Friday, November 21, 2014

B Gata H Kei

B Gata H Kei; animated erotic romantic comedy, Japan, 2010; D: Yusuke Yamamoto, S: Yukari Tamura, Atsushi Abe, Yui Horie

Yamada is a high school girl who thinks it is about time she lost her virginity. And she is popular enough to do so, but decides to try it out first with an uglier guy, Kosuda, a virgin himself, thinking it will be easier since such an inexperienced guy won't notice her strange looking vagina. However, Yamada is awfully indecisive and spends weeks setting up pretexts to meet him, only to give up on everything in the last minute. Even her classmate Takeshita is annoyed by that. Finally, Yamada and Kosuda rent a room in a love hotel - but just as they were about to do it, she accidentally presses a button that starts rotating the bed, which injures Kosuda and sends him in the hospital.

When a heroine at the beginning of a story announces that she will sleep with "a thousand men", and by the end of the show she is still a virgin, one can safely assume that the show is misleading the audience. "B Gata H Kei" is a truly anticlimactic anime: despite setting out to be an erotic romantic comedy, it ends up being not even a romantic comedy, or just a comedy, since the silly and goofy "Loony Tunes" like jokes disrupt any attempts at romance, and are not sufficient to carry the comedy assembly. The main problem is that the heroine in question, teenage girl Yamada, is catastrophically indecisive - on one hand, she wants to seduce Kosuda, but on the other, just as she is about to do it, she suddenly backs off and runs away. And this is repeated for the entire storyline. For instance, when she is about to "seduce" Kosuda in the photo darkroom, someone knocks on the door and interrupts them, and when he is about to say that he loves her, the doors of the rapid transit close and "pinch" his head, whereupon the train drives off before he can finish his sentence. Needless to say, it becomes tiresome really quickly.

Out of 12 episode, the only good stuff is in the first two and the last two, while the whole middle is full of empty walk. The supporting characters are interesting, like the purple haired "villainess" Kyoka Kanejo (in one great humorous scene, she even plays piano and sings her "rivalry" song aimed at "destroying" her nemesis Yamada, with such lyrics as: "By stealing Yamada's boyfriend and chucking him, I'll show the difference in power between us..!"), but the majority of them plays almost no role in the story or rarely have moments when they can shine, which makes their presence here hardly necessary. As said, only the last two episodes have some interesting moments, but even when Yamada and Kosuda are finally alone in a love hotel, just about to have sex for the first time, even then the author ruins it - with more dumb humor. There was never a season 2, and that is good that way, since it would have been tiresome to watch further 12 episodes of Yamada and Kosuda messing it up just to remain virgins at the end, anyway.

Grade;+

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