There were some good gags, sight and otherwise (the weed, and the indirect kiss) and the general youthful foolishness of the leads was exposited quite well. Funnily enough, it helps when Fujiwara is around because she talks so much she pre-empts the narration, which feels like a welcome break. The funniest of the three was the bento chapter, and it may not be a coincidence that it was the one that most prominently featured Fujiwara Chika ( Kohara Konomi), the cheerfully airheaded student council secretary and general relationship obstacle/facilitator. There were three mini-stories packed into this episode, with each principal “winning” one of them and one ending in a draw (I don’t know if that will be the case every week). The gag is that the two of them are in-love with each other but so driven by pride and the idea that “love is war” that they’ll be damned if they’re going to be the first to confess. You climb the hills mainly by casting those people as vulnerable (check) and by not taking the material too seriously (check). Romcoms about two essentially unlikable people have some hills to climb, and student council veep and general ojou-sama Kaguya Shinomiya ( Koga Aoi) and seitoukaichou and top-ranked student Shirogane Miyuki ( Furukawa Makoto) are pretty unlikable by design.
#Zetsubou sensei youll be laughing 7 years from now series#
I will say that it worked quite well for me with Sankarea for the most part (it might have even been a top 10 series if 2012 hadn’t been an all-time great anime year), but it remains to be seen if it will with this series.Īpart from that, what essentially saved this premiere from going down the sinkhole was that it actually was funny a good chunk of the time. Shouwa Genroku certainly represented a big stylistic shift but 2012’s Sankarea was a lot closer to this post-SHAFT vibe Kaguya-sama is repping. Hey, I’d change my name if I used to work at SHAFT too, but old habits sometimes die hard. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Hatekayama-sensei cut his teeth at SHAFT, though he worked under the name Omata Shinichi there. That unrelenting quality – which extended to the visuals too – gave the whole episode a sort of SHAFT quality which hung in the air like a slightly-off smell in a crowded elevator. One of the oldest rules of joke-telling is never explain the joke. I don’t need or want that – I’ll laugh when something is funny (and I often did with this ep) and I won’t if it isn’t. And it created a sort of implicit hand-holding by the narrative to make sure we knew when we were supposed to laugh. I certainly have nothing against Aoyama Yutaka as an actor, or even with his performance here, and I get that the narration is part of the gag construction.
That really means the strong feeling it elicits comes down to execution I guess, and the jury would still be out on that for me.įirst off let’s get the negatives out of the way, so we can focus on the good parts. I mean premise wise, it’s strictly retread tires with one twist (albeit the twist is central to the plot). It’s certainly not awful, so hard to get why some folks would feel strongly in that direction – but it didn’t strike me as being anything all that exceptional, either. I liked a lot about this first episode, some stuff about it bothered me, but my main reaction in the end was mild puzzlement over why this series seems to be such a big deal. So yeah, my expectations had to be pretty damn high – but the tempestuous reactions of manga readers had me thinking I was either going to love this series or hate it.įunnily enough, it was neither. And it’s directed by Hatakeyama Mamoru, fresh off one of the finest anime of the decade in Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu (which counts most of all). It’s published in a seinen magazine (which is probably worth more). Still, in all, this is one of the best aggregator-reviewed romcom manga out there (for whatever that’s worth). But though I haven’t read the Kaguya-sama (fuck me if I’m going to type that whole title out one more time this week) manga, it almost feels like it because a lot of folks have – and it seems as if almost all of them have strong feelings about it one way or the other. Usually with those series I’m either familiar with the material and extremely confident, or going in cold turkey on a hunch. But I was feeling oddly trepidatious going into this premiere. And it’s a big one too, the third of my top-level expectations shows for the season. Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen is the last of the major new series on my radar for this somewhat undersized winter schedule. “I Will Make You Invite Me to a Movie, ‘Kaguya Wants to Be Stopped, Kaguya Wants It”
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