Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Paradise Kiss – episode 1

October 21, 2005 on 8:40 pm | In Paradise Kiss | 2 Comments

“Atelier”

Paradise Kiss is a series I’ve been vaguely looking forward to for a while. Now I don’t know what to think about it; it seems all underground and weird.

Yukari is a student who spends the majority of her time studying. One day she is chased by Atelier, a fashion design group consisting of George, a blue haired “bisexual”, Arashi, a punk (in the Sex Pistols sense of the word), Isabella a transvestite with brilliant make up and Miwako, a gothic lolita; Yukari wants no part of it and is quite rude about it.
However, as fate would have it, she drops her student passbook and is forced to find Atelier again. This time she realises how cool the world of fashion can be and agrees to take part in their wild schemes: she wants to have a life that means more than study.

Two things turned me off about this show at the start: the SD was definitely not to my liking and, frankly, Yukari was a bitch. Much of this was forgiven when Miwako did not know Yukari’s name and so dubbed her “Caroline”. Something about that speaks to me, just as it did in the case of “Stephanie”.
To be fair on one of these points, Yukari being a bitch is a fundamen of the series; she’s just got to learn not to be.

I could be wrong, but memory tells me that there was no music in this episode, which made it feel all the more detached from the real world; I felt kind of suffocated by the whole thing. This makes it sound like I didn’t like ParaKiss, but that’s far from the truth: I still have high hopes for this series.
I really liked the scene in which Miwako explained her feelings for fashion, and the fact that Yukari was big enough to apologise was a very strong sign. Atelier itself is very nicely designed, and gives the show a literal underground feel. The ideas of different people having different values could be very interesting if adequately portrayed.

The OP, “Lonely in Gorgeous”, is a large part of what attracted me to the show. It is an excellent piece that sounds like a NES game in places. It is somehow hypnotic, and captures a feeling that I would like and hope to get from the rest of the series.
The ED is what sealed the series for me – Franz Ferdinand’s “Do You Want To”, which I’ve listened to so many times in the last week that I’m surprised I haven’t OD’ed. It’s a deliberately pretentious, wanky song and it goes with ParaKiss so well. The dancing SD animation that they used for this was actually perfect in this context.

The whole idea of Paradise Kiss is character growth. I won’t like it if Yukari remains as she is, but I really just can’t see that happening … Fan reaction is mixed, but let’s keep going.