Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku

Deconstruction of the comedy, school genre.

It never takes itself seriously, too many comedies ruin themselves by adding unnecessary drama. The art is quite a bit better than the manga. Sound is appropriate, they manage new OPs and EDs despite their budget.

Very nice and refreshing gag and parody anime. It has nothing to do with "cute girls & cute things" as some people think for unknown reason. The show heavily relays on breaking 4-th wall and abstract humor and it seems most of the anime watchers are not used for this and miss entire point of the series. The show is full of self-irony and mocks anime-industry quite a bit, and it feel kinda honest which I like.

People bash this show due to inability to understand content outside of typical school comedy/drama tropes. So, while I can't guarantee that you will like it, there are no reason to trust the current score and skip it without trying on your own, especially if you have sense of humor of more intelligence than banana peel. read more

With markedly solid new offerings like Love Lab, Stella Jogakuin Koutou-ka C³-bu and Kiniro Mosaic, the Summer 2013 anime season has really been an excellent showcase of schoolgirl shows. With quality production and interesting hooks those anime all work to reaffirm how much fun the genre can be when done right. They also help to highlight the many failings of the peculiar Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku, the one new schoolgirl series of the season I would not recommend.

Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku is about five high school friends who are part of a club that doesn't really do anything--basically the same premise as Yuru Yuri or Yuyushiki. This can be an effective setup, as those shows both proved, but here it's not particularly well executed. The Going Home Club seems ill defined even next to the Amusement Club or the Data Processing Club and mostly just serves as a place for the writers to wring out the next comedic setup. It never feels natural. Yuyushiki got pretty random with its topics, but it made it feel entirely natural through the choice of setup and the brilliant way the characters played off of each other. Here, every setup and punch line feels so very labored.

A big part of the problem is that Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku is not very frequently funny. It tries. It tries really hard actually, but it just falls flat constantly. The timing is off and the jokes often aren't very funny in the first place. One thing it really seems to love a lot is fourth wall jokes; which is fine--they can be quite funny when done well. They're just really not here though and its in part due to the approach. Drawing attention to the fact that your animation budget is small, your writers are dumb and lazy and your show isn't very popular isn't going to hide the fact that its all true. On the contrary, it just highlights the problems for the viewer to scrutinize as they watch.

The anime was produced by the studio Nomad, who looking at their credits, always has been kind of underwhelming, at least from the series of theirs I've seen. Even then Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku really is pretty cheap and generic looking though. The art and animation are substandard. It doesn't fair much better on the sound end either. Music is okay I guess; seems to do what it should and while the opening theme isn't something I'd call particularly great (mostly due to the singers), it does have charm and is peppy enough; the original ending theme is really generic though, but it's quickly replaced by a better song a few episodes in. The big problem with the sound is in the voice acting. The VAs aren't very good. Well, most of them are passable, I suppose, but the voice of the club president has a weird grating quality to it and, more importantly, the main character is miscast and terrible. I usually like tsukkomi characters, but this one just comes across as annoying and shouty in the role--something that absolutely kills any comedy she's supposed to provide.

But what of the characters themselves? Well, they're pretty one note and reductive, reminding me more of the sort of characters you might see in a particularly bad harem anime than something like this. Main character Natsuki is, as said, a tsukkomi, only there to play the straight man to the others and shout about how stupid they are. Karin is a cute airhead. Club president Sakura is energetic in a decidedly generic way. Claire is basically Mugi from K-On! reduced to the dullest core elements. Botan is a kind of weird mix of gamer girl and martial arts girl who is somehow able to do inhuman feats. The show doesn't really bother to ever develop them. Between all the random comedy in Yuyushki, it took the time to develop the characters and make the audience care about their friendship. This show doesn't bother trying to do that. it just presents us with a set of fairly unrealistic, underwritten characters to blather on about whatever the writer wants them to.

Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku just isn't a good anime. With unfunny comedy, flat characters and zero in the way of plot, if it had more in the way of fanservice I expect this is what people who despise this genre entirely think it all is. If you want to watch a schoolgirl show this season, you're best off looking elsewhere. Love Lab is much funnier, Kiniro Mosaic is much cuter, C³-bu is peppered with cool action (and just generally better). As a longtime fan of the genre, the best I can give it is a five, but for others I expect the score might be lower. Not recommended. read more

Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku is a comedic manga written by Kuroha and published by Square Enix. Thi year it was adapted into a twelve episode anime by Nomad, a studio that's only headed about a dozen productions, none of which I've seen. Let's take a look and see what this studio can do.

The series opens with High school student Andou Natsuki going in for the opening ceremony. Afterwards she checks out some of the club adverts, the strangest of which is someone flailing around in a seal costume. When asked what club she's going to join she responds by saying that she might just join the going home club, only to find out that it's a real thing when her classmate, Touno Karin, decides to go with her to check it out. From their it goes into the details of the club activities, which seems to consist of doing strange things for fun. The comedy in this is a strange blend of absurdist elements, breaking the fourth wall and jokes about everyday school life. The closest anime I can compare the humour to is Gokujou Seitokai. The humour is strange, can be very random and mostly works pretty effectively. The series has a lot of great moments, particularly the musical chairs bit and the Schubert episode. One thing I really appreciate about the series is that they actually use pop culture things they reference for actual jokes and parody purposes, which shouldn't be surprising but there are a lot of series that just treat the reference as a joke by itself because “this thing exists, it's funny” and that's not only completely lacking in humour but just lazy, (glaring at you, Lucky Star.) A lot of their humour is also based around making fun of really stupid tropes, their gags about fan-service for example. They do have some jokes that don't really work or just fall flat, but those are in the minority.

The characters aren't particularly deep. They're really simple archetypes who don't develop very much with their major defining characteristics played up for comedic effect. I will grant that the characters play off of each other very nicely and the dynamics among them are well handled. They're also used in a very self aware fashion, which helps make them more interesting than they would have been had they been played completely straight.

The art is pretty standard. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but it isn't anything special or eye-catching. Save for a few visual gags.

The voice acting in this is well done. Most of the main cast doesn't have a lot of roles outside of this which is a shame since they are quite good. Particularly Senhongi Ayaka, Kobayashi Miharu and Kido Ibuki. The music is fun and they do some really clever things with it.

The ho-yay factor is a 6/10. The girls do get really homo-erotic. Karin and Claire are the ones who get the most screen time, but a lot of the dynamics have heavy homo-erotic undertones.

That's Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku. All in all, I rather enjoyed it. There are a lot of funny moments. The characters play off of each other nicely and the voice acting was good. That being said, it wasn't the best comedy I've ever seen and the art was certainly nothing special. Final rating, 7/10. It's a good little anime, check it out if it sounds like your type of humour. That does it for December. The request queue going into the new year is: Battle Athletes Daiundoukai, Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu, Dansai Bunri no Crime Edge, Shinsekai Yori and One Outs. Next week I'll ignore all of that because it's the beginning of a new year and those of you who have been reading my reviews for a while know what that means. Studio Ghibli month. We'll begin with what some claim is the first Studio Ghibli film and others argue isn't on a technicality, Nausicaa of the valley of the wind. read more