Shugo Chara (Anime) Review

Shugo Chara is written by Peach-Pit, and is published by Kodansha. The anime is directed by Kenji Yasuda, and licensed by Crunchyroll.

Shugo Chara is an anime with a fairly interesting concept, although, I think that it is also one of those animes that you either like or don’t like. The storyline follows Hinamori Amu and her friends as the try to keep an evil company by the name of Easter from finding the Embryo, a magical heart egg that can grant any wish.

Heart eggs represent the dream in every child’s heart, and sometimes the eggs come out from the child and hatch into a Guardian Character. Amu and her friends all have these Guardian Characters, and can use them to character transform in order to stop the contaminated X eggs from causing havoc. Normally, a person only has one or two guardian characters, but Amu is special and has three, and later on, four guardian characters.

Anyway, as previously mentioned, Shugo Chara has an interesting concept, and I enjoyed the storyline quite a bit. This anime falls into the “Magical Girl” category, and while I’ve never watched Sailor Moon, I imagine that it is similar in its presentation as Sailor Moon is. Which brings me to the pacing. While the pacing is generally good throughout the show, there are some episodes that caused me to wonder why they were doing what they were doing in the episode. These episode really weren’t needed as the didn’t really provide anything for the storyline, they were just there to be there. But, while they weren’t really needed, they weren’t necessarily boring. They were also well spaced out, so it wasn’t much of an issue in the long run. I have found that animes with similar presentations do the same thing, so maybe it has something to do with the genre? I’m not sure.

Alright, next is the animation! As expected from an official anime, the animation is smooth and portrays the characters movements well. Their movements match their emotions extremely well, even if you didn’t know exactly what was going on, you would be able to tell how a character felt about it. There’s one character who acts like a jerk most of the time so no one that he cares about gets involved in his problems, and his movements subtly give away the fact that he’s faking being a jerk. Although, if you don’t know that he’s faking it, you probably won’t notice it, just like with a real human being. This really impressed me when I noticed it, as I had not previously noticed until I found out that he was faking it.

The art also holds up to anime standards. Personally, though, I thought the eyes were a little too big at first, but later on I realized that they added to the overall art style of the series.

The characters in the show are pretty solid. Even though they have super powers, they are still very believable characters as they still go to school and face problems that some real people face. Like, being who you are verses who everyone thinks you are, and liking someone but being unsure if they like you back are examples of some of the problems the characters face. And one of the characters was almost kidnapped once, which causes her parents to be super protective and blame each other for the incident ever even happening. This blame game causes them to constantly fight, and causes previously mentioned character to wish with all her heart that she could make them smile and laugh again. Out of all the characters, though, my favorite would have to be Ikuto. He’s really cool, and usually behaves similarly to a stray cat. I’m a really big fan of human characters that either have cat ears (these characters get bonus points if they also have a cat tail), or behave like a cat, and Ikuto is all of these things.

Overall Shugo Chara was an interesting and fun watch. There isn’t an English Dub out, but if you don’t mind watching it subbed then I would definitely recommend it.

Before signing off, I’m going to leave you a picture of Ikuto being a kitty-kitty and a video with my favorite song in the series.

This video is uploaded by iAznReDii

Later.