This anime is centered around an amusing middle school art club and people they’re associated with. Each episode is the standard 24 minutes, but most are composed of completely distinct segments, and thus it’s essentially a series of comedic shorts. This comedy is entirely carried by it’s cast. None of the characters have that much depth in and of themselves, but they’re all pretty interesting and amusing and the writing makes good use of that for a lot of amusing situations.
Of the art club, only one member, Usami, is really acting like a proper art club member should. She also generally serves as the tsukommi to the rest of the club members antics, though with her easily angered personality and her crush on fellow art club member Uchimaki, she’s the source of a good amount of comedy as well. The relationship dynamic between the two is amusing because while a great artist, Uchimaki is a total otaku who says he has absolutely no interest in 3D girls and joined the art club essentially with the goal of painting the ultimate waifu. And he doesn’t try to hide these aspects of him in the least and it constantly results in him butting heads with Usami. But despite all that, she’s still totally in love with him. And despite her being totally obvious about it to the point that pretty much everyone else has realized it, Uchimaki is too dense to notice. If the focus here was actual relationship development, then this may have been frustrating, but as it is it feels the relationship is more a source for comedy than romance, and as such it fits the anime quite well.
The other art club members include: Collette, a strange and incredibly energetic girl with an obsession with heroes; and the unnamed President, who is incredibly laid back, lazy, and just sleeps all the time. Though neither of the two ever really shown actually creating any art of their own so it’s a wonder why they’re in the club in the first place. Both have a decent presence the point I think its fair to consider them main characters, but far less than Usami and Uchimaki. What I think really elevates the cast of this anime though, is it’s really good use of reoccurring side characters. There’s a very large variety to these side characters, ranging from clumsy teachers, to meddling best friends, to chuunibyou transfer students, to incompetent and forgettable rivals. Most are incredibly simple, but they’re used well in a spaced out manner to keep things interesting, with the ones that are especially interesting being used just as much as the main character’s even I’d say. There’s also pretty good use of abrupt coincidences, like the random girl randomly met on the street in one episode just happening to be the granddaughter of one of the teachers as shown later on, that should feel forced or unnatural, but due to the execution manage to feel amusing in context.
The majority of the anime is just these random comedic shorts, with the only real overarching elements being the introduction of new characters from time to time. Still, with the varied cast and varied comedy it keeps things pretty enjoyable throughout. I felt the last two episodes were a bit weak however. They drop the separate segments aspect to instead have a single story per episode, each trying to have significance beyond just comedy. The 11th episode is centered around the art club as a group of friends with the standard anime style emphasis on youth and the 12th has a pretty strong emphasis on the relationship between Usami and Uchimaki. There’s still comedy, but it’s paced much slower than previous episodes in favor of serious moments that are actually intended to hit emotional beats.
I don’t think these emotional beats worked all that well however. The art club and everyone around them have a pretty amusing dynamic that fun to watch, but it’s not the type of group of friends that one finds themselves getting invested in, and thus the emotional beats related to that don’t hit all that hard. The relationship between Usami and Uchimaki is similarly amusing, but not that good of a romance in and of itself, and thus that too feels like it fell pretty flat, especially as no real progress was made. I get what they’re going for in trying to have a more memorable and substantial finale, but I really feel the story really wasn’t in a place that such a thing could be pulled off. With all that said, it’s not like these two episodes were bad, just weaker than the episodes before them, and thus while the anime didn’t end on what I think is a high note, it still left off on a pretty decent note.
The art and animation in the anime was pretty solid. The character designs were solid for the setting. There were a few cameos of other anime that were amusing to see, though they were a lot more subtle and minimal than anime references usually are in my experience. The eye catches between segments were pretty amusing. The OP and ED both had pretty great visuals and songs that fit the anime incredibly well. The soundtrack outside of that was decent enough but not particularly memorable.
