Otaku Review

K-ON!
aka: けいおん！
Genre: Music Comedy
Premiere Date: 4/2
Studio: Kyoto Animation
Official Website

It looks kind of lazy in places but it’s still more than enough to make it three in a row for Kyoto Animation.

The Story

High school has started for four girls; Yui, Ritsu, Mio and Tsumugi. As more days pass by in the new school year, Yui still has yet to make a decision regarding which club she wants to join. Ritsu has already made her decision, she wants to join the light music club and form a band. She manages to nab her best friend and another girl to join but they need a fourth in order to keep the club from being suspended. Eventually, despite her having absolutely no idea how to play a guitar and being a ditz, Yui is number four.

Good and the Bad

It’s easy to see why fans have already started raving about this series since it first aired. These are incredibly cute and charming characters that are impossible not to like. All of their personalities have perfect roles to play and with only four girls playing the central leads, there is ample room for the characters to interact.

The one thing about the characters that confuses me so far however is why all the love for the lead character Yui. Yui is beyond a ditz or an airhead, she’s annoyingly dim. Always completely paranoid and on the verge of a panic attack or tears, I’m really finding it hard to really like her all that much in the beginning. I have absolutely zero doubts in my mind that her personality is going to grow on me as more of her personality is shown but right now, she is the character with by far the most room for improvement. So for the record, I’m putting my fanboy love on Ritsu and Mio. 

Ritsu and Mio were the characters that I really could not get enough of during this first episode. With Ritsu being so enthusiastic about saving the club, she becomes the over the top character literally begging people to join the club and save it. What makes this particular take on the character so unique however is that Ritsu isn’t being portrayed this way just to make her “wacky”, it’s just a side effect to her role as club president which makes it that much funnier. Mio serves as a perfect straight man to the over the top Ritsu and keeps the series grounded with her dry sarcasm and Ritsu smacks.

The one thing that got to me the most during this episode however was gaps in animation quality. While there are plenty of moments when the animation looks fabulous (such as the close-ups of the girls playing their instruments), there are other moments when K-ON just looks terrible. The lines will just be very rough and the characters in the scene just don’t look as they did moments earlier. 

When the animation does look good however, it always has a nice soft color scheme. While the characters aren’t designed as dark, none of them are overly bright with a lot of shading used. Even in the outdoor scenes the animation never looked that bright or overdone.

Music

It’s a music series so naturally the four leads are going to provide the theme songs. In the opening theme song, Aki Toyosaki (Yui) gets the lead with a pop song with a nice edge to it. It’s very upbeat and really portrays the girls well with a solid theme song for fans to start enjoying now before the girls even get to the point of playing their instruments. The closing theme is remarkably different however with Yoko Hikasa (Mio) getting the lead as the girls are dolled up as a gothic rock band. The entire closing animation looks like a gothic rock video and while disconcerting at first, is incredibly easy to get into within thirty seconds. Bonus points go to the animation staff who took the time to make it look like the girls were actually sort of playing their instruments instead of just mindlessly strumming.               

Overall

I can tell you right now that this series has me hooked in for the rest of the season. It’s cute, it’s very funny and three out of the four lead characters are already charming and entertaining. Kyoto Animation just keeps the hits coming along as unless something pretty bad happens to the animation or story quality in the middle, this one is going to be one of this season’s success stories.

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