Spice and Wolf

Furries of the World Unite. I'm not really much of a Fur-person... other than the catgirls in Dominion Tank Police the closest thing to cat ears that ever did it for me was Makoto in Kanon - and she wasn't really being a fox at the time. This one is pretty odd. Lovestory... middle-ages young grain merchant travels city to city teaching wolf-spirit-girl (who has conned him into tagging along) the complexities of a pseudo-japanese middle-age mercantile system. Plot points range from cost of transport affecting sales to supply and demand crashes related to extenuating externality market adjustments to specie fluctuation in metals based monetary policies. Needless to say, Horo the wolf gets confused a lot... and is really only interested in the man, the cart full of apples, and keeping away from shepherds. Hard to fault her there - as the long droll economics lesson gets pretty old. The Japanese choose some really screwy shit to build plots around. This one, I think, plays as some strange outgrowth of a complex game mechanic. It feels like someone built an anime out of a weird Nintendo DS game user manual (which, considering there is a game, might well be true). That said - there IS a really good dynamic to the relationship between these two - and yes it's certainly not 'new' territory - but that doesnt mean that a lovestory told slowly through struggle is necessarily a bad thing. Horo is wily and devious (as one might expect from a wolf) but with just enough of a sense of lonely fragility that she seems vulnerable (and enough of a dirty trick gleam in her eye that you're seldom sure how much is an act) - and watching her work Lawrence over the course of the series is classic tsundere anime fun. The atmosphere of this one is good... the art, the music, the expressions, the pacing - it all folds together very well. With only 13 episodes and no real compelling arc to the story it's only the boy/girl relationship that makes this worth watching - but that also means this is dialog-heavy for an adventure story. They do a great job flushing out this relationship - and it ends up being a bit more captivating than most. This one snuck up on me - and I found I kept watching it. +++ clean art, Horo will make you appreciate tails --- economics + furries = high barrier to entry 6/10 Unlicensed in North America Original Run: January 9, 2008 – March 26, 2008