Claymore attempts to be something like a new Berserk; most of it is derived from it and other similar works and there's very little originality throughout. It's overall quite entertaining if your expectations aren't very high, but it's also riddled with obvious flaws.

Animation

Mostly pleasing and nicely detailed throughout the show, the animation tragically breaks down during several action scenes due to the unimaginative use of grey blurs to convey the idea of the great speed at which swords are swung around. Seeing two enemies stand in front of each other, their bodies almost perfectly still, with a gray blur between them may work relatively well in a manga, where you're trained to fill in the gaps between a drawing and the next; it doesn't work as well in an anime, where you expect to actually see movement. I call this technique unimaginative as it's the most obvious one can envision among a plethora of different techniques that have been used so far both in anime and live action movies, one example being the alternation of very fast movements and slow-motion scenes.

The backgrounds and the character design are not bad at all, although they don't really show a particularly high production value; at least the the use of black borders has been avoided as much as possible, which is something I appreciate. There's too much of that about even in today's animation.

Sound

Yet another category where Claymore definitely doesn't shine is the sound. The soundtrack is absolutely forgettable and deserves no attention; the sound effects are the average stuff that's been used in anime since forever. The voice actors are nothing to write home about either, a couple of them being particularly annoying. Whenever a Claymore (a female fighter) releases her Yoki (some kind of power), becoming somewhat more beastly, the unlucky voice actress bends over backwards to make her voice rough and evil, delivering spectacular failures.

Story

The watcher should expect the usual mix of themes used so much in most shounen: fight to protect, comraderie, weak vs strong, good vs evil, etc etc. The whole show unfolds in a medieval setting where villages scattered about the countryside are occasionally infiltrated by monsters that devour the inhabitants one after the other, disguising as humans between one meal and the next. Half-human, half-monster women, the Claymores, are usually called to deal with those problems. They wander from one town to the next asthe organization, as they call it, gives them assignments; they struck down all the monsters they can find in the village and move on. As they use their beastly powers, their monstrous side eventually takes over - that's how a Claymore inevitably meets her end.

The plot is composed of short stories fit within a larger campaign that leads the main characters to the inevitable OMG HUGE FIGHT at the end; as the plot moves along the many details of the story and the setting are added to the initial sketch, often with little sense of continuity and without too much regard for the rules the writer himself set at the beginning, possibly making it difficult to maintain the suspension of disbelief required by most fantasy stories. The story doesn't really end; at least a second season will be needed to wrap everything up.

Story just isn't the strong part of any shounen of this kind, so my criticism here must be taken with a grain of salt. I do recognize the emotional pull certain arcs have and hats off to the creator of the manga for the ability to create within the reader/viewer's mind an attachment for certain characters in a short timespan, yet what I'm talking about here is a set of episodes that barely accounts for one third of the anime. The rest of it uses so many archetypes without changing any of them in any interesting way that one can't possibly rate the story anything higher than average.

Characters

Well, characters and character development aren't the strongest part of most shounen either. Claymore fails in an especially spectacular way since it sets the characters up as unimaginative examples of beauty and strength disregarding the most artistically interesting part of a character: where does he come from, what is his world view, if and how he changes and so on. Claymore's characters can be described best as a set of motivations: they are motivated to fight someone and to protect someone else. Additional details are chosen among the following: having lost a friend, having lost the parents, being in love and owing one's life to someone else. That's the end of it. Past events and motivations are taken from this small pool in different amounts and combinations and grafted on the "hopeless fighter" template. This is no way to do art.

Personal judgement

I enjoyed watching this anime one episode every week and experienced several times while it was airing the "I want the next episode!!" fever. It's been an entertaining experience for most of the time and I never really stopped liking it. This, of course, has to do a lot with the other things I was doing in that period: I simply needed something like this show, and true enough I got it and enjoyed it - and that's all there is to say.

Overall

An average rating for a very average show. Nothing to get too excited about, but do add it to your own list of mindless action series you may want to watch during those periods of your life ;)