OP: “Mellow” (メロウ) by Keina Suda

Another day, another premiere of a show that would have been my top pick in a lot of seasons.  I haven’t read Skip to Loafer, but this felt like as safe a bet as those circumstances could ever allow.  So far pretty much every first episode I’ve watched this season has almost perfectly matched my expectations (whether I knew the source material or not).  And given how lofty my expectations for the season are, that’s generally a very good thing.  I was fully expecting to like Skip to Loafer a hell of a lot, and that’s exactly what happened.

This is only the second manga adaptation P.A. Works has ever done, so in a funny sort of way it represents a move both towards conventionality and a change of pace for them.  I was a pretty big PAW fan at one time but for me they’d really lost their way over the past decade.  It seemed like almost everything they did (Uchouten Kazoku being the glaring exception) was desperate to deliver exactly what people’s idea of a P.A. Works series was, and that was no longer something I wanted to watch.  So their branching out is, on balance, a plus in my book.  Skip to Loafer is less of a stylistic departure from them than Akiba Maid Sensou or even Paripi Koumei (their first manga adaptation), but still quite a different look and feel for PAW.

That look is down both to mangaka Takamatsu Misaki and Deai Kotomi, the industry stalwart who’s handling both direction and series composition here.  I certainly don’t love everything she’s done but Deai is capable of outstanding work, and she has a very distinct visual style that suits the material perfectly.  I can’t help but think Skip to Loafer would have been a Brain’s Base series ten years ago – the color palette and thematic structure are right up their street – and indeed that studio is where Deai-sensei did most of her best work.

In addition to being a huge romcom season spring is also a seinen bonanza, and Skip and Loafer is another that checks both boxes.  It’s also the first of the big high school romances to debutante (leaving only marrieds outstanding, though ToniKawa will address that).  In fact it reminds me of one of my current favorite seinen (or any) manga, Hirayasumi – though it would be more correct to say the opposite was true.  The heroine is Iwakura Mitsumi (Kurosawa Tomoyo), a small town gal from Ishikawa on her way to start high school in Tokyo.  Mitsumi has her new life planned out to the last detail, but it soon becomes pretty clear that her reserves of common sense are not on par with her book knowledge.

It would be fair to say Mitsumi is unprepared for the scale of Tokyo – her middle school had all of eight pupils, which is surely a reason many such kids go to Tokyo to attend high school.  She’s staying with her father’s “sibling” Nao-chan (Saiga Mitsuki), who it’s strongly hinted is a trans woman (the choice of seiyuu supports that supposition).  But despite Nao’s warnings Mitsumi (who had no idea cities could have more than one train line, as her’s had zero) gets hopelessly lost on the way to school.  Fortunately for her the kindly Shima Sousuke (Egoshi Akinori), a classmate, is running late himself (overslept) and takes pity on her in her obvious misery.

To some extent we seem to have an obvious opposites attract scenario here, though Mitsumi is so sheltered and Sousuke such a bishie that she never had a chance anyway.  This appears to be an elite school, and Mitsumi is in fact that spokesperson for the first-years at the entrance ceremony (which presumably means she got the highest score on the entrance exam).  She’s genki, scatterbrained, and naive.  Sousuke seems to be carefree, maybe a bit unserious, and is as tall and glamorous (and blond) as she is ordinary-looking.  But they’re both nice people, and clearly each is attracted by the strangeness of the other.  It’s not hard to see where this is headed.

There are a lot of potentially really interesting pieces to this puzzle.  Each lead has their own orbit of pre-existing satellites – his middle school pals and her family and bestie (and pets) back home, and it seems as if neither is going to be ignored.  They’ll surely make friends in school, and then there’s Nao-chan’s intriguing situation to consider.  Ultimately though of course Skip to Loafer is going to focus on the title pairing (whether those will be official nicknames or just implied I don’t know), and they seem more than up to the task.  They’re an extremely likeable couple and this premiere was winning in an effortless, breezy way.  It looked and sounded great (loved the music), and it seems pretty much like a can’t-miss prospect at this point.

ED: “Hanauta to Mawarimichi” (ハナウタとまわり道) by Rikako Aida