The preview disc packed in with this month’s issue of Newtype USA contains the first episodes of The Wallflower (Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge), Magikano, and Yawara! I watched all three episodes in subtitled form and short answer: I didn’t like Magikano but did enjoy the other two. You can read my long form opinions after the jump.
The first one I looked at was Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl, which is about a high school girl named Inokuma Yawara whose grandfather Jigoro was a legendary judo champion. Jigoro is training her for the 1992 Olympics because women’s judo is rumored to debut as an event at those Barcelona games (which it did). However, Yawara wants to just be a normal high-school girl and has a crush on a pretty male vocalist who goes to her school. That becomes more difficult after a sports reporter Matsuda Kosaku and his photographer partner Kamoda witness her take down an escaping robber in a local square. Matsuda is also convinced that Yawara has what it takes to become Japan’s next sports star and tries to get the inside scoop so he can avoid writing the scandal stories that his editor keeps assigning him.
An interesting piece of trivia about this series is that real life teenager Ryoko Tamura (now Ryoko Tani) was nicknamed ‘Yawara-chan’ after she won silver in the 48kg weight class at the 1992 Games. She later won another silver in 1996 and earned gold in 2000 and 2004. The manga by Naoki Urasawa was serialized from 1986 to 1993, spanning 29 volumes, and the anime adaption aired from October 1989 to September 1992 with 124 episodes, with each episode ending with a countdown to the number of days until the Barcelona Olympics. (The number for episode 1 was 1013.)
I have been thinking lately about getting in watching more sports anime like Major or the out-of-print Princess Nine so Yawara! interested me when I saw it, as did Bamboo Blade when I saw the first episode of that last week. There was natural comedy in this first episode and Yawara seems to be a strong female character at the start. The preview for episode 2 involved Jigoro finding a rival for Yawara so there’s already the beginning of the road to the National Merit Award and then the Olympics. Animeigo plans to release the first season (episodes 1-40) in early 2008; interested customers can fill out a form to get an email when the preorder opens. I put my name and address in because I’m interested what the price will be and also because I’d like to see how the first season develops.
Next was The Wallflower, an anime I didn’t know much about going into it. Four bishonen housemates make a bet with their landlady that they can make a lady out of the landlady’s niece who is going to stay in their house. If the boys are successful, they don’t have to pay rent for a year but if they fail, their rent triples. Soon after the unnamed “Auntie” leaves in a helicopter to go on a worldwide journey to find her true love, Sunako (the girl) is discovered hiding in some bushes in the garden. She has long black hair with bangs that cover her face and an overall “scary” aura around her.
The boys try to make her comfortable in their best efforts but are not doing so well. One of them attempts to cook dinner and fails but luckily Sunako was peeking from behind a wall so she steps in and makes the meal. She pulls her hair up into a ponytail as she is preparing dinner and one of the boys notices Sunako has a nice neckline and thinks the group may have a chance of making good on their bet. He then tries to get her to show her entire face, which she resists by crawling in retreathalfway around the house until she knocks into a table and flour falls onto her skin. The boys think she looks average but then they notice pimples and a chapped lips when the flour is cleaned off. She fails at attempting to apply some skin care products but at least it’s a start.
I had no particular expectations of this anime since I didn’t really know the basic plot before diving in, so I was a little surprised that I started to like it near the end of the episode. I don’t particularly care for the bishonen characters themselves but thankfully the main humor is in the awkward interactions between them and Sunako. The first episode started off slow but got better toward and after the reveal so it was a little better than average. I would be interested in seeing the next couple episodes so maybe I’ll rent Volume 1 sometime. Perhaps I’ll utilize ADV’s download service and hope the dubs aren’t too bad.
Finally, I watched Magikano. The plot here: Ayumi Mamiya, a young witch, is assigned to be a maid for the Yoshikawa family so she can deal with a curse she incurred upon herself when she looked into the Mirror of the Future, one that will deplete her magical power (and supposedly also kill her) until it is reversed. In order to do that, she must get Haruo to awaken his latent powers (or make him into a man, as she calls it) but his magic-using sisters have been trying let him live a normal life and they are not about to let Ayumi change that, especially not the overprotective Maika.
I didn’t particularly like the first episode of Magikano, finding it pretty average and only mildly humorous. There were some interesting elements like how a bit of each sister’s personality was revealed when each had a spell placed on them that made them see what they desired most, whether it was a pile of money, an exercise machine, or a dream kitchen. Ayumi’s dislike for eels was also used to cleverly disarm another spell. Unfortunately, this anime just didn’t seem like something I would want to watch either for the light comedy or for the magic storyline. It’s only 13 episodes but I have other stuff I feel I could better spend my time watching.
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