Yuyushiki: Final Review by Miki

Genre: Comedy/Slice of Life
Format: 12 episodes
Allegiance: Kinema Citrus
Director: Kaori
Vintage: 2013
Intelligence Agency Report by: Miki

 

Yui, Yukari, and Yuzuko are in their first year of high school, and haven’t found a club to join yet. They’re stopped while wandering the halls by a flyer for the “Data Processing Club,” and their homeroom teacher, who happens to be the advisor for this club, comes across them and asks them to join. Unable to resist the teacher’s cuteness (or breasts, depending on the member of the trio), the three girls agree. Their club meetings consist of sitting at computers and randomly searching for information on the internet on any variety of topics, but the range of their friendship stretches far beyond the confines of the tiny club room, their school grounds, or the sheer absurdity of Yuzuko’s mind.Field Agent Report by: Miki
Plot
Characters
Impact
Visual
Audio
5.00
6.50
5.00
8.00
8.50
Overall 6.25
(not an average)
yuyushiki promoAnd that’s about it! There’s really not much more to say about Yuyushiki. I have a short list of things I wish the show had or hadn’t done, however:I wish the writers understood how half-hour comedy works. Usually a show, even in short 4-koma form, sets up repeated gags that come back in surprising ways to make them fresh again and even funnier. Yuyushiki does not do that. It instead sets up jokes and gags that last for a scene and don’t come back ever again, except in a bland episodic fashion to the point where you can predict how any scene will go from the first line uttered.

The concept of the show heavily involves their free-association search engine wandering. It would help if more than half of the episodes actually involved said wandering. It was amusing, and the only unique (and consistently interesting) thing the show had going for it. Who hasn’t lost hours on the internet randomly searching for something that leads to a trip down the rabbit hole?

There are a lot of puns in this show. Onomatopoeia-based, homophonic word endings, words starting with the syllable the previous word ended with, all kinds of things so closely tied to the original Japanese that unless you either know the language or have been a very attentive anime viewer, they will go right over your head. The subtitles do an admirable job to try to cover for this in places but they inevitably fall short. It’s not the fault of the show, really, but it’s a bit of a hurdle for cross-cultural viewing.

Apart from this, the show was repetitive, too random to look for any logical progression or development, and too focused on how obsessed Yuzuko and Yukari are with Yui’s and the homeroom teacher’s boobs.

On the plus side, however, the opening theme song was nice, and the animation placed some surprising focus on some unexpected aspects of the character movements that was rather nice. It also helped that a very small handful of scenes in the 12-episode run were actually funny. If you’re a fan of true whimsical randomness, give it a shot. Otherwise, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.