Kitaku-bu 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.

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.

Oh the memories..The hate,the pain,the blood running down my comrade's hands,the screams of burning victims as the bombs came down on us like rain,the sweet release of death as our lifeless eyes turned white.

That pretty much sums up everything about CotGHC,so goodbye no........No what are you doing?Why are you dragging me back?Leave me be,don't make me go through this nightmare again please...

Well they said that if i don't write a proper review they'll send me my wife's head in a bag so..

CotGHC then..It's about..Erm..Maybe it has to do something with Japan's school having a ton of clubs for kids to stay out of their parents ... way and kids than don't join one are treated as the plague and nobody loves them and they rot away slowly as time fades and with it fades the empty life of those fucks that stay at home and suck their parents happiness dry.

But because this is Japan they had to think of a shorter name and they went with members of the "Going Home Club"..Which in this anime's case it's an actual club with it's own room and stuff and people can join and it's legal..So Natsuke Andou and Karin Touno decide to join this cult and were ordered to sacrifice a baby seal..But the seal cried and begged for its' life and they couldn't handle the cute seal's tears and ended up making it their mascot.

As for the rest of the cult..Well there's Botan Oohagi who goes around the worlds parks and beats bears to a pulp to prove her martial artistic superiority or something..And no this time i'm not joking.

Then we have Claire Kokonoe,whose family is richer than Elon Musk.She also has a bit of an obsession Karin..I forgot Natsuke who has an antenna for hair,always shouts for some reason and plays the role of the "straight man" in this chaos..Karin is the cute airhead who also cooks and is perfect and all girls want to be with her.

Then there's the cult leader Sakura Domyoji,who wears some enormous red hair ornaments and has so much enthusiasm,one could believe she snorted a kg of cocaine.She founded the cult,which she wanted to be a cult that could be about anything.Unfortunately the cult is about nothing at all in particular.They basically sit around a table and talk about all kinds of uninteresting shit,like why a bird doesn't sing or something like that or why the Demon King is such a wimp.

All in all i think these girls would be better off if they actually DID go home.Apart from some good moments here and there,and i'm being very generous here,and the episode with the word chain(7),this anime has nothing to offer.

My mind keeps returning to a line in the closing song,"Don't think,feel!"..Makes perfect sense cause the more i think about it the more i feel i wanna drink bleach with snake venom in it.