After various urgings from people whose opinions I respect, I got Shingu (on DVD) and recently watched it (after a bit of struggling with Linux DVD players and especially deinterlacing).

(It amuses me that the shipping to Canada was almost as expensive as the DVD release itself.)

So here, have some reactions and notes:

• everyone who has praised this has done so for a good reason. It is totally worth your time (and your $20).

  I'm pretty sure that this will make my best N of 2011 when I write it. It easily would have made my best N of 2010 if I had seen it last year.

(If you want to have a completely unsullied and un-influenced viewing of the show, stop reading now.)

• Nayuta is great. It's a good thing, because she is at the heart of the show.

  (You can tell that she is the real protagonist because she is the character who gets the real emotional development over the course of the series. By contrast, Hajime barely changes.)

• Someone should do a 'many faces of Nayuta' page, if it hasn't already been done somewhere (this and this give you a taste of what it would be like). It doesn't need to be distorted faces, because the animators give Nayuta so many normal expressions too. Even her eyebrows are expressive.

  (There's one scene where she goes through about three or four emotions in a row, and it's all done through the eyebrows.)

• I think Romi Park's voice acting for Nayuta is the first time I've been conscious of how good a job a seiyuu was doing. It's not that it's showy (in fact it's basically invisible), but her delivery completely supports Nayuta's various emotional shifts that result in all of those expressions. Without such a convincing emotional delivery, the rest of it would fall flat; instead, it's so well done that I didn't even notice, it was just perfectly real.

  (Yes, I'm being neurotic in writing her name as 'Romi Park' instead of the more common 'Romi Paku' or 'Paku Romi'.)

• I like how Hajime's room is realistically messy. Shingu is full of little details like that.

• like other people, I did not find the OP or ED to be particularly impressive. Neither song particularly grabbed me, and only the OP is animated (the ED is scrolling text).

• it's interesting how fast the look of animation gets dated. Shingu was made in 2001, but it looks very different from recent animation and comes across as seeming fairly old-fashioned. One of the things I particularly noticed is that static shots shake very slightly, I suspect from cell alignment not being completely precise from photo to photo, whereas I'm now used to shots being absolutely rock-solid (because they are at least computer composited if not entirely digital).

  Also, I'm spoiled; DVD resolution now looks dowdy compared to the routine use of 720P in fansubs. And I maintain that modern fansub subtitles really do look much better than DVD subtitles.

• I think it's best to carefully ignore what the show tells you about how Hajime's mother does her work. The work is fine and realistic; the details of how it's done, not so much (if nothing else, the memorization bit). Even given that this was made in 2001, I have no idea what the staff were thinking.

Vague spoiler warnings for the following:

• I'm happy that the show did not attempt to explain the situation with Muryou. Some things are fine to remain mysterious because they ultimately don't matter to what the show is about.

• the more I think about it, the more I can understand the emotional logic of why Nayuta winds up making a connection to Hajime. Out of all of the people around her, Hajime is both an outsider (and so not influenced by the baggage of who and what she) and someone who is in on the secrets so she can be open around him.

  (Muryou does not count as an outsider, not in this way.)

• given that Momoe Sanemori (the Sanemori matriarch) is around 113 years old, she may not literally be Nayuta's grandmother but a step or two further away. On the other hand, who knows; Nayuta does specifically call her 'grandmother', and Japanese does have a specific term for great-grandmother.

  (We know Momoe's age from the rediscovered old school movie. It was explicitly made exactly 100 years ago, and in it Momoe is a middle schooler just like Nayuta is now.)

I have other things to say about Shingu, but they're going to wind up in separate entries because this got long.