Anime Review: School Rumble, Volume One

High school seems so very long ago. All the cliques, back stabbing, love triangles, and hormone-driven bad decisions might have happened to someone else, in another place in another time. Unfortunately, they did happen, they happened to me and they will happen to most teenagers in the process of “growing up”. Bad, crappy, and downright horrible high school memories aside, high school is a place that for good or evil helps shape our lives.

We learn how to interact with each other, learn how to stand up for ourselves, or not, and learn all about puppy love by attending this grand institution. Most of the time, teens don’t even have to pay for these wonderful life lessons or, at least, not here in the US.

If you wish to forgo the high school experience or want to revisit those happy yet troubled years in a slightly skewed manner, let School Rumble Volume One take you back.

plot summary

Tsukamoto Tenma has issues. As a sophomore in high school, Tenma isn’t the smartest, most attractive, or most athletic girl in her class. However, what Tenma lacks in intelligence, looks, and fitness she makes up for with her endearing tenacity.

This year, Tenma has vowed to proclaim her love to her long time crush, Karasuma Ooji. Since she’s lacking in even the most basic smarts, she’s forced to constantly come up with new, and interesting, ways to gain her heartthrob’s attention.

While Tenma schemes and the hamster in her head runs round and round, someone else is also hatching plans to capture the heart of their crush.

Unbeknown to Tenma, Harima Kenji, high school delinquent, is madly in love with her. Like Tenma, Harima schemes ways to make his enduring love known to Tenma. And like Tenma, Harima also isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. Harima tries in his own delinquent way to pour his heart out the girl who’s his only reason for attending school.

As these two clueless lovebirds circle around the objects of their desire, hilarity ensues as Tenma tries to escape the bathroom, Harima pours his heart out in an unsigned love letter, and Tenma’s sister, Yakumo, discovers she can read her admirers’ minds.

review

School Rumble is a comedy of the random, slice-of-life variety à la average high schooler. No episode necessarily follows the previous one to further the story since what’s driving the story is the character’s interactions and reactions.

Random vignettes pop up in the episodes, play out and just as quickly disappear. Ideas don’t fill entire episodes as much as streak across the screen. I found I didn’t need to devote actual thought into watching School Rumble nor pay too much attention. Bonus after a hard day.

Tenma is absolutely hopeless in her dense mental process and naiveté. She doesn’t come across as moe as much as clueless. Tenma is perfectly capable of helping herself once she figures out how to, although “helping” might be stretching the definition of the word a bit.

Harima is sympathetic as the tough bad ass who tries to turn his life around in order to get the girl who inspired him to do so. His intentions are pure and done for the good of Tenma, no matter the cost to him. Harima’s ill-planned plots are as funny as much as they are sad.

Karasuma is bland as Tenma’s questionable heartthrob. His unwavering inexpressiveness makes me wonder what the hell Tenma sees in this guy. He’s not so easy on the eyes, not much of a hero, and he’s a very mundane and average character.

I laughed at the “drama” unfolding between these three characters but I wasn’t too drawn into the story nor did I sympathize overly much with them. School Rumble much resembles Azumanga Daioh and Cromartie High School in it’s structure but it doesn’t have the heart of AD nor the well plotted laughs of CHS.

The OP, “Scramble”, by Yui Horie is cute and fits the subject matter. The ED, “Onna no Ko, Otoko no Ko”, by Yuko Ogura is also a good fit. I was indifferent to both OP and ED beyond that they were both cute and apropos. The graphics to both OP and ED are adorable.

We skipped the English dub and went with the Japanese version. The Japanese dub had so much more expressiveness then the overly affected English one.

Studio Comet did an average job with the animation and overall the animation was actually fairly bland. There weren’t even moments when the animation stood out as something special. I can’t say that I was impressed with the work the studio did.

Character designs for School Rumble were what one comes to expect with this variety of anime; meh. You can’t do too much with high school uniforms ‘cept maybe hike up the hem line, add an extra line here or there, or unbutton a blouse on the girls and perhaps have a tousled look for the boys. Although I did like the character design for the cat Yakumo befriends.

The packaging for the DVD has some nifty extras. A sheet of seven magnets with Tenma’s classmates are included as well as a reversible DVD jacket. On the opposite side of the jacket is the original Japanese DVD cover.

School Rumble has the potential to be a great series if it steps up the pacing a notch. Even with all the random quirkiness, there’s still a decent plot underneath the series’ silly facade. The concepts that have, so far, been in the background have the capability to push School Rumble beyond an average blasé slice-of-life anime.

Which is why I think this anime, while entertaining, is not one, thus far in the series, I would devote much effort towards. If someone pops School Rumble into a DVD player, for example, and I happen to be in the room, I’ll watch it. However, I will watch the next volume to see if my suspicions are true that School Rumble will pick up the pace and the heartfelt sentiments that lie dormant will wake up and take this series to the next level.

out of a possible four gummies.