Life throws curveballs all the time, but some take you by surprise more than others.
What They Say:
Segawa Yuuta has just started college miles away from his older sister, his only family. One day, she comes to visit him at college to see how he’s doing, and to ask a big favor of him.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the light novel series by Yuka Nakajima that began in 2009 and has several volumes to its name already, as well as a volume of manga, Listen to Me Girls, I’m Your Father is the latest property to jump ship to anime form and it comes from studio feel, which recently did work on Mayo Chiki. The show revolves around college student Yuta who is proud of what he’s doing in starting a new life and makes i tknown to his older sister through letters as read by him during the start here about how he intends to do things right and live a good life. Unfortunately for him, situations never go right and an incident with friends where he got drunk off the fumes of others drinking reveals some less than polite situations he became involved in, namely full of nudity.
Yuta’s sister is actually pretty interesting in that while she’s not that much older than Yuta, she married an older man who had a couple of kids of his own already and they added a third together. It’s the nice situation where you see that she’s been accepted into the family and built upon it with them. But she also uses it as a bit of a weapon with Yuta to encourage him to do the right thing in life in general so that he can have a family of his own some day and experience the joys of it all. But, he is in college and that means cute, expressive and outgoing college girls such as the one he came across in the Sightseeing Club named Raika. The two are cute when together since she’s a bit of an actress and there are some very good scenes in which they are together.
The episode does a lot of fun stuff in establishing the cast here, both with Yuta at college where he’s got a friend he hangs out with a lot and dealing with Oda, who seems to be interested in him whereas she typically has no male friends in general, or friends either it seems. This is also balanced with some fun, cute material with his sister Yuri at home with her three daughters where we get a bit of their personality. The smooth mixture of the two, the cute and sweet with the slightly lewd and pervy, manages to give the show a good feel even though you can tell they may be trying to make you feel uncomfortable. So when you have Yuri coming to the college to visit, blending the two could go in weird ways.
When the tables are turned later on and he goes back home to visit her, that’s where the series starts to pick up its pace a bit in a sense by getting to the real story. As we see from the flashback, he didn’t approve of his sister marrying an older man with kids and that was part of his reason for leaving even though she took care of him for years after their parents died. The non-blood relative girls did take to him over time though and they’re certainly growing up now, which leads to some uncomfortable moments for Yuta as he notices. Though they don’t quite get to the point here, something I actually like in that they’re not rushing headlong into things, it hits a lot of good setup and shows the nature of his relationships with his nieces.
In Summary:
Listen to Me Girls is definitely a cute show from what we get at the opening here and it’s charming in a lot of ways, though you can see people making a lot from the mildly pervy (but sorta realistic) way Yuta looks at one of the girls towards the end here. Yuta’s your average college kid that comes across well without any real problems, but not flawless and certainly not a eunuch. The girls that are introduced are pretty simple here as they don’t get a lot of time but I liked that they spent a lot of it dealing with his sister more than anything else, along with Raika, as it fleshes out the adult relationships in his life first before he takes on this new task that he’s ended up with. Of course, there’s pervy times ahead as that’s a good part of the series for some and it’ll be divisive with what people consider acceptable. Foolish me, I think I’m gonna take a ride with this show as it has some good charms here at the start.
Grade: B+
Readers Rating: [ratings]
Streamed 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.
