Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou

Yukino Miyazawa is at the top of her class in both grades and respect. She’s the perfect model student... poised, generous, cultured, the picture of a school idol. But before you can start throwing around accusations of her being a Mary-Sue, she informs you very clearly that it’s all an act. She pretends to be perfect, working her little butt off to not only get good grades, but to make it look easy. Why? Because she loves receiving praise, and Japan has that whole ‘sempai’ thing going on.

Her world is thrown into turmoil when a new student transfers into her class, named Soichiro Arima, and ... his good grades immediately bump her from her pedestal as the smartest kid in school. She declares him her rival, and he declares her... His love interest?

There’s a lot to talk about in regards to this series... I’ll try to touch on most of it... But to start, I can’t restrain myself from gushing about the English dub, which is easily one of the best I’ve ever heard. It consists mainly of some of the best and brightest stars of the nineties, and they all give four star performances. Yukino is a very talky character, whose inner monologues take up a disproportionate amount of the script, and this would be unbearable coming from anybody other than Veronica Taylor(Ash Ketchum, Amelia Wil Tesla Seyruun), who has a distinct habit of throwing herself wholeheartedly into every single role she performs. Her obsession over her grades and her budding relationship is every bit as convincing as her drive to become a Pokemon master ever was, and she never misses a beat on this project.

Christopher Nicholas plays Soichiro just as flawlessly, hitting a wide range of emotions where most other actors would have just gone flat. He’s a damaged boy with very profound abandonment issues, and his motive for overachieving is entirely different from Yukino’s, even though it has about an equally complex affect on his life. He does such a great job that I have to wonder why he only had six other anime roles aside from this one.

Soichiro’s childhood friends consist of Hideaki Asaba... Or Sexy Carlos, as AMV Hell 3 called him... and Tsubasa Shibahime, who has an unrequited crush on Soichiro. Because of course she does. Hideaki is played by Liam O’Brien, and I don’t really think Dr. Tenma from monster needs me to tell you how great he is. He loves his lascivious ladies’ man character, and eats up every sleazy line he’s given. Lisa Ortiz, who voiced my favorite character of all time Lina Inverse, portrays Tsubasa, and she’s able to command the screen even when her dialogue is reduced to growling. Which is a thing that happens. Rachel Lillis also has a handful of roles, and while they’re not as diverse as her multiple roles in Pokemon, she still does a great job.

The other two of note are Yukino’s younger sisters, Kano and Tsukino, but the only really big part they play in the story is the fact that it’s their job to dole out plot summaries at the beginning of most episodes, and the preview at the end of every episode. And who did they cast for these roles? Megan Hollingshead (Officer Jenny, Nurse joy, the Sonozaki Twins) and Jessica Calvello (Excel!). While either of these actors are phenomenal on their own, they work even better together, feeding off of each others’ already boisterous energy.

By the way, i’m going to go briefly off topic to say how awesome it is to have Calvello returning to voice acting. She’s already done a few recent roles for Sentai filmworks, and even some Cyanide and Happiness clips, and now she’s going to be in Attack on Titan! Glad to have you back, and I mean it!

Oh, I should probably say something about the music. There's some nice sounding 60's stuff, but the track you'll remember the most is a very somber piano piece. You'll remember it the most because they play the damn thing over and over and over again.

Since this series was produced directly after Evangelion, I don’t think it’ll be any surprise that it had an abysmally small animation budget to work with. But that’s never the death knell of any anime... Any show can look fantastic even with the barest of budgets. And since Kare Kano is a slow paced and text-heavy romantic comedy, it should have been easy to cut corners wherever possible without really upsetting anybody.

But since this is late nineties Studio Gainax, the order of the day seems to have been ‘make it look like the last few episodes of Evangelion.’ Much like he did in Eva, Director Hideaki Anno overcompensates for the lack of animation money by employing hyper, eclectic visual style that’s meant to distract us, like dangling keys in front of a baby. this is a huge pet peeve of mine, and until now, I always assumed that Bakemonogatari was the worst offender. The art direction is largely directionless, as the breakneck editing frequently jumps from style to style. When we’re not watching the lifeless key frames of the actual material, we’re looking at art-class charcoal sketches, monochromatic manga images, and... I swear I’m not making this up... Actual cardboard cut-outs on popsicle sticks, all in a hilarious attempt to distract us from what little visual flare the soft, pastel-clad series has to offer. There’s no OTHER reason for such a slow paced anime to do this... Oh, wait, yes there is.

In order to talk about the writing that went into Kare Kano, I’m going to have to start by explaining the concept of Show Don’t Tell. Well, a condensed explanation is in order, as it pertains to a visual medium. Basically, telling the viewer about something isn’t going to give them the same experience as showing it to them. If a feeling or emotion can be stated with a simple change of expression, there’s no reason to have the character blab on about it. For example, my biggest problem with Kick-Ass 2 was that the admittedly bold character development was explored through long-winded emotional speeches, rather than actual actions. Show, don’t tell.

Unfortunately, Kare Kano is an extremely ‘telly’ series. Every single plot point is stated to us, sometimes over and over again, and I’m not just talking about the plot recaps. The voice-over narrations between our two heroes are incessant, as they beat us over the head with every thought, concern, or emotion that may be going through their minds. We’re constantly reminded about things that we couldn’t have possibly forgotten, and no matter who’s talking, they won’t shut up about Yukino’s personality, whether real or constructed, or about the fact that her and Shoichiro are changing each other. A good cast can go a long way, but this amount of expositional soliloquizing wears out it’s welcome fast. And don’t even get me started on the constant... And I mean constant... On-screen text.

Basically, it has the pretentious writing style of Evangelion, and the heavily randomized viaual style of FLCL, and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it wasn’t for it’s slow pace and limbo-champ stakes.

Which is unfortunate, because when the show actually shuts the hell up for two minutes and develops the characters normally, it can deliver some heart-stoppingly beautiful moments. But they're few and far between.

I don’t think it’s a big spoiler to say that our two leads become a couple, since this is a romantic comedy, but the surprising factor is just how fast they get together. Instead of relying on the cliched will-they-won’t-they dynamic, Kare Kano isn’t a story about them getting together as much as it is about them staying together. And that would make for a really interesting plot, if there was any actual threat to them. Yes, the characters themselves may not be annoyingly perfect, but their relationship damn well IS. Every conflict they ever face... And I hate using hyperbole, so no, I am not exaggerating about this... Is resolved as quickly and easily as possible, before being instantly forgotten. Even the characters that try to get in their way are defeated, befriended, and robbed of any future identity or screen time.

Unfortunately for Kare Kano, my other big pet peeve is when a series spends an entire episode... Or two... On one character's arc, giving them development or a backstory just to drop them out of the story immediately afterwards. When that character is going to be killed off, that's one thing, but when they're going to lose all of their dialogue and literally act like a monkey for the rest of the show, that's something else. And not something good.

Sometimes, even the events revolving specifically around our couple ultimately result in nothing. Here, I’ll give you a spoiler-example. Soichiro was abandoned by his deadbeat father and physically abusive mother as a child. He’s raised by his aunt and uncle, and at one point in the series, we travel with him to his family reunion. And because of some betrayal his father committed, everybody hates him, saying he’ll amount to nothing. You may be saying “Wait, isn’t he at the top of his class?’ Yes, and his uncle brings up that exact point, telling all of them that they’re feelings toward him make no sense. And that’s where that storyline ends.

If having a character point out that something didn’t make sense was enough to make up for the fact that it didn’t make sense, I would have enjoyed Angel Beats a bit more.

Now, here’s the part where I put my money where my mouth is; That entire plot point could have been easily improved. Rather than openly hating him for something he didn’t deserve, why not have them secretly hate him, but wear fake smiles around him and pretend to love him BECAUSE of his grades? Then when they find out that his grades slipped because of his girlfriend, their true natures show! See, by doing that, they could have tied this conflict directly into the main plot. His relationship to Yukino could have been dragged into it, kicking and screaming if necessary.

To address the elephant in the room, a lot of people consider this show’s damning flaw to be the fact that it suddenly ended at episode 26, leaving off without any sort of conclusion. This was done because the manga author, Masami Tsuda, didn’t like the direction the adaptation was taking. She said that Anno was focusing more on the comedy than the main romance, and as such, she refused to let them adapt her work any further. Personally, I think it was unfair and entirely inaccurate of her to imply that this show was moving in some sort of direction in the first place. But yes, I have to side with her on this. I’m actually glad she cut them off, because in addition to protecting her own name, she prevented Anno from embarrassing himself any further.

There's a long list of shows that were inspired in some way or another by this particular series, including one of my first positive reviews, Yamada's First Time. The problem? Almost all of these shows are decisively better than Kare Kano.

For those of you who decided to TLDR by skipping right to my final thoughts, I’d hate to disappoint you, so here they are. Kare Kano is a train wreck. I’m sorry, I know it’s popular, and a lot of people love it, but I have to be honest; This is one of the most badly written and poorly executed pieces of work that I’ve ever seen. It showed some promise in the beginning, but even then, the cracks in the writing were already beginning to show. My expectations may have been a little too high, but even if they weren’t, my opinion of this show would still be the same. I thought it would be the best anime I reviewed this month, but no, it’s the worst. At least This Ugly Yet Beautiful World put forth some actual effort, making a genuine attempt to have a decent story and a consistent plot.

I give His and Her Circumstances a 3/10. If you’re pleasantly intrigued by the idea of watching a circle of talking heads play Uno for three minutes, go ahead and raise it to a 5/10, as no other show will be lazy enough to deliver on that esoteric joy.

His and Her Circumstances: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worshiping and Hate the Gainax.

Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou is an anime from the late 90s released by Gainax & JC Staff. It was based off of a manga by Tsuda Masami. And, apparently, she was unhappy with the way Gainax handled it which resulted in it not receiving a full adaptation. So, what exactly is wrong with the adaptation? Let's take a look and see what went wrong. Or maybe she was just being overly picky. We'll see. 

Story:

Miyazawa Yukino excels at everything. She's an outstanding student, a strong athlete and is well liked by everyone. There's just one problem. She doesn't show her true personality to anyone outside of her ... family. She puts on a mask because she loves to be praised. One day her major rival, Arima Soichiro, uncovers the truth behind the mask. The pair become friends and quickly go beyond friendship. The narrative from there goes into their ups and downs as well as their relationships with those around them. 

The big narrative problem with this anime is that the last third is really atrocious. Here's the thing. Roughly the first two thirds have a strong comedic aesthetic where problems come up, get resolved in ways that are pretty entertaining  and things flow from there. Roughly the last third throws that out and adds a bunch of terribly written angst and poorly thought out drama. This causes the series to devolve from an entertaining romp to being virtually unwatchable. The ending is trash too. Most anime that aren't going to cover an adapted work entirely have the decency to give some closure and end with some pressing issue getting wrapped up. This one takes the rubbish heap route and leaves every single plot point unanswered. 

There are some lesser problems before that. Yukino's friend, Maho, talks about dating a dude who's almost thirty and no one finds it creepy except the people in the audience who have sense. Hate to break it to you guys in your late twenties, early thirties, but if you're chasing after high school girls you are objectively a complete fucking creep. Same with those of you in your mid twenties. Even early twenties is pushing it given the developmental difference. The anime is also pretty lazy. It features a lot of long recap segments, a full recap episode and two episodes that are half recap. To an extent, I do understand it since the economy was doing poorly, but it still does impact the quality of the work when it wastes your time rehashing to that extent.

On the positive side, the first seventeen or eighteen episodes are enjoyable, except for the recaps. The high levels of humour work quite well. To the point where you can almost completely forgive the lazier elements. If it had maintained that momentum, this could have been a very solid anime. But some incompetent moron working on the adaptation lost the plot. It was probably Zach. No one likes that guy.

Characters:

The characters were never super complex. Even before Zach ruined everything. But this was a more comedic series and the characters did work well in that regard. Then we reach the shite segment of the series and Arima gets obnoxiously angsty and drags the whole cast down with him. They also introduce a male love interest for the girl who has spent the entire series showing interest exclusively in cute girls. Which actually makes me mad. Like, I haven't entirely forgiven Fire Emblem Fates for pulling that shit with Soleil and I liked that game considerably more than I liked this anime. 

It's also a bit annoying that they basically get rid of all Tsubasa's character after wrapping up her arc about her dad remarrying. It's like they couldn't think of anything for her character to do and didn't know how to work her into the friend group. So, they gave up and had her just go feral. 

Art:

This is another area where the obvious fiscal problems resulted in a lot of laziness. There are a lot of scenes where characters will be talking and they'll just show some still images of street lights or some other nonsense that doesn't matter and is just boring to look at. They'll also just cut to quiet scenes of the same kind of scenery for no narrative reason and just linger on it to pad out the episodes. The series uses a lot of boring still images and recycled animation in general. It doesn't help that it has one of the worst drawn dogs I've ever seen in anime. How do you have a dog that isn't even a little cute? Honestly, most of it looks pretty bad. 

Sound:

Here's where the director royally failed. The acting in this can be pretty damn bad. Shintani Mayumi, Fukui Yukari, Kiyokawa Motomu and several other actors sound really stilted in their delivery. There's also a lot of over the top comedic exaggeration that might be fine in more moderation but gets grating when it's employed this often. I'll give the series credit for having some theme tunes that are pretty good, musically. The imagery isn't. The rest of Sagisu Shirou's soundtrack is pretty mediocre. 

Ho-yay:

There's Sakura and her thing for cute girls. There are also moments where both Asaba & Tonami seem to have a thing for Arima. And there's an episode where Yukino's sisters seem to pick up female admirers solely for cheap jokes. Naturally, this episode is at the point where the series has already gotten bad. 

Areas of Improvement:

Lose the badly written, ill conceived angst. There's a place for angst. Preferably, as a temporary shift due to some major events. But it doesn't work in a mostly comedic series. Especially when it just keeps going. 
Do not give the one character who's been portrayed as not straight a hetero love interest. Yes, we get that bisexual people exist. However, there's also this terrible tendency in media to have one LGBT character to earn some "representation points" and then give that character a hetero normative relationship so you don't actually have to deal with any of that queer stuff. Fuck that. Fuck it with something long, awkwardly shaped and covered in literal spikes. 
Have a satisfying conclusion. I get it, Zach is an awful writer and screwed up, thereby making it so the series had to end prematurely. At least give us some closure. End the emo Arima phase and show Yukino's play. Just give us something to make it feel somewhat satisfying. 

Final Thoughts:

This is, honestly, a bit difficult for me to rate. On the one hand, I did enjoy the series for about two thirds of it. And if it had maintained that standard, I could somewhat forgive the lazy, rubbish artwork, the lazy rehashing and even the poor directing. If not for the way it ends I'd be going with a "6" maybe slightly higher. However, the final third is utter tripe and those elements that worked get heavily bludgeoned to the point of being nearly unrecognisable and a whole slew of problems come in to make sure they stay damaged. And if the entire series was like those last eight episodes, I'd be giving this a "1" and making rude gestures in its general direction. Still, I can't bring myself to call it bad given the way it started. So, I'm going with a 4/10 for the whole thing. Maybe I'll go read the manga and it won't have the same problems at the end. Maybe that final stretch is what made Tsuda unhappy with the adaptation. In which case, completely justifiable response there. 

reading some of the reviews done by other users i realise that their compliments to the story and characterisation along with other aspects excluding art and sound, can be primarily thought of as praise for the source material rather than the anime itself. I find it hard to understand their enthusiasm when watching this tripe.

don't get me wrong, the manga was brilliant and although many of the characters where generic it had situations that where altogether new and exciting and to a certain degree the comedy and romance aspects mixed well. But that is in the manga. THIS is the anime.

Where to begin?

Honestly, thia ... anime is so badly done that I felt insulted by the animators, and i'm not even the mangaka, and we all know how he felt about this anime (notice the lack of a second season). There are simply too many problems here that rather than speaking of inexsperience or time/money constraints speak of an inherrent laziness that would make you think that the animators spent most of their time reading the manga instead of animating, since there's so little actual animation in this show.

As far as the story goes, it's good. And in the beginning it follows the source material pretty well, for the story alone you could actually enjoy this anime, if it weren't for the equally fitting half assed attempt to sub this anime which considering this anime was licensed was devestatingly terrible. Entire scenes would go by without any subs and when the subs do appear their in a horrible yellow text that's often blurry and at times just popped in for a few seconds then vanished rendering them pointless. The fact that it began so close to the source material adds further inclinations toward the creators laziness, since copying text from the manga means you don't have to come up with anything new for people to say.

Where the biggest problem comes (and the laziest part of this anime) is with the animation itself (which I dare say hardly qualifies as animation at all). This show has some of the laziest animation I've ever seen, so lazy that it's an insult to the animation industry. Let me break it up into percentages for you:

80% of the anime is just still images from the manga with voice acting over them, and some zooming and panning from the camera.
The remaining 20% is 'gif' like animation where characters move erraticly but consistantly the same way over and over again again, with voice acting over it.

What has the animation industry come to when this kind of shoddy excuse for animation is passed off as consummable by the general public who are, honestly, expecting actual animation to take place. As if that wasn't lazy enough they also couldn't be bother to use colour so the 80% of the anime that remains stationary is in monochrome like the manga. Honestly why bother, you may as well read the manga since this is just audio over the manga 80% of the time.

on the topic of audio, the voice acting in this anime isn't half bad, but this show's budget must have been dreadful, since there are literally only 3 pieces of music in this entire show if you exclude the opening an ending creds. After you've heard funny music for umpteenth time, and romance music 1 and 2 for the umpteenth and a half time you get so irritated and tired of it that you want to smash your face through a combine harvester. Each piece of music is used with respect to situation and quite stoicly at that since there are only three types of situation throughout this show, comedic situation, awkward romance/issue situation, and romance resolved situation. The manga was more detailed and explored more of the characters and their history whereas this show just acts melodramatic hoping you won't notice the rotting cheese they left all over the frames.

The characters are waaaay too melodramatic and although there are plenty of you're average manga character in this it's good to see a stronger female lead, and her friends and character are funny at times but arima is just too boring in this anime since they don't explore his character much beyond aluding to a hidden self which only makes his character seem inhuman since he hasn't really got a very emotional V/O artist.


all in all you should read the manga instead, it's waaay better and not so lazy and half assed like this bargain basement garbage. You might be able to watch it and enjoy it superficially and maybe find the characters interesting. It's justa shame about the cheese.

OK, so here's the thing. If you want to pick up the manga and read from where the anime ends to continue the story, then it's a great anime and an awesome introduction to the manga.

If you want to just watch the anime, be ready for a sudden and abrupt unsatisfying ending. A lot of the anime has you wonder what will happen and guessing at things, and then in the final episode, not only does it not answer any of your questions, it introduces a LOT of new plot to leave you with even more questions!

It's just so odd that ... there was never a continuation/sequel/movie even made and the unsatisfying conclusion haunts me still to this day.

An analogy: imagine you're listening to a singer perform a brand-new song that has four verses. Their voice is nothing special, but the first two verses and the chorus tell a deeply relatable, at times heartwarming and at times heartwrenching story... then on the third verse the singer stumbles for a bit and ends up having to repeat the second verse, and on the final verse the entire tune changes and is distorted until it's unrecognizable. How do you rate such a song? Was it good overall? Do its exceptional parts outweigh its stumbles and ultimate failure? Does it matter if the sheet music had ... a fifth unsung verse even worse than the performance you just saw?

KareKano was a promising series that suffered a late-term budget and directorial abortion midway through. The honest romance, strong characterization, realistic relationship struggles, and unique art style got abandoned halfway through and replaced with clip show recaps and a back half of episodes that never quite manage to find their footing after the interruption.

If you're feeling like an anime archaeologist and want to see a classic romance series that has the bones of a good story with a depth of emotions, characters who actually push themselves and each other forward, and a sometimes hypnotically calm and thoughtful pace, you could certainly use to flip through a few episodes of KareKano, but it never quite delivers on what it promises at the outset.

That being said, hungry for more, I pursued the manga, which concludes on some... deeply problematic notes with enough red flags to make the Beijing Olympics look tame. You've been warned.

This anime came off as a Nick Jr. show to me. Because it was about this girl who created this certain image of herself and had to keep it up so she would be admired like year round and the boy I forget what his story was, but at the end of the day it is all about just being yourself.

I did not like the art at all it was too nineties and just not very appealing to look at. It also came off as like the writers were trying too hard for certain parts of the anime to be funny. You know like when ... an anime character is mad and suddenly they go nuts and start yelling and their head gets suddenly big and they have fangs and their eyes are all white and they are just yelling at someone. That's why I think they tried too hard and over exaggerated on most scenes.

First episode is suppose to pull you in and make you consider continuing to watch it and that did not happen.

I watch this anime with two other people the unanimous opinion was that it was bad, luckily when I watched it I was a sponge for anime and manga and didn't miss out on the story that was underneath the poor animation. As RomCom goes this is one of my favorites but I did not enjoy this as an anime. Characters were great and didn't feel like inserts or "cut and paste" characters. I had to look up the music to remember it, the opening was decent but overall the soundtrack was fairly forgettable.
Now I watched this 10yrs after air and writing a review ... 14yrs after viewing so grain of salt please. I enjoyed the story but the number of stills ruined it as an animation. I would highly recommend this series but not as an anime please go read the manga. The anime takes the main romance story and adds voice to it, so if you like your manga read to you give this a go but I wouldn't say it's worth it.

The story was pretty cliche but very love-able. The main characters relationships develops very early in the anime, unlike those series where the literally spend the entire series goofing around and never confessing. There's a lot of time focused on the relationship itself, rather than the chase.

Everything about it is great, but there's a simple reason why I rated it 1/10... The subs S-U-C-K. Whoever subbed this show, can go hang himself. Some episodes (if not all) are missing tons of subs throughout an episode. They'll speak back and forth with no lines subbed, then suddenly one line of sub appears and immediately disappears ... again. How utterly annoying.

1/10 unless you understand japanese or wanna watch dub (ugh)

The synopsis lied to me and it was really disappointing. I heard it was about a fake bitch and a dude who wanted to blackmail her. I thought it was going to be a twisted romance with terrible people kinda like Phantom Thread. But they resolve and forgive all that by the second episode. Her being an attention seeking whore is practically forgotten by the 5th episode and the dude who blackmailed her was apparently never in the wrong to begin with. He ‘just wanted an excuse to talk to her’, which was the most disappointing part because when he was blackmailing her, his chipper ... attitude was very entertaining. Him smiling so genuinely while saying despicable shit made him a very fun and interesting character. But alas they both turn into bland and cliche perfect protagonists who you’d never be able to tell were malicious whatsoever. The comedy was bland, the drama was dumb and I gave up 7 episodes before the finale. Every problem that crops up in this show is just resolved within the episode or in the next. Old anime is cringe in a different sense and it’s weird seeing how it (d)evolved. Still the paper puppets and paper animation in the last episode I did watch was pretty neat.

BRO Aparrently this ass show was made by the same guy who did Evangelion what the fuck?!