The New Matthew’s Anime Blog

DVD Review: Shugo Chara! Amulet Box 1

As y’all know… or probably don’t know since I haven’t been blogging that much lately… I’m a huge fan of Shugo Chara!, both the manga and anime. Unlike a certain other anime that Satelite made last year (Kami-chama Karin), Shugo Chara! turned out so well that I knew I was going to get the DVDs only a few episodes in — so there goes my DVD budget for the next few months with the purchase of the Shugo Chara! Amulet Box 1 last week (though I didn’t pay the price that’s listed on the box since I got it from Amazon), including 13 episodes plus other extras.

Now let’s go through the goodies inside, starting with this:

An almost life-size wallscroll of Amu-chan (much bigger than the Sakura ones I have) — extremely kawaii as advertised. At first, they were going to include an Amu-chan “big towel,” but decided otherwise (I wonder why…).

 

The box includes 4 DVDs with 13 episodes in total, each with a different shugo chara on it, a DVD with special features, a drama/radio CD, and a soundtrack CD. A 23 page color booklet has summaries and staff comments for each episode, character profiles, and an interview with director Kenji Yasuda (Shugo Chara! is the first show that he’s directed). He talks about how he was offered the job to direct and also what he does to make the show interesting and easy to understand for its intended younger audience. The storyboard for Amulet Heart’s transformation bank is also in the interview.

 

The special features DVD includes an interview with the voice of Ran, Kana Asumi (AKA Asumin), who most of you probably know better as Yuno from Hidamari Sketch. It’s pretty much the usual questions about her role, what character she likes, so on, but still a watch for her fans (like myself).

The pilot film is rather interesting — Kenji Yasuda talks about how he made it to show the staff at Satelite what exactly they’d be working on, and also get a idea of the general look and feel of show (such as the textures used for clothing). Some of the cuts were later touched up and reused in the show itself, like the cut above which was used in the OP.

The actual DVDs are pretty bare bones but with excellent picture quality as expected, with the first including some interesting commentary from Kanae Itou (Amu), Kana Asumi (Ran), and director Kenji Yasuda on the first two episodes. Kanae-chan and Asumin seem to be quite big fans of Suzuki-kun, and even Yasuda-kantoku said that Suzuki-kun might be the star of an episode sometime soon. Anything on when we might find out what his name is?

And that’s the first of four DVD boxes to come for Shugo Chara!. Yes, buying the individual DVDs would’ve been a bit cheaper, but I’m glad that they decided to put out a box every 13 episodes to make things easier to manage. We’re just about done with the second batch of 13 episodes — next week’s episode about Nadeshiko looks very interesting (I’ll keep quiet for those who haven’t read the manga) — and I’m looking forward to seeing where we go the second half of the show.

And, Amu-chan kawaii yo Amu-chan! (of course you’d say that).

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