While some people can rock a pair of glasses, Bossun certainly isn’t one of them.
What They Say:
Fumi-chan is a great artist, but what will happen when she tries to emulate Roman’s style of manga?! And speaking of emulate, when Tsubaki temporarily loses his vision, the Sket-dan plays a prank on him by pretending to be the other members of Student Council… but then they’re stuck in the situation.
The Review:
One of the characters I generally enjoy in the show when she ends up in it is Roman as she’s so into her manga work that she can be pretty inspirational. That’s also made an impact on Fumi as she wants to be just like Roman, which is admirable enough since Roman is published, at least once. She’s struggling with getting her second work out there though and getting some criticism from the editors about what she’s doing. So when others come to her asking for opinions about their work, hoping to get good advice or potential praise from Roman, we get to see that she’s not quite the cute and upbeat girl we usually see as she can be just as cruel as the editors she deals with. But that’s just her personality when dealing with manga itself. Once she steps away from it, she’s cute and simple.
While we get some very fun lead-in material here dealing with Roman, the main focus turns towards Fumi as she’s wanting to really do ewll with her work. So much so that she actually tries to become just like Roman when it comes to doing her storyboards. Or rather, after some harsh criticism, she does a blend of the two which is something that just panics the Sket gang members when they’re asked to look at it. Especially since she does a riff on the Sket characters and just messes with them. It gets weird pretty quickly and even though it cheats by doing a whole lot of storyboard panels for the episode, it’s cute and fun to watch unfold.
The second half of the episode is a good bit of fun as it utilizes Tusbaki again. I’ve been glad that the series hasn’t harped on making Tsubaki a bigger regular since revealing his relationship with Bossun, so when he does show up it’s not annoying that we’re seeing him once again. This time around, he’s in a bit of a bind as he’s lost his contacts and that makes for some real rough times in getting around the school since he’s nearly blind. Bossun and Himeko end up really taking advantage of it since Bossun pretends to be the student council president and their gag ends up going pretty far as they get stuck in a situation having to impersonate the whole student council. Seeing the gang take on those roles, the panic over it and the plain silliness just works really, really well here.
In Summary:
Sket Dance plays with two different stories once again to good effect and definitely has a lot of fun with it. The first story dealing with manga lets both Fumi and Roman shine, especially since we get to see Roman being a hard ass editor type for awhile as she critiques everyone’s artwork. The series does these manga style episodes every now and then and they definitely come across as a short cut for animation, but they’re fun to watch. The second half definitely works better for me though as the prank Bossun and the others play on the now blind Tsubaki goes horribly wrong and they’re fully committed to it. It hits a lot of very cute details along the way and definitely makes you laugh as the trio has to impersonate the student council, both very well and very badly.
Grade: B
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.
