Just finished watching the Gravitation anime. I have quite a few volumes of the manga and had seriously high hopes for the adaptation. Sadly, it just doesn't work. They try to squeeze too much into too few episodes (thirteen in all). As a result, certain characters (Maiko) and settings (the highschool, Shuichi's home) are done away with as Shuichi and Hiro are made at least a year older in order to have graduated school and free up their commitments.
But that removes a great deal of the tension and atmosphere from the original story. Rather than starting off as a talented but raw highschool band, the anime kicks off with the pair already having landed a deal with Tohma Seguchi's production company, essentially skipping and/or mishmashing anything in the earliers volumes not directly related to Shuichi/Yuki romance.
That being said, the romance itself feels horribly contrived in the anime, and only superficially resembles the awesome heat between the two main characters which gave the manga its name.
Despite being older, Shiuchi is much brattier in the anime and cloyingly self-obesessed. His love for Yuki is maintained only by illogical and
baffling reasoning, and several of the better characters who weren't done away with have relatively little screentime. The one-note joke Sakano gets as much as Hiroshi for god's sake!
The character designs with the notable exception of Shinji are as close to manga as one can reasonably expect. Shinji though, looks less like a cute stylish eighteen year old than he does the tomboy-ish member of a magical girl group.
I like the music, but the same few songs get repeated/recycled quite often, so it can become irritating if you were expecting something to rival Macross Plus or Cowboy Bebop.
The area most worthy of praise would be the acting. Ryutaro Okiayu, Kappei Yamaguchi, Tomokazu Seki, Ai Orikasa, Hiromi Tsuru, Yatsunori Matsumoto - all big names in Japanese voice acting and the first two in particular are given license to let loose and be as funny as they like. ^^ However, Matsumoto (Hiroshi) who has played the likes of Gourry and
Dick Saucer before gets relatively little in the way of humorous dialogue, which is a shame because I think he'd be perfect to spout off some off the things Hiro says in the manga that had me rolling. ^^
So all in all, this is okay if you've not read the manga and aren't going in with unrealistic expectations, don't mind a spoiled major character with no real emotional depth and aren't expecting a decent ending. ^^;
There's a Gravitation OVA as well apparently, but unless I hear that it more closely follows the manga than its animated predecessor, I think I'll pass on it.