Release Date: 2009-08-01 (Japan)

Much of the staff for Summer Wars also worked on “The Girl Who Lept Through Time” which is one of my all time favorite anime movies. You can tell from the style, that they have a very similar look. Aside from that, members have also had involvement in titles such as the .Hack series, Evangelion, Studio Ghibli, Gurren Laggan, and FLCL. So I think it’s safe to say my expectations are high.

Kenji Koiso’s secret crush Natsuki asks him to accompany her to her family’s home in Nagano for a summer job. He agrees immediately. Natsuki’s family is of the Jinnouchi clan dating back to the Muromachi era (1336~1573). They’ve all come together to celebrate the birthday of 90 year old Sakae. Kenji finds out his “summer job” is to pretend to be Natsuki’s fiance and dance together with her at the party. Kenji does his best to keep the act up when he gets a strange math problem sent to his cell phone. As he is a math genius he can’t resist solving it. Only problem is, once he does, he finds out the solution is an equation that causes a strange parallel world to collide with earth, and the only ones who can help him fix it is his new fake family.

Despera

Ryutaro Nakamura, Chiaki J. Konaka, and Yoshitoshi ABe have come together to make their first collaboration since Serial Experiments Lain for a new title named Despera. “The story centers around a 14 year old girl named Ain, who often builds devices despite the lack of scientific background for them. The sci-fi alternative period story is set in Tokyo during the Taishō era in 1922, one year before the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. ^{[quoted from wiki]“}

SE Lain was one of my first animes after really understanding what it was, and yes it was slightly traumatizing. However, after watching an AMV of Haibane Renmei (Another ABe work) I had an impulse to watch it. It became one of my favorite series, and I bought all the DVDs. I think we can expect that maybe Despera will be closer to Lain than anything, but it’s rather unpredictable as all other info is TBA.

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