Shokugeki No Soma

Up front, I dont recommend this anime (though I do recommend the manga). Its not a cooking show, its a shounen battle manga, but with no actual battles, in their stead you get cooking. The cooking is fun, for the minute or half that you get to see it happening.

-STORY-

The story follows the manga decently, though it seems to speed up and slow down at its own pace making me want to skip around (I resisted). I think its because they try to hard to make the cooking LOOK like some kind of action, with weird visuals and other things which overall just ruins the overall feel of cooking in the anime.

-ART-

What can I say, it uses the new standard for art in anime, so it looks good, and has those extended food frenzy moments, but there's nothing super amazing that awes me.

-SOUND-

Again, like with how they do visuals for cooking, they added some kind of concert, or orchestra music that just doesn't fit with the cooking, like they tried to make it seem like a battle action anime. Its kinda annoying to me after the 3rd episode. To be fair it wasn't always like this, at the end of the first episode while talking with his father the music was very nice, and it followed in the beginning of the second episode. After looking back at the episodes I came to a conclusion, they use fast pace or actiony orchestra music when they want to give some kind of feeling of action or battle taking place, and that just doesn't work well into the anime.

-Character-

Theres a wide range of strange characters in this anime, but with 6 episodes in there's very little actually development of characters going on, and to be honest I don't think there will be much if any in the future, aside from possible the girl who almost fails in the beginning.

-ENJOYMENT-

I enjoy and love the F*** out of the manga, and I think ill go read it again today with all this thinking back to it. But the anime was annoying, with how they stretched it all out you rarely get to see much cooking (episode 1 and 2 should have been one episode). That said if you watch the first episode you might understand, you feel like there wasn't much that happened in it, and your right, it felt like you watched a 10 minute episode. But not because you lost yourself in it, but because when you think about it you dont know where those minutes where, there just wasn't enough happening to fill it.

-OVERALL-

The art and sound did not mesh well with one another as this should not have been treated as an "actiony" anime, but as a cooking one. The story and characters works fine, but its not something where I came to care about the characters, or whats happening at all, yes its only 6 episodes so far, but that's quite a few episodes. If it was 3 I can understand not caring even a little about anything, but 6? Overall the anime was all over the place but never where it should have been, like it was having an identity crisis.