If you looked like your face was a hockey mask, would you really learn how to make chainsaw sounds perfectly?
What They Say:
Bossun may have a way with words, but these clients were born with their feet in their mouths! First is J-son-sensei, the shop teacher with the glass heart and looks straight out of some horror movie! Can the Sket-dan help him find love? A man of few words and many offstandish poses, “Dante” perhaps poses the greatest riddle of all… Can the Sket-dan help this Fallen Angel find his Wings?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Getting back more firmly into its short form story, Sket Dance has a lot of fun with the parodies and homages in this episode, including the episode title which makes an Evangelion reference with “Mistaken Angel the 13th.” It plays to the horror side more for most of the episode though as we’re introduced to the shop teacher who is nicknamed J-son. He has a real problem in that he’s having a new marriage meeting with an attractive young woman but is afraid that he’s going to screw it up. A lot of it comes through because of his personality and the fact that he face looks naturally like a hockey mask. He has real problems with how he presents himself though because of the things he says but also because most of the things he does comes across as creepy, from his smile to his laugh. Having the Sket kids try and help him is pretty cute and fun though and it serves up a nice first-half story with plenty of little nods to the horror fan audience.
The second half goes in a different yet similar blunt direction as Kura arrives on the scene and introduces the group to Dante, a very goth and effeminate type young man with Visual Kei worship who has problems of his own that she hopes they can solve. Whenever he talks, he’s very theatrical about it in a way with the slow pans, the quiet moments and so forth. It’s definitely amusing when he introduces himself and the huge black wings spread out from behind him in a very theatrical way. Dante provides the club with another situation similar to J-son where communication and words are definitely difficult in being expressed, to the point where Himeko is ready to hurt him for trying to compress everything into one word.
Dante’s come to them, through Kura’s help, because he’s lost something and needs their help. Unfortunately, he has such an incredibly hard time expressing himself in a way that others can understand that it almost turns into a game in how they try to get the information out of him. Dante does try to get beyond the single word answers, but it gets creative in a way that only serves to frustrate the others more, though Switch seems to be able to break it down more than the other two. Watching them go through it bit by bit, trying to figure it out and then to have Kura do the big reveal of the truth at the end is spot on in how it plays out. Himeko steals a lot of this with how quick she is to anger but there’s a lot of fun to be had with how Dante presents his single words as well.
In Summary:
Sket Dance is still in the process of trying to win me back after that Bibage Battle arc and episodes like this definitely helps. These are the kinds of simple stories and good fun that populated the early episodes that caught my interest since it did short-form storytelling and simple gags that other shows would try to carry for an entire episode. This one gives us some horror and Visual Kei fun in the two stories it wants to tell, and it does manage to bring the opening story through to the end with a couple of amusing little nods. Of the two, the first story works the best simply because it’s not “frustrating” with how Dante talks, but both of them offer up some very fun moments and definitely had us laughing more than I expected.
Grade: B
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
