Daily Lives of High School Boys (Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou)

(12 episodes)

What’s it about ?

Absurdist comedy starring high school boys trolling each other. (Basically, imagine a gentler Cromartie High School.)

Characters

Tadakuni, the “normal” guy who gets trolled by his friends. (Although he does gives half as much as he receives.) The butt of many jokes, when he’s not just protesting how stupid his pals are.

Hidenori, the troll in glasses. He loves taking the piss with a completely straight face. Some parts also have him in rambling monologues obsessing about ridiculously trivial stuff ; which is obviously why they hired Tomokazu Sugita. (And hey, he can do funny voices too !)

Yoshitake, the other troll. His trolling is slightly more outlandish, but really there’s little to distinguish him from Hidenori.

Supporting characters showing up so far include Tadakuni’s sister (sic), who’s way less disturbed by those dudes trying on her underwear than you’d guess ; the Literature Girl (sic, again), whose joke I won’t spoil ; and Motoharu, the badass delinquant of the class who’s more talk than walk.

Production Values

Well, the mechas are quite well done…

Wait, what ?

Oh, that was just a joke about how this is a Sunrise-Squaresoft collaboration (also included : random RPG sequence, with Tadakuni as the Healer Girl). Anyway, this looks a bit better than most comedy shows where the graphics aren’t the selling point anyway.

This episode is made of 5 sketches (plus a pre-OP prologue), 3 of which were aired on the web over the past few weeks as a preview ; it’s nice to see them in non-eyebleed-o-vision.

The OP song sounds completely wrong for the show, like some epic shounen show it absolutely isn’t. Given that the OP is filled with shots cribed from the shounen-opening cliché list, I assume that’s the joke. (The ED song is clearly taking the piss of the conclusion of the 5th sketch.)

Overall Impression

At last, a comedy show that’s actually laugh-out-loud funny ! This belongs to the “dialogue grows more and more ridiculous as the sketch goes, until the final punchline” school of comedy, and it’s got good enough voice-actors to pull it off. Heck, even the sketches I’ve already seen were still funny.

The previews had wetted my appetite, and this definitely looks to be as good as I hoped. Definitely a keeper for me.

via [In which I review] New anime, Winter 2012 – Page 7.

Published by

Jhiday

I've been kinda blogging about anime for years... but mostly on forums (such as RPG.net's Tangency) and other sites. This site is an archive for all that stuff, just in case.