
English Dubs: N/A
Overall: 2/5
First Watched: July – September 2008
Do I Own: No
Do I Recommend: No