(12 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Adaptation of a manga series of Cute Girls Doing Cute Things… er, with motorbikes.
(There’s also a recently-released OVA where they visit hot springs, but 95% of the screentime is devoted to the road trip, because of course it is.)
Characters
Hane, the naive newcomer who had no interest in motorbikes before entering high school, and thus can be explained everything. It doesn’t take much to convince her : it sure would be more convenient than her bicycle to climb the huge slope to school, and the show is all about motorbikes being cool as heck. Also, she’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. (With their parents abroad, it’s her little sister who handles the finances.)
Onsa, on the other hand, is an old hand at this ; she even chose the school deliberately because its rules allowed coming to school by motorbike. The show gives her a running gag of going off in long, rambling and passionate speeches about her passion, only for her to get quickly ignored by her friends. I’m not sure it really works, although the payoff at the end of the episode is cute.
Both of them (at Onsa’s impetus), join the school’s ill-defined Bike Club, with only the one member left before they come in. The joke is that she keeps her helmet on at all times and never talks (onscreen).
Rin is another classmate whom Hane meets at driving school ; she’s a Suzuki fangirl, and seems affluant enough to wear a bike suit.
Production Values
Okay enough. It’s clear that most of the care went to depicting the bikes as lushly as possible.
What did I think of it ?
While the central idea is cute, such a show lives and dies on the execution of its jokes. Unfortunately, there’s quite some misses here (Onsa’s whole shtick, in particular). Other could get old quickly, like having Hane’s bike being voiced by Kikuko Inoue with a very dirty mouth. (What is it with slife-of-life gag series this season being unexpectedly raunchy ?)
Still, there are enough decent jokes here to make me give it a second episode to find its feet. We’ll see how it goes from there.
