Double-J

It hurts me to see how many people just outright dislike Double-J because it wasn´t what they wanted or were used to.
Double-J, for me, was exactly what I had expected and looked forward to.
Flash animation, atmospheric live-action pan shots and Cromartie-ish nonsense with sometimes not-so-typical High School girls.
The ED is fun, the characters are amusing and I don´t see why you shouldn´t give this a go, with its 22 minutes(minus the OPs and EDs).
This show was my weekly source of peace for 4 minutes and deserves a lot better IMO.

What exactly a comedy mini-series about a club that preserves traditional Japanese arts can offer? That's what draws me to watching Double-J.

I have a mix feeling with the story; the first couple of episodes are really funny as it is centered to the main theme of the series - a couple of girls who accidentally discovered this one unique club about preserving traditional arts. What are hilarious about it actually are the arts that the people of the club are trying to preserve and I laughed really hard when the characters together with their very unique arts are introduced one by one. The last ... few episodes though are a hit-or-miss in terms of comedic value seeing how the series headed into completely random topics that may or may not be connected with preserving traditional arts, I still have a couple of good laughs though. The series have no ending, I wouldn’t mind a new season if ever seeing how completely random the concept anyway.

The animation is a nice experimental concept (according to a blog I read, this is a flash-based animation), something that I have adjusted first before I get a hang on it. The background consists mostly of real-life still images in grayscale color of classrooms, schools, and landmarks which I thought is really a good idea. The characters basically stay in a stationary position, their movements are limited mostly to mouth movements for the vocals, eye blinking, robotic movements for the extremities, and some motion from the clothes the characters are wearing to give an effect that the wind is breezing by which I think really works as a good visual aid for the setup of the series. The character designs are also simple looking but have enough facial features that distinguished one character from the others.

Double-J has some fairly nice background music themes that are energetic and upbeat complementing the animation really well. The ending theme “Wani to Shampoo” is very catchy and lively, something that compensates for the simple music theme that is heard during the opening clip. Voice acting is fairly well done, very in-character; the quirky dialogues are enough reason to enjoy the series.

For a 4-minute per episode clip, Double-J has quite a huge number of characters that appeared in the span of 11 episodes. I say the main highlight of the series are the characters which did a very good job in entertaining the audience with their conversations, attitudes, personalities, reactions, and the traditional arts they are practicing much to the amusement of the audience and the very characters in the series whom they are explaining what their traditional arts are.

Overall, Double-J is a fairly good series that packs enough goods to entertain its viewers for 4 minutes every week. I for one have a good laugh on most of the episodes from the humor that comes from the characters. The comedy is a hit-or-miss just like what I describe above especially in the last few episodes, but not enough to say I didn’t enjoy those. The series as a whole can be recommend to all audience who just wants a good laugh and doesn’t mind the unusual style of the animation.

Few anime manage to be funny. The only one I've ever laughed at was DMC, for its slapstick shock value humor, and the Yu-Gi-Oh! movie, because it was 1 am and it really sucked. I didn't expect anything from this anime. I expected it to be bad.

It is. It's worse than I thought.

Let's start with the animation. It's so unbelievably lazy. It's static backgrounds which are just pictures that weren't even drawn, and characters that stick out like sore thumbs in the foreground. I swear to God, there's a part in episode 3 where an old man sits on a bench, but the bench is ... part of the photo in the back. So far, I haven't seen anyone walk. All that moves is the characters' arms and faces. It's really, really awful.

The art is OK. The main guy looks like Sasuke except drawn by a two year old and outlined with a paint roller, and all the other girls look like your generic "color scheme" moeblobs. One girl has red hair and a red outfit, one has greenish hair and a greenish outfit, etc.

The characters are also pretty generic. The main guy's kinda hot-headed and quirky, the main character's kinda shy, the main character's friend is loud and hotheaded, there's a girl that's completely monotone, and the like.

The sound is not too bad, but it's still pretty bad. It's jumpy when it needs to be, epic when it's supposed to be (but really, it's not needed), and all that. But the ending theme is not too bad. It's really colorful, but it just looks stupid.

The voice acting is fine. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just average. They all maintain the same tone throughout, no whispering or anything, just yelling at the same pitch. It's not fun.

At the moment, it's not funny. At all. It's trying to be, but you know what? It fails. It's too random. I know DMC was too, but it actually was funny, it wasn't just talking about toothpicks and other random useless objects.

There might be a plot. So far, the blue haired one joined some art preserving club, and then she talks to a girl with toothpicks and an old guy with a brick. Or something.

All in all? Just don't bother. It's not funny, it's not pretty, it's just not a good show. If you're desperate to complete anime like me, then the short episode length helps. If not... Just no.