The trials and adventures of Yurie Hitotsubashi, Japan's youngest god, continues in volume two of Kamichu!  This time around the poor god gets sick, has to play matchmaker, and even turns into a cat.  This quiet and gentle show has a lot of charm and warmth to it and is the perfect solution to someone who's wondering what to watch until the next Miyazaki film is released in region one.

Series background:

One day Yurie Hitotsubashi goes to school and confides to her best friend Mitsue that, well...the previous evening she became a god.  She's not sure what type of god she is, or what powers or abilities she has, but she's definitely a god.  When their classmate Matsuri overhears them, she decides that she'll be Yurie's new best friend.  After all, Matsuri's family owns a temple, and so she knows about god-type things.

Even though she's a god, and can see the other gods that inhabit the world, Yuri still thinks and feels like a school girl.  She has a big crush on a cute guy in her class, Kenji, but he doesn't even know her name.  All he's interested in doing calligraphy, and even with divine powers, though she's not really sure what powers she has, Yuri can't get him interested in her.

This volume:

The volume starts off with one of the weaker episodes so far.  Yuri catches a cold, and has to spend a few days in bed.  While she's gone, her friends miss her and wonder how she's doing.  With her fever running quite high, Yuri hallucinates that she is immaterial and flies around the town.  It's only fever dream though, or is it?

In the next episode, Yuri runs into a little trouble.  While giving advice to her fellow students, a young girl confides to Yuri that she's in love with a boy in school.  She doesn't know how to get to know him better. Yuri does her best to try to help the girl, but when she finds out she's in love with Kenji too, the young god isn't sure what she should do.

In one of the sweeter episodes of the series, Yuri, Mitsue, and Matsuri all go to the beach one hot summer day and discover an old abandoned beach-side shop.  The girls explore the building and wonder what it was like back in the day when it was filled with fun-loving teens.

Later that evening, Yuri goes to a party that is thrown to welcome her into the association of gods.  She gets her official god costume and meets some of the other gods, including the ones the used to inhabit the old sea-side shop.  The one thing in the world they really want is to see what happened to the young people who once spent their summers lounging in the shop.   Yuri finds a way to grant them their wish.

The volume wraps up with a rather odd show.  Yuri's cat, Toma, starts to act strange and so Yuri follows her one night after the cat sneaks out of the house.  It turns out that all of the cats on the island have started following a large tough cat who teaches them how to fight dogs and live a better life.  Now the leader wants all of the cats to rebel against the humans and it's up to Yuri, in cat form, to convince them not to.

While this wasn't quite as good as the first volume, it didn't have as much humor or charm as volume one, this was still a good disc.   While the first episode didn't really go anywhere, and the fourth one was just a little odd, they both had a good amount of charm that kept them interesting.  The best episodes of the series are reminiscent of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, with engaging characters, sweet stories, and detailed settings.

Yuri and her friends are never fighting for their lives; their problems are on a smaller scale.  How cheer up a friend or please an acquaintance are what they are concerned about, and that is a nice change of pace.

Audio:

This disc has a stereo soundtrack in the original Japanese as well as an English dub, also in stereo.  I alternated tracks, as I usually do, and found that both tracks were very good.  The Japanese voices seemed to fit the characters a little bit better, but the English cast did a very good job matching the dialog to the mouth movements and putting emotion into their performances.  Being a recent show, there audio quality was very good, with distortion, dropouts, and other defects being nonexistent.

Video:

The widescreen anamorphic image was very nice.   There was a wide range of colors used and they were all reproduced very well.  The lines were a little on the soft side but the image was clear.  On the digital front, there weren't any issues worth noting.  Even aliasing, something that plagues animation, was absent.  A very nice looking show.

Extras:

The only extra included with this disc is an art gallery of images from the Japanese release.
 
Final Thoughts:

This is the type of show that Hayao Miyazaki would make if he ever had the urge; charming and wonderfully engaging.  This light comedy is not only funny and cheerful, but also creative and unique.  Taking place in a world just like ours, only a bit stranger, this show is a lot of fun to watch.
If you're looking for a nice light show with a lot of appeal, look no further.  A strong recommendation.