Busu ni Hanataba wo. – 01

There are two seinen romcom adaptations this season whose descriptions read like shoujo romances to me (Kaoru Hana wa Rin to Saku is the other). And after watching this premiere I’d still pretty much have been fooled. Labels are just labels of course, and those two demographics can have a fair bit of overlap (some series, like Orange, have even flipped between them). Still, that’s definitely the impression this premiere gives off.

Busu ni Hanataba wo is the story of a 15-year called Tabata Hana. She fancies herself an ugly girl but as with most animanga ugly girls, she’s perfectly normal-looking. A couple of kilos overweight, a few freckles, glasses – but ugly no. This self-perception has helped exacerbate Hana’s shyness. Her solace are the flowers she comes to school to care for as part of the beautification committee. Thinking herself unworthy of being seen with flowers (despite being “Hana” – get it?) she comes to school early every day, and one such day the class idol, Ueno Yusuke, walks in and catches her putting a flower in her ear.

What follows is entertaining enough, if pretty formulaic. Hana’s relentless self-deprecation has a limited shelf life for me, and I was done with it pretty early into the episode. In fact the most interesting thing about the show may be that all the characters seem to be named after Tokyo train stations. Apart from that it’s just stuff I’ve seen countless times in romcoms and never felt much about one way or the other. Pretty decent staff here (including director Mirai Minato) so I’ll give it another ep or two to show me anything distinctive about itself.

Fermat no Ryori – 01

This is one of those allowances for time I referred to in the Bisque Doll post. These were both mid-table shows in the season preview, and Fermat no Ryori near the top of that category. I’d love to give them a dedicated post and if either had really impressed me I would have. Fermat is better for sure, but I still found this premiere to be a pretty mixed bag.

The main draw with this one, of course, is that it’s the “other” series by Ao Ashi (which just ended and has a second anime season coming next year) mangaka Kobayashi Yuugo. Beyond that I really knew nothing about it apart from the synopsis. A high school student named Kitada Gaku is a superstar mathematics student before he freezes in the math olympiad, handing in a blank paper and drawing the ire of his elite school’s cartoonishly villainous chairman. Eventually he’s forced to work in the staff canteen to justify his scholarship, where a visiting star chef named Asakura Kai happens upon him making a napolitan pasta and takes an interest.

Napolitan, for those who don’t know, is kind of the quintessentially sacrilegious Japanese take on Western cuisine – basically spaghetti with a ketchup-based sauce. It’s not as awful as it sounds but it’s about as humble as food gets, shall we say. The hook here is that Gaku is some kind of cooking savant who uses mathematical principles to unlock the divine ratio of a dish – and “if he can do it for Napolitan…”. Sort of an interesting idea, but the execution here was nothing special. Lots of over the top distorted faces and theatrical glares kind of take you out of the moment, and there’s not a lot of subtlety in the character dynamics.

Eventually Gaku’s refusal to participate in a math competition prompts the chairman to expel him. Kai recruits him to cook the main dish (Napolitan, obviously) for the catering job he’s taken for the chairman and his patrons. We’ll see whether this develops into something really interesting – it’s certainly possible with Kobayashi writing – but for now Fermat no Ryori leaves me with a pretty empty stomach.

Kimi to Ame to – 01

And there’s the third of the manga mid-table triumvirate, Ame to Kimi to. Likewise it’s a series that would have gotten it’s own intro post most days and most seasons. And it’s the best of these three premieres for sure. It occurs to me that spring didn’t really have a “that” series – maybe Uchuujin MuuMuu, but that’s not quite in the niche. With You and the Rain seems like it could very easily fill the role this season, though only time will tell.

I kind of suspected this series might be pretty good – it was one of my sleeper picks. But what really surprised me was how pretty it was. Lesprit is certainly not a studio with a lot of stature and this is not a particularly commercial property. But this premiere looked great, artistic in a kind of watercolored way. The visuals were like the narrative, soothing and flowing like water. The premise finds a novelist named Fuji finding a “dog” abandoned on her walk home. She’s given her umbrella to an old lady – initially I thought she might have been planning to commit suicide but she just likes the rain. The dog (it’s not) helpfully offers her one, the first clue that something ain’t right here.

Well, not the first. This is obviously not a dog, and in fact pretty clearly a tanuki. But it’s written a note describing itself as a dog, and Fuji seems perfectly happy to go along with that. Initially I found it a bit annoying that no one was pointing this out, but it seems to be a running gag – everyone else can see it’s not a dog but nobody says it. Another running gag is that the tanuki is able to do stuff like write and even make jokes, and Fuji (and even others, like the vet) are perfectly OK with it. And some of the notes are pretty funny, like the “Oi-C” one and the “I love you, I’m never coming back” when leaving the vet.

I don’t know what the point of this show is, per se, but I suspect it’s going to be just an observational slice-of-life with low-key comedy and reflections on what’s truly important. For one week at least that worked very well for me – I laughed when I was supposed to, the tanuki was cute, and Ame to Kimi to has a very positive vibe to it.