Cinnamon Ass - Reborn Like a Zombie

Gokujyo Seitokai (The Best School Council) Episode 1 - Dear Mr. Poppit

OP - Koiseyo Onna no Ko (Yukari Tamura) - hurray, I can tell her voice straight off now! Well, it's perky, and the animation is a complete ripoff of Sensei no Ojikan AND Azumanga Daioh (surely it's not actually possible to be so brazen?). Fanboys rejoice, fangirls beware, it's all girls from here on in.

ED - Gouzen Tenshi (The Student Council) - mmm, bishoujo. Pleasant enough, lively Jpop track.

Thanks to the mysterious penfriend Mr. Poppit, our heroine, Rino Rando, is attending Miyagami School, accompanied by her sarcastic puppet Puchya. She finds out the apartment organised for her has burnt down, so she heads up to the school. She ends up sleeping outside after she gets frightened by a bear in the bushes and another student, Kaori Izumi, who turns out to be her class president. Rino ends up trying for a position on the Student Council so she can get somewhere to live (they're given an apartment building to live in), and by a series of accidents on the way to the Student Council building (which incapacitate most of the Student Council's security squad) manages to defeat the arsonist who burnt down her apartment, thus ending up on the best student council of all!

Mmm, kanji-tastic. Definitely a Sensei no Ojikan-a-like show here, with most of the same directorial tropes (dots! SO MANY DOTS!). Of course, this being a comedy, not only did I not get lots of the jokes but I also didn't really care - anime comedy, not my thing, yadda yadda yadda. It's much more straightforward than something like Azumanga Daioh, though, it's a fairly conventional school comedy where the full episode is one continuous plot.

While the show isn't the kind of thing I enjoy at all, it actually looks quite good for its genre, with vibrant (but not garish) artwork, some generally good voice work (although I'm not really a fan of Yukari Tamura's performance as Rino here). The Puchya gimmick might get a bit annoying, but I actually laughed at him in this episode, which I really didn't expect to. So if schoolgirl comedy is your kind of thing , you'll probably really enjoy this. I'm even vaguely tempted to watch the next episode, although it's probably a little too close to a "cute girls doing stupid things" show for my tastes, plus the yuri vibe between Rino and the student council vice-president suggests things will get sappy at some point. But hey, I'm sure that's a definite plus for most readers!

Posted by BluWacky at April 7, 2005 09:34 PM | TrackBack