It’s been quite an odyssey waiting for Cool Doji Danshi.  First the premiere had no streaming partner for almost a week after its TV premiere – even in Japan.  Of course with no Western service streaming it, it was left to the mercy of the fansubbing Gods (and there aren’t as many of those are there used to be) whether we’d get an English version.  Fortunately it did finally stream locally, which made raws readily available, and a fansub group decided to pick it up (for a week at least).

This was among my sleeper picks for the season, so that delay was pretty irksome.  It’s also unfortunate than Cool Doji Danshi is so short – officially 15 minutes, but it’s easy to forget than means 15 with commercials and such.  With a full OP and ED (a choice I wouldn’t have made for a slot this brief) the actual episode ended up being less than 10 minutes.  It’s not much time to make a real impression, never mind a first impression – but in spite of that, I liked what I saw.

At this length you’d expect any show to be pretty breezy and light, but CDD seems like it would be in any format.  It’s the story of four young guys (all around 20 I’m guessing) who in one form or another project a cool image they belies the insecurities/neuroses they’re feeling inside.  The good news is that the series will air for two cours, which makes the decision to open by (apparently) devoting one intro episode to each character seem pretty logical.  First up is Ichikura Hayate (Kobayashi Chiaki), a 2nd-year college student who’s effectively a male dojikko (maybe that’s still just “dojikko”?), who’s aghast with himself at every social stumble but manages to project an air of indifference – a combo the local females seem to find pretty irresistible…

Like I said, it’s pretty hard to get much of a read on this series in less than ten minutes.  But I enjoyed myself, I can say that much.  Cool Doji Danshi sports a very accomplished writer-director combo in Kon Chiaki and Uezu Makoto, and while the visuals are nothing special the execution overall is smooth.  The show looks a lot like old-school Brain’s Base (once upon a time they’d have done this for sure) with its soft watercolor look.  I can’t commit to anything but I certainly hope we continue to get subbed episodes, because I suspect this series is going to end up being one of those low-stress weekly tonic series that are easy to like.