Paradise Kiss – 07

Summary:
At school, George gives Arashi his key back, telling everyone that Yukari has moved in with him. Yukari wakes up in the morning and finds that George is taking care of her every need, from making her meals to laying out her wardrobe. During lunch, Arashi acts cold toward Miwako, and hints that there’s something she hasn’t told him about (Hiroyuki). George gives Yukari a beautiful butterfly ring later that day at the studio, one that’s going to be part of her fashion show outfit. It’s a large ring, so George asks to have it back and Yukari reluctantly obliges. Yukari dreams that night about how she didn’t live up to her mother’s expectations. She wakes up to find a smaller butterfly ring on her finger. Overcome with emotion, a crying Yukari pulls herself up close to George in bed. But Yukari knows that she can’t rely on him, so she pursues her own opportunities, first having lunch with Mikako. Mikako then introduces her to a friend who’s running a model agency. On the way there, Yukari remembers how George let her have access to all of the clothes in his massive closet. He told her that he wanted her to wear them because the clothes are important to him (just like her). Mikako’s friend, named Shimamoto, initially keeps Yukari waiting while she talks on the telephone. When she finally does start to interview Yukari, she laughs at how serious Yukari is about modeling. Through her laughter, Shimamoto promises to turn Yukari into a top model.

The quality of the show has carried over fairly consistently from last week. And because I’m not shuddering at the production aspects, I’m enjoying the storytelling a bit more now. However, I have been noticing that the voice actors/actresses deliveries of lines just don’t have the same impact that they do in the manga. I dunno if it’s because I’m seeing this a second time and basically already know what’s coming, or if the animated version just lacks a lot the “punch” that the manga has. Most of the stuff that I’m missing is comedic material, which is understandably absent from the anime so that they can fit everything into a twelve episode series, but that humor is a very important part of what makes the manga so good.
All that having been said, they are still improving by a lot over some of the earlier quality, so this show is getting better. Like I noted last week, the overall production is a lot better when they don’t try to cover so many chapters in one episode (a solid three this episode). But again, the bad news is that with over 20 chapters left to cover in five episodes, odds are some of those might not be so good.