First Impressions: Kamichu! – 01

So, um, I’m not sure I understood enough of the first half to give a summary, so I’m just going to post some impressions. If you want to watch the episode in screens to see more screenshots, see lolitron’s post. Ignore his crazed pedo rantings though, reading it will make you go blind.
Our story revolves around Hitotsubashi Yurie who gains magical powers (powers of god I think) by saying “Kamichu.” Well, not at first, but she does by the end of the episode when she has to save Kenji from the storm. Her friends, Saegusa Matsuri and Shijiu Mitsue support her along the way. Yurie’s character really grows by the end of the episode as she’s able to confess to him in the falling scene (a la Sen to Chihiro). It’s a damn shame he doesn’t know who she is (which was a funny scene), but I can see them developing a relationship.
The production quality of this show is really good. The animation is definately not what I expected from just looking at the website’s art style. It’s much more refined and not as vibrant as I originally thought (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). The background music is amazing, in a very Studio Ghibli way (I’ve got the storm rescue scene on loop right now just for the music). It’s soft most of the time, but really gets you during the important scenes. In fact, everything about this series screams Miyazaki Hayao, though my research shows that it’s by a slew of Read or Die staff, but having not seen that, it’s hard for me to compare.
I’m most likely going to keep watching this series for production value alone, if nothing else.