Sparrow's Hotel

Sparrow's Hotel is a fun, fast-paced romp that gives off this atmosphere of something that should have aired on Adult Swim- sharp, witty, fast-paced, and absurd. The story is built upon a strong premise with a lot of iterative potential- a group of people working in a hotel, each one with quirks and oddities that set them apart from one another. Namely, you have Satou, a femme fatale former assassin who uses her proficiency for violence to protect the hotel from troublemakers. Though she is pretty funny, I actually prefer the rest of the cast, like the petite yet business-minded Tamaki Shiokawa, her obsessive older ... brother simply named Shiokawa, the inept internal company spy Yuu, or Misono, the longsuffering part-timer. Each episode covers a kind of story that could only really be told in the context of running a hotel, and provides comedy at a nice pace from start to finish. My favorite episode of the whole run was Episode 9, where they host a con, and have to navigate the chaos that inherently comes with such a venture.

Next, the art is a strange beast. At first, it looks like genuine garbage, as though it was put together in flash or something, given that it looked flat, stilted, and amateurish. However, by episode 7, when they change the OP, and Misono inexplicably becomes blonde, the whole art style suddenly changes, and the production values shoot through the roof. The whole thing all of a sudden looks so crisp and professional, and it uses this bizarre improvement to the full extent of its potential, making for a second half that is far superior to the first.

The sound has a more consistent quality throughout, with good pacing and a sense of how to match the energy of a given moment, with music that is good yet not distracting.

The characters are the real strong point of this anime, however, as the cast feels like it has such natural chemistry despite the whole show only being about 36 minutes total. Of them, my favorites are definitely Tamaki Shiokawa, the dedicated manager of Sparrow's Hotel, and Misono, the withdrawn yet witty part-timer who is more often than not stunned by the absurdity of the things that go on at his place of work. Shiokawa is great as a kind of central point between the whole cast, and her capability to control the situation when contrasted with her stature makes her witty retorts all the more funny in context. Meanwhile, Misono is a normal guy that only wants to get through his shifts, but he regardless finds himself caught up in the antics at hand, and even finds that these people he works with are his only real friends- once again, it is the contrast he represents that elevates his comedy. Overall, even with the issues it has with production for the first half, Sparrow's Hotel is a fun romp of an anime that's well worth the minimal time investment required to watch it.

Sparrow's Hotel is about a woman who works in a hotel on the rowdy side of town. She is talented, beautiful, and just happens to be the hotel's bouncer.

Starting this anime I had very low expectations for it. People on MAL gave it a pretty lousy review and frankly, the cover image for the anime looks like crap. Surprisingly enough, the low budget production actually wasn't too bad in the first episode, or the second, or the third. I found myself laughing and really enjoying the show. The poor art quality actually worked for the show and its level of humor. It wasn't ... until the 7th episode that things started getting weird.

Have you seen an anime in which the MCs are anime creators themselves and the project they are working on goes through a massive change in the middle of production? Well, Sparrow's Hotel is a RL representation of that.

All of a sudden on the 7th episode it looks like the whole production moved to a different company with new artists and possibly new voice actors. It was very unsettling since I watched all the episodes back to back. The art style actually got better after the change, however, since it was such a big difference, it was very distracting. I couldn't get over the change in time to truly enjoy the rest of this anime.

All in all, give this anime a try expecting it to be what be what it is: a poor soul that seemed to want to do better but couldn't.

A simple litmus test for how much merit one might find in Sparrow's Hotel can be done by the brief uttering of one of its jokes: "Cute girl with large breasts is good at fighting". Now, if you are presently convulsing in laughter with tears in your eyes and a pain in your sides at the mere thought of that "joke", boy are you in luck, Sparrow's Hotel uses that joke repeatedly! Hell, it's the only joke it has! None of that pesky "variety" garbage to encroach on your love affair with that perfect, solitary joke. As such, Sparrow's Hotel's doubtlessly masterful sense of humor ... will remain laudable for as long as one finds this lonesome joke funny. For most of us, however, that moment will arrive mere seconds into the first episode.

Sayuri Satou, a busty and overly capable bouncer for a successful hotel, is somewhat renowned for her eccentricity and her overzealousness. She tends to go overboard and treat the simple task of calming the guests as that of an assassination or something of comparable severity. That is the entire premise. The meat of Sparrow's Hotel rarely strays from this barebones scenario. Various quirky characters occasionally enter the fray, but they are similarly marred by being one-note affairs. For instance, the sis-con is characterized entirely by his unhealthy affinity for his sister, and the grizzled biker character never diverges from his trite archetype. This isn't necessarily an inherent flaw - better comedies such as Cromartie High School have thrived on this sort of characterization - but the jokes associated with these characters are just as banal as their cardboard cutout personalities would suggest. It'd be a stretch to even consider incessant reoccurrences like Satou fervidly beating up gangsters a joke, but Sparrow's Hotel sure tries its darndest to frame it as one. And as one might expect, the results are invariably poor.

In of presentation, Sparrow's Hotel started out as something unique. The show had an art direction straight out of the early 90s, but even by those standards, it would've been hopelessly deficient. The animation was choppy and innumerable corners were cut, resulting in a product that the director even had to apologize for on of how shameful it was. While this would have looked bad in the 90s, it feels entirely alien in 2013. Being remarkably bad is hardly commendable, but it made the show almost worth watching just to marvel at the fact that this was a show that existed in today's modern anime climate. "Almost" being the operative word there. "Was" being the other, because Sparrow's Hotel abruptly changes its art direction to a rounder style that is more in line with modern sensibilities halfway through the series. While it might sound like a positive turn of events, it takes away the only thing that made the show noteworthy: all we're left with is the comedy, and we already know how that turned out.

And that's the long and short of it. Sparrow's Hotel is an abject failure of a show in every respect. Avoid like the plague.