Sunday night is usually gaming night (see BlogRiPinG), but all of the regulars except Rachel bailed, so Rachel and her sister and I watched shojou anime instead. Rachel's sister had never seen any anime before so some of the conventions needed explaining, but she seemed to enjoy it. Rachel likes shojou stuff, but most of the time if we watch anime we have to take her husband's (and the rest of the group's) sensibilities into account so it's usually something like Trigun, Ranma 1/2 or even (once) GTO (Scott liked that).
We ended up watching the first four episodes of Fruits Basket, all of the first disc of Risky Safety, and the first episode of I'm Gonna Be An Angel. I'd say that Fruits Basket was the biggest hit, and that we all agreed that Risky Safety (which I hadn't seen before, either) was kind of interesting but a bit too young to really compell us to watch more. I'm not sure how I'm Gonna Be An Angel went over--there was a fair amount of laughter, but it really is so odd that you almost have to laugh, without it really meaning that you like it. I happen to think it's a hoot, but I'm perfectly prepared to believe that it's too strange to appeal to everyone. The dances for all occasions really send me, though.
Fruits Basket is, I think, a relative rarity, in that its genre is "magical boyfriend." That is to say, the set-up is the same as the relatively common "magical girlfriend" (like, say, Tenchi Muyou), but with the sexes reversed: one normal girl with a bunch of male supernatural/alien/extra-dimensional potential suitors. In this case the girl, whose mother has recently died, and who is secretly living in a tent while going to the local high school falls in with the mysterious family on whose land she's living, and discovers their secret: each of them is possessed by the spirit of one of the animals of the Chinese Zodiac, and involuntarily transforms if embraced by a normal member of the opposite sex. I suspect you can see where this is going. The animation relies heavily on stylization and anime tropes (character design styles changing at the drop of a hat to mirror the emotional content, patterned background straight out of shojou manga, even some CGI smoke clouds when the characters transform). This one took a fair amount of explaining for the anime newbie.
I'm Gonna Be an Angel is strange, strange, strange, but in a really cheerful, candy-colored way. On the way to school, ordinary boy Yuusuke comes across a naked girl with a halo, he falls and accidentally kisses her, and she awakens and calls him her husband. He flees in panic, but then she shows up at his school (fully clad) as a transfer student. When he heads home to where he's living alone while his parents are abroad on business, he finds the house has been replaced by this astonishing pastel edifice out of Willy Wonka's fever dream by way of PeeWee's Playhouse. There, waiting to great him, are his new "bride" and her family of monsters: Dad is Frankenstein's Monster/Herman Munster, Mom is an elf, Big Brother is a vampire, Little Sister is I-don't-know-what, Big Sister is the Invisible Woman, and Granny is (what else could she be?) a Witch with a scruffy vulture familiar that looks just like her. They perform a musical number (!) to celebrate their moving in with their new son-in-law. And it gets weirder from there. The animation is stylized, and silly, full of bright Candy Land colors and designs; it's really something else.
Risky Safety is the story of an apprentice Shinigami (spirit of death) named Risky, and an apprentice angel named Safety who schizophrenically inhabit the same body; bad thoughts an impending disaster call forth Risky, who want to collect enough souls to graduate to full-fledged Shinigami; good thoughts bring out Safety, who seeks to thwart Risky and earn her own promotion. Moe (Mo-eh) is the young girl (middle school-age, maybe?) who becomes their battle-ground and keeper, more or less. The episodes are short, ten minutes each, and reasonably cute, but not really compelling if you're not in the target age group.