Short notes – みなみけ 夏やすみ / Minami-ke: Natsuyasumi / Minami-ke Summer Holiday

Usually if an OVA comes out, I wait until a new season airs before writing anything about it. But this looks like it might actually be the last time we see the loveable cast of Minami-Ke in animated form. And sadly, it’s just a typical piece of fluff with the usual beach episode clichés. A group of the girls go to the beach and splash water at each other, except the quirky ones who give us some light character-based comedy. A couple of the girls have collected beetles, still an enduringly popular activity for kids in Japan, and of course they manage to get loose, causing not mayhem but some light tension between siblings. Over the short run-time of the episode, just about the whole cast is visited briefly, allowing for some nice pleasant scenes reminding us of their personalities before we finish on possibly the most perfect, ridiculous character to conclude an entire series with.

Chiaki gets the most screen time, struggling to complete an athletic task set as part of her summer homework. It’s a light, fun, cute thing to watch, her doing her best and failing a lot, but not exactly thrilling.

My favourite characters get very little to do. Touma gets to be girly for a change with the others at the beach, and has a funny little bit where she gives her beetle the same name as her brother, but there’s little more to it than that. Poor Mako-chan shows up to play and quickly gets turned away. The comedy based around these two characters defying gender norms was the reason I really enjoyed the show, but we didn’t get any of that.

Still, nice to check in with these characters again, and a little sad to think it might be the last time.

みなみけ おまたせ/ Minami-ke: Tadaima

Minami-ke is probably my favourite of the slice-of-life cute-girls-doing-cute-things comedy shows, despite my initial dislike of it, at least in the moé-dominated period that came after Azumanga Daioh and Ichigo Mashimaro, which I probably put top of my list. Minami-ke has an edge over the likes of K-On! and Manabi Straight because it doesn’t need a gimmick or strange setting. 

It doesn’t need to be frantic like Lucky Star or out-and-out weirdness like Nichijou (though all of these shows I enjoyed to a greater or lesser extent). It really is just a group of sisters and their schoolmates and the silly things they do, with nothing more surreal than a weird sweaty guy who likes to do dramatic monologues and unbutton his own shirt, and a boy who likes to dress as a girl. And after all, boys dressed as girls aren’t exactly unusual in anime – see MariaHolic, Hourou Musuko et al.

And I have to say, boys who pass as girls are something I always enjoy in anime, especially if there’s cute but awkward comedy, and this also has the reverse I enjoy just as much – a young girl who is often mistaken for a boy. Both in the same anime, supplying some of the big laughs – that has definite appeal!

And the anime has soldiered on and on. It’s changed studios several times now – the first series was from Daume/Doumo, then Asread took over for the next two seasons and first OVA, but now the continuation comes from Da Capo II animators Studio Feel. 

The funny tear-shaped mouths are still there, and the overall character design, but it does look subtly different – a little clunkier in movements, but a little more consistent in staying on-model, which might be ironic if we judge Feel for being made up of ex-Pierrot staff (various videos exist of the laziest slapdash art from Naruto and Bleach) but for a slow-paced and pretty show like this the art looks nice.

There’s no structure to this 13-episode season apart from the loose changing of seasons, which was also the theme of the Omatase, the OVA Feel put out prior to this season. It feels mostly like checking in with a familiar old group of friends. We get an April Fools episode, which includes a funny moment where Fujioka very nearly finds out Touma’s gender. We see that Touma’s big brother is excellent at barbeques and that Touma has some impressive skills with needlework. Makoto gets into a girls’ swimming costume and helps Chiaki learn to swim, while the girls are put in yukata, maid outfits and wind up without towels after the bath – all of which somehow manages to avoid coming over as blatant, annoying fanservice because it genuinely seems like the comedy comes first and the camera doesn’t do the horrible blatant things that made Kyou no Go no Ni (from the same mangaka) so sleazy. 

Fujioka and Hosaka continue to dwell on their crushes on Minami sisters in their very different ways, and somehow Chiaki comes to regard Hosaka as her ‘curry fairy’ from the supermarket. The only episode segment that’s a bit of a mis-step is the one about a television show that hypnotises people, which breaks too much from the realism of most of the comedy, even if it comes with a cute dance and a brilliant fantasy sequence with Chiaki and Hosaka. 

D.C.S.S. ～ダ・カーポ セカンドシーズン～ / Da Capo Second Season

Let’s face it – Da Capo wasn’t a very good anime. Revolving around a magic cherry blossom tree that granted the subconscious wishes of the female inhabitants of an island, it featured some very silly ideas (like a robot replacement for a girl and a cat that had become a human) and put in terrible filler like lengthy songs for each girl and stupid side-stories about dreams. Despite this, there was an interesting love triangle at the heart of the show, and here, it succeeded.

The second season shows us what happened next: Jun’ichi and his sister continued their incestuous relationship (though they weren’t blood-related), but she left to study medicine, and Sakura (the third point of the triangle, who finally accepted the siblings’ love) disappeared. However, there is a new arrival on the island – a young, naïve mage called Aisia, who thinks Jun’ichi is a great magician. When she sees that the rest of Jun’ichi’s harem have been disappointed by his choice of lover (and since the show is based on an H-game, the harem is extensive!), she decides she’ll bring back everyone’s hope by restoring the magical tree. Plot devices ahoy!

The series pulls off the magical idea by presenting it in a realistic context. There’s magic, but the characters are all ordinary teenagers, living normal lives, and the magic is peripheral to their everyday existences. No more robots or cat-girls, making the whole thing rather easier to watch. It still has its faults – the plot meandered along for a long time in the middle, with too many extraneous plotlines that amounted to nothing, and too many characters who Jun’ichi could no doubt pursue in the game but were totally superfluous to the anime and existed only for the fans – overall, though, it was a much less frustrating experience than its predecessor, and Aisia and Sakura were both extremely adorable girls!

And hey, Nemu was quite a sweet person, even if the entire fandom seems to want to tear her limb from limb…I really don’t understand the people complaining because the show ends more or less as it began, without Jun’ichi deciding that actually, he loves someone else entirely. It was the journey that mattered, and the show IS called ‘Da Capo’!

(originally written 15.4.06)