Mononoke the TV series is a spinoff of the series Ayakashi, which follows the life of the nameless medicine seller. Mononoke offers a very unique viewing experience since the series is animated using a traditional Japanese art style similar to that was often used during the Edo period.
While the animation is truly unique, sometimes you get a sense of tiredness watching it for a long period, which is why I’m glad the series didn’t go past 12 episodes. Though, despite that the animation style being very unique, it was not quite good enough to get a perfect scoring. The plot was interesting enough, and reminded me a lot of Mushi-Shi. Granted, as with both stories, I started to doze off half way through the series with the very slow plot lines, and the fact that the story didn’t really go anywhere with character development. Sadly, that is the one thing I’ve always found most important in any anime series. Mononoke doesn’t deliver this much at all, which made me a bit bias against the series. Even Mushi-Shi had a lot more development, granted the series went on 26 episodes.
Overall it wasn’t a bad series when you consider the overall makeup, but if it wasn’t for the originality the series probably would have been rated a low C, but instead received a B- in my book since the animation was truly unique and ventured into unknown fields, but it still didn’t make up for the lack of story and the extremely slow pace. If you are interested in unique anime series I would recommend Mononoke, but only if you are an avid anime fanatic and you enjoy both the old and the new. But, keep in mind Mononoke is actually a fairly recent series that was actually released in mid 2007! So I applaud the creators on the visual master piece, but the story doesn’t follow through, and the pace is too slow for my personal tastes.