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RECReviewed by William "Tony" Cooley
Aka Onda is an twenty-year-old aspiring seiyu (voice actress), who ends up living with 26-year-old, Matsumaru Fumihiko, after she is left homeless from an apartment fire. The two met during a chance encounter when Matusmaru was stood up by a co-worker one evening outside of a movie theater. Matsumaru works for a snack foods company and is a young marketing agent in charge of a new ad campaign for a snack food. During casting for the voice of the product's mascot, who does he see auditioning for the part? It's Aka! (But they have to act like they don't know each other to not seem suspicious) This is the main crux of the storyline. Through living and working together Matsumaru deals with caring for someone else in his life, and Aka learns that becoming a voice actor is hard work, but not nearly as hard as dealing with affairs of the heart.
The art direction and pacing for this series are pretty good. It has a very rich feel to it, with warm sunsets washing scenes in orange, and night sequences awash in blue. The production values for a series so short are usually lower, but this time TBS went all out. The voice actors seem to match the characters well, and no one is unbelievable, which you usually find in these kind of comedies. Despite all this praise, I still didn't like the series as much as its flaws seem to drag the entire experience of watching it down. The romantic comedy genre is really flooded with much better writing than what REC has. With REC the execution is flawless, but the core is barely mediocre.
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Director:
Ryutaro Nakamura
The plot for this story is as cliché as it comes. Boy is a pervert and lovable loser with a heart of gold. Girl with Audry Hepburn complex is naive and with an impossible dream. Sexual innuendo is all over the place in this series, which normally is a good thing, but generally you have enough invested in the characters that you are rooting for them. This is where REC fails. Maybe it's the brevity of the series, or episode length (9 episodes each about 10 minutes long), but I never once felt connected to any of the characters. This series tries so hard to be Honey and Clover but falls WAAY short. The characters are flat, the story is uninteresting, and while the voice actor element attempts to add something new to the story, it seems to trivialize the position. I wonder if Seiyu really are this flighty and flakey. Generally if there is some redeeming aspect to a mediocre series, I'll still pick it up, but I can't RECommend *heh* this as a "must have" purchase for anyone. If it's on sale, maybe, but I wouldn't bump anything off my wish list for REC. 