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Love Live!
Idol Project - What makes Love Live so special?
Unlike other series, the Love Live project was planned from the very beginning to be a full idol "experience". It was a collaborative project between ASCII Media Works' Degenki G's Magazine, the music label Lantis, and the anime studio Sunrise. It's not a standalone anime, nor is it a series that's done as an afterthought which attaches itself to a pre-existing popular item (e.g. games, actual idol groups, etc).
Since this idol project is meant from the get-go to be not "just" an idol anime series that's either attached to something else or a standalone anime product, all the elements mesh together well and don't hamper each other. For instance, there's another idol anime which main theme song was derived directly from the main vocal-less theme of its originating videogame. The result of that was a song that had kind of not-so-great lyrics... The words were clearly shoe-horned into the melody, resulting the overall song not being as good. Not only that, the characterizations of the idol group members suffered from being somewhat one-dimensional due to the fact that again, the series was derived from a videogame. Many other idol series were just not planned from the beginning to be an integrated multimedia project the same way Love Live was. Even the dance steps appearing in the Love Live PVs and anime projects were planned from the beginning to be able to be performed in real life:
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Love Live has great planning, but what about its actual execution as an idol anime show? Let's start with what I think is pretty much the most important thing about an idol show- The sing-and-dance numbers. To that end, Love Live just completely kicks ass:
HEALTH
WARNING:
EXPLOSION OF CUTE
In order to have really smooth animation of dancing, some tradeoff had to be made for CG but the results were still amazing- Full fluid animation of everyone dancing just like a professional Japanese idol group for every song. You seldom see this in idol shows, where in many other idol series I see just really bad CG for certain older shows or a whole lot of skipping/zooming around to save animation for some of the more recent ones. Either that, or unrealistic dancesteps were used because again unlike Love Live, not all the dances were designed to be danced in real life. For Love Live I could really get into their performances because so much of the dance moves are animated and they're real choreographed dance moves too!
Even the protagonists' main rival idol group puts up amazing dance moves in the second season
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Combine all of the above with great character designs and the individual personalities of the characters themselves, and we have the lovable Love Live!