Slice of life Tuesday Wednesday…

Kimi to Boku – 06

This was definitely one of the more amusing eps of Kimi to Boku so far, maybe the best overall.  It’s still ungodly slow, but the intermittent flare-ups of a welcome quirkiness to the humor were more evident this week.  Starting with an extraneous and oddly disturbing image of a preying mantis sucking a cicada’s brains out (complete with gross sound effects) the whole episode had a meaner, more mischievous – more boyish, for lack of a better word – tone to it than most of the first five eps.  The thumb-wrestling/thumb painting flashback to middle school was quite funny, and for the first time (at least for me) really captured the obsession with time-wasting nonsense that’s such a part of the male school experience.  The treatment of the glasses issue was fairly well-done as well, reflecting what a harrowing thing that can be for an adolescent without overdramatizing it.  Nothing much is overdramatized on this show, now that I think about it, and that’s both a source of charm and a weakness.  For the record we did have another example of the hairbrushing fetish as well, although this was at least followed up by a long-awaited haircut for Shun.  And Chizuru continues to provide amusement just for his sheer oddness and the way his genki personality contrasts with the somnolent nature of the rest of the crew.

Tamayura Hitotose – 06

There’s something weird with the timeline of this series.  This episode starts with a flashback to 1999, when it looks as if the girls are about six years old.  But that would make them 16 years old in the second half, which is set in 2009, which is impossible as they’re second-year middle schoolers.  I know the current day has them in high school, they all of them except for Kaoru look way too young for that, but even if that’s right that means they would have been about three years old in the first flashback – three year-olds climbing mountains alone?  Whatever.  As for the ep itself, not one of my favorites I’ll admit.  Tamayura has a crying fetish that I don’t find especially winning, and both stories tended towards the self-indulgent and overcute side of this show, which is not its best face.  And we frustratingly got nothing more than a teasing shadow image of Fu’s Dad in the 1999 story, a chance meeting of the four friends and how Mao-chan decided to communicate via whistling.  The second part deals mostly with how Mao and Norie became friends, which is better as Norie is the liveliest person in the cast, though it lacked in the humor department by not having her making a fool of herself courting Kou.  I’m not expecting any edginess, but I do enjoy this series more when it’s at least agreeably silly and not so focused on being cuddly.  Oh, and needs more food porn.