シャッフル! / Shuffle!

I suppose one could call it ‘the nipple factor’. With the exception of R.O.D. the TV, every show that has female nudity and actually includes nipples, rather than trying to be artistic and tasteful with the Barbie-doll factor or concealing crucial areas, has been catering to the lowest common denominator, ended up being trashy rubbish and actually removed rather than enhanced most of the attractiveness of the characters. Let’s face it: a drawing is a drawing, and dots for nipples aren't going to do it for most.

Anyway, Shuffle! got a fairly bad rep in the anime community. And a lot of it really is very bad. However, it actually manages to be better than expected, but only because the first and second halves of the series seem like completely different shows.

The first half is pretty awful. Rin, an ordinary sort of a boy, is surrounded by cute girls, including one who lives with him and acts virtually as a servant of her own free will. Not only this, but the world he lives in is populated not solely by humans but also by demons and gods, distinguished mostly by their kawaii~ pointy ears. Rin’s daily life is disturbed when two new girls transfer to his school and announce that not only are they both princesses (one of the gods, the other of the demons), but both want to take Rin as husband and make him ruler of an entire dimension.

The absurdity only increases. We have the normal harem nonsense of beach episodes and comedic mix-ups. We then get utterly trite angst with the channelling of dead twins and split personalities, and an overlong subplot about little engineered lolis who can only be saved by the power of love.

The second half, however, mostly ignores this sort of rubbish as Rin seems to be leaning towards another girl altogether, a long-time friend who is the least cliché of all the girls. This part actually begins to work, even when jealousy is taken a very long way, but then it all tumbles down again because of lazy writers falling back on magic.

In the end, Shuffle! isn’t dire, and at times it actually leans towards Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien in a rather appealing way, but ultimately it’s laden with too much crap to be considered anything like a good series.

However, it brings to anime the rather excellent term ミスターロリペドフィン!

(originally written 11.12.08)

みなみけ/ Minami-Ke / The Minami Family

Having now finished both seasons of Minami-Ke (Minami-Ke and Minami-Ke Okawari), I found myself pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it, and indeed would really quite like some more.

I wasn’t keen at first, finding the central three girls quite unappealing, the comedy, especially over-the-top animation sequences, somewhat forced and the teardrop-shaped mouths going too far to look like the vaguely cat-like :3 face and ending up just looking like something nasty has happened with a razor blade. Manabi Straight's mouths looked a little odd, but here they end up looking like beaks.

But the good thing about character-driven slice-of-life comedies is that if just a couple of great characters get introduced, they can carry whole episodes. And while Minami-Ke is mostly aimed at getting boys to think the girls are cute, its real stars are the males.

There’s the one who likes the oldest sister, an absolute nutcase who overdramatises everything and tries to reach perfection to impress her (only for her never to notice, while one girl always sees and gets creeped out by his dramatic poses and manliness), and then there’s the boy who likes the middle sister and gave her a love letter, only for her to get convinced it was a challenge and spend the rest of the time being combative. Most especially, though, there is the boy the same age as the youngest girl, who is cute enough when he’s just trying to fit in, but then starts cross-dressing in a convoluted scheme to get closer to his crush, the oldest sister.

It’s the last one, Makoto-kun - AKA Mako-chan - who’s really the most funny and endearing part of this show, especially when he gets paired up with the tomboyish Touma, who is also adorable and gets mistaken for a boy quite often, leading to some classic Shakespearean comedy with gender mix-ups and people put into absurd situations.

And the two of them actually made this show, which might otherwise have been quite dull and low on laughs, both hilarious and endearing. Thus it comes recommended.

(originally written 25.9.08. A third series and an OVA were to follow. The first season was made by Studio Doumu/Daume; the rest came from Asread. Thoughts on the fourth season, from Studio Feel, here)