Bihada Ichizoku Ep. 01-02 - Maybe she's born with it; Maybe it's Insanity

I was really expecting a cute and mindless story about cute girls worrying about fashion and boys. Turns out, it's really not. Bihada Ichizoku (Beautiful Skin Family) is another series in the grand tradition of selling stuff to kids. But instead of trading cards or plastic wands, it's cosmetics. And the plot is only tangentially related to any sort of cosmetic products at all. The world beautiful skin competition is dominated by the Bihada family. The winner this year is Sara Bihada, and the runner up is her older twin sister, Saki Bihada. The family throws a fancy party to congratulate Sara, and hunky hunk man Tatsuya shows up. Sara dreams that he'll compliment her as well, but Saki becomes increasingly jealous of her sister's popularity. When the Bihada parents prepare to give Sara the Bihada family secret scroll, Saki steals it and runs away. Sara chases after her and sees her getting into a car with Tatsuya. ::gasp:: Three years later, Sara attends school and lives a somewhat more normal life. People still recognize her, but now they compare her to the current beauty skin champion, Saki. After Saki left, the Bihada family fell to ruin and the mansion and fortune were lost. Sara visits her destitute father, and Saki drops by to laugh at them. To be continued. O:

Okay, so it's better than I expected, but I wasn't really expecting much. The plot is a lot deeper than it could have been considering the topic, but that's not saying much. Jealous girls competing over who has the nicest skin still isn't very deep. In fact, you might say it's...SKIN DEEP. Sorry. The animation is really interesting. It looks like an older series, especially the way Tatsuya is drawn as a classic bishounen rather than the current stick figure boys these days. It's a little nostalgic, and it reminds me of those old fairy tale and classic novel anime series I used to watch. I really like the jealous demon eyes, and it would be so much cooler if the girls really were demon possessed. Alas, such is not the case. As it is, I can't really think of a reason for anyone to watch this unless he or she is bored, curious, interested in makeup, or some sort of completist who needs to watch all anime ever (you can't do it). It's not bad, just...bland. Each of the episodes is less than ten minutes long though, so I'll probably keep watching it to see if the plot turns into anything more interesting (spoiler: it probably won't).

--Ou-bento