Good Job Club #12 — Maudlin
March 27th, 2013
Ugh.
Impressions:
Ugh. Did this show really spend an entire episode trying to be sentimental over the three seniors graduating? Well, I guess it’s the first even slightly ambitious thing that it’s done in about eight episodes, but maybe it should have tried to be ambitious in a way that isn’t a complete 180 degree shift in tone and atmosphere from the rest of the series. I’m pretty sure that the near minute of pans around dark scenery, punctuated right in the middle by a happy peppy OP (Ha ha! We didn’t think this out at all!) at the start did not exactly help to prime my opinion either.
Melodrama and emotion was never your strength or selling point anyway, at either the best or worst of times. And no, long, tone deaf insert songs are not going to win me over either. Good on you for keeping the volume set low, but even if my black and shriveled heart was predisposed toward it, nasally barely audible wailing in the background for about three straight minutes ranks somewhere slightly below lettuce on my list of things that will enhance an emotional scene. But hey, we gots us CDs to sell, don’t we?
Final Thoughts:
I have really nothing new here to say that I haven’t been saying for weeks. The opening episode was charming, energetic, cute, well animated… maybe not the snappiest paced, but still moved enough from segment to segment to keep from being boring. But the budget quickly drops off, the pace slows to an absolute crawl forcing it dwell on and stretch out the already thin impetuses for each scene, and it has a bigger commitment to recycling than Al Gore. Anything that was mildly amusing once just gets repeated over and over and over again. Kyoro pretending to be a badass for example. The joke never escalates, never evolves, is never reacted to any differently, it just repeats.
It got really bad in parts of the second half too when characters literally just stood in a line waiting to essentially say their catchphrase and then go back into the line again. The glut of new characters didn’t help either. Their single jokes were even more painfully obvious and repetitive than the main cast’s. The characters are wafer thin, but it tries to ride on nothing but their (lack of) personalities anyway instead of letting situations and events drive the humor. And I use ‘events’ lightly. Basically anything at all happening would be an improvement to "they watch him brush X’s hair for 20% of the episode while cooing over it, and then next week, they’ll watch him brush Y’s hair for 20% of the episode while cooing over it."
So like many a comedy, it ended up being a one trick pony and trying to ride that trick to the bitter, bitter end. After the first three episodes, you’ll have seen about 90% of the humor that the show has to offer. While it can often be cute, there’s really not much else that it has to offer after the opening salvo. Besides more than its fair share of fetishized hair brushing.
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Well, I’ll miss the hair brushing. Hope it becomes a trend in Anime for the next five years.
Onward….