Amamizu-kan, an old boarding house in Tokyo, is the home of The Sisterhood – a group of otaku women of various stripes who shun The Stylish and men in general. Tsukimi, a jellyfish fanatic, is the latest addition to their ranks. One evening a strange Stylish woman helps her out and she brings the Stylish home with her...only to discover that “she” is a “he.” Despite her pleas, Kuranosuke, the disenchanted cross-dressing son of a prominent political family, sticks around, finding himself more and more fascinated by The Sisterhood in general and Tsukimi in specific. When unscrupulous developers begin to eye Amamizu-kan's location, Kuranosuke realizes that there is more at stake than just a building, and sets out to galvanize its residents to save their way of life.
The story is the whole “coming out of your shell” type of story when a person who has a different outlook on life wants to help them not only with experiencing life outside their comfort zone, considering that they are going to need it since their home is on the verge of being wrecked. As for the romance aspect, I did sort of sense that the main characters Tsukimi & Kuranosuke would have their relationship to grow but to me, it was never towards the “lovey-dovey” type of relationship but more like a “close friends” relationship and I thought it was great that they stuck it to that. As for the side story with Kuranosuke’s brother, it didn’t went anywhere at all with him having a crush on Tsukimi, only to ended early with the one character Inari, who’s the one that’s after Amamizu-kun and the very textbook definition of the word “cold bitch”, gets involved plus, his brother Shu isn’t that interesting of a character or even that memorable unlike Kuranosuke himself, who was one of my favorites in the show for being the motivator of Tsukimi and the other women in the sisterhood.
As for Tsukimi, she is portrayed as a sweet but very awkward and often an easily weirded-out character with his unique interests in jellyfish and drawing them ever since she saw them with her late mother. The other tenants in the building also have their unique personality about them with the acting landlady Chieko collecting traditional Japanese clothes and dolls, Banba is into trains, Jiji into older men and Mayaya is a fan of Three Kingdoms and unfortunately out of all of them, Mayaya is the most annoying character on this show, mainly because while she’s very animated, all she does is act like a neurotic fangirl and not the kind that would be fun to hang out, but the kind that rages about everything and everybody so much, you want to pop an synapse after just to calm down.
The animation for this gets a little rough around some of the character movements and designs. Brains Base, the guys that brought you Baccano! & Durarara!! , has made some good animation in their past works and for this, it’s more like when Durarara began to show its budget problems during the second half but then again, this is an 11-episode anime, so I shouldn’t expect much of a grandiose amount of animation, but it is typical of Brains Base’s style of animation and it was good to say the least. The music is very appealing to most of the show with its comical style to some of the scenes to the light dramatic moments in there. Plus, the opening and ending themes are quite addictive to listen to, especially the opening sequence where it parodies or pay homage to most movie franchises like Star Wars, James Bond, The Seven Kingdoms, Singin’ in the Rain, Mary Poppins, etc.
For the FUNimation dub, this was one of those dubs that didn’t sound so usual. Usually, I yawn at FUNimation dubs, not that they’re bad (they make good dubs) but they’re not that special to begin with. I did liked Maxey Whitehead’s performance as very sweet and genuine although it is strange hearing her as a lead female character since most of her roles have been androgynous sounding boys. Josh Grelle did convince me that Kuranosuke was an actual girl at first and even though I find Mayaya to be annoying, Monica Rial plays the role and her voice much differently than she used to, it sounded more lower than her standard of voicing characters.
FINAL VERDICT: The show is actually worth watching around the first chance you get. Some of the humor can be charming and unique up to an extent although I hate that it ended on a lousy cliffhanger, which mean it’s one of those “read the manga” endings. It’s something you would either want to rent or own the DVD to.
