Aoi Bungaku (青い文学)

Aoi Bungaku (青い文学) is the most recent anime I've seen. It's a series containing 6 stories adopted from Japanese novels:

(1) No Longer Human (Dazai Osamu)
(2) In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom (Ango Sakaguchi)
(3) Kokoro (Natsume Soseki)
(4) Run, Melos! (Dazai Osamu)
(5) Spider's Thread (Ryunosuke Akutagawa)
(6) Hell Screen (Ryunosuke Akutagawa)

I like Run,Melos best because of its storytelling, where the personal experience of the character (playwright) is being paralleled with the story within the story (Run Melos play); this is being done while the storytelling interchanges between scenes of the playwright's life and flashbacks with the scenes of the play. Furthermore, the whole theme and the quote about the pain burdened by the one waiting vs the one making another wait is very interesting and is a new insight for me.

No Longer Human is my second favorite. The visuals are stunning, the score is great, the main character is a troubled creep :) However, the story is actually a bit slow, was it not for the visuals and the score, it could have been dragging (No Longer Human is 4 episodes long; the others are 2 episodes long or less)

I could have really liked In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom a lot more if not for the color and artwork. I like the musical/song segment where the lady-wife sings along with the pretty backgrounds though (I'm thinking of drawing an image like that one above and placing it above my bed).

Spider Thread and Hell Screen are okay, I like Spider Thread a bit more, maybe because Hell Screen is too dark for me although I like the idea that the painter drew X (noun) then requested Y (verb) simply for the sake of painting X. The last half (hell and thread) of the Spider Thread is really familiar, it is quite similar to a story in a Chinese philosophical comic strip from a book that I used to borrow from my grade school library.

Kokoro is the most unremarkable among the 6.. though the nice thing about this one is that it shows two differing perspective ("summer"/"winter") of the same events.

Not really a fan of the guys behind Death Note, Prince of Tennis, and Bleach. Nonetheless, Takeshi Obata is involved in No Longer Human and Kokoro; Takeshi Konomi with Run, Melos!; and Tite Kubo with Spider's Thread and Hell Screen.

Oh also, Sakai Masato (I just saw him play as Yamanami in NHK's Shinsengumi) serves as the narrator appearing before every episode introducing the authors and the stories. He's also the voice actor of EVERY "main character" of each story.

Aoi Bungaku is good! I like series with several interesting short stories.