Anime — Windy Tales

A short slice of life series about the adventures of a school digital camera club. And cats. And the wind.

True to its title, the wind is everywhere, in swirling and rushing animation, often home to hordes of cats frolicking in the air, sometimes just blowing around.

The premise -- girl sees cat on school roof while taking pictures of clouds, tries to catch it when it leaps off (and flies away on the wind), and falls, her fall broken by one of the teachers who just happens to come from a small village where the art of wind-working is a tradition -- is there mostly to give the small group of students some shared secret, as well as to excuse many indulgent scenes of wind and weather. And cats.

Between the off-beat premise, which never falls over into outright magical-girl, and the idiosyncratic art style, this series charmed me in a way that typical school-girl slice of life (Hidamari, Sketchbook,...) never does. However, I suspect that those are exactly the reasons why this series is quite so obscure, and out of print.