Some people you just can’t teach how to play a game.
What They Say:
Teaching Yuri how to play tennis is harder than herding cats.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the manga series of the same name by Roots and Piyo, Teekyu is the latest short form anime series to make its way over and it’s a sports based one. Clocking in at two minutes an episode, it’s certainly short and to the point as it features cute girls and tennis. Heck, the credits sequence takes up a quarter of the run time! That leaves us with lots of quick paced dialogue and gags where it’s all done at hyper speed almost. Blink and you miss it humor as we see one girl, Yuri, being taught how to play tennis. She’s pretty incompetent at it but she’s got an intense teacher that will show her the way.
We get that quick introduction here with Yuri, doing the teaching and Kanae even though she hasn’t got a clue. At one point she even picks up a plunger thinking it would make an ideal racket. The focus isn’t around her completely though as we do see another student come into play with Nasuno, a classmate that has returned to Japan and intends to stay there a bit. This leads to an amusing bit of doubles play where two Kanae’s get involved for comedic effect. It runs through a couple of different gags but I definitely loved how the plunger came back into play in a very dangerous and disturbing way.
In Summary:
With short form anime being pretty varied, they generally do come down to certain ideas, mainly being quick and simple gags that don’t get dragged out. I like a number of these types of shows, but usually that additional minute can go a long way towards fleshing an episode out, which sounds strange to say. Here, with a two minute run time of which thirty seconds is devoted to the credits, it just goes overboard in trying to do a lot. The animation is weak in general, the designs decent but the dialogue (and mouthflaps!) is just done too fast to make it fun to laugh at. It’s like it’s on 1.5x speed in order to get it all done. I like the tennis aspect and it does have some potential, but the show even in two episodes seen one after the other just makes you cringe as it comes across as one that doesn’t understand how to utilize its time well and really needs that additional minute.
Grade: C
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.
