[Kaoru Chujo]

No worries about Hanazawa Kana. She seems to be working from Zange's fake-nice voice outwards, so she can start where she's comfortable. I have no problem with the voice, since I haven't read much of the manga. But it does make me wonder if maybe they originally planned to have Kana-chan do Nagi and Tomatsu do Zange -- their voices would seem more suitable that way -- but were knocked out by Tomatsu at the audition and switched them. There was apparently a rumor that it took a long time to cast this show.

Perhaps I wasn't quite as bowled over by this episode as by previous ones, but still enjoyed it a lot. In this ep, I felt a sudden breath of wonder at Sawashiro Miyuki's performance in the last few minutes of the ep. Really great. Tomatsu slipping back and forth from natural testy kami to ojousama there was a trip, too.

I note that in the final credits, there are only eight key animators named. Whereas there were over twenty for ep3. That might explain the comparative simplicity of the animation. Not as simple as most shows, but simpler than we have become used to in this one.