What They Say:
Naoe Riki was a boy living on the brink of despair. The one to reach out to him was Natsume Kyousuke, a just boy who called himself the leader of the “Little Busters.” Every day from then on was like an endless carnival, and the pain in Riki’s heart slowly ebbed away. A few years later, the five of them are living in the same school dorm, still living every day like a carnival. But when Kyousuke starts to look for a job, Riki worries that the five friends will drift apart. “Let’s start a baseball team. We’ll call it… the Little Busters!”
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Kud’s arc is one of the most heartwarming, so much so that it almost feels forced. Or maybe I’m just getting tired of the show’s formula by this point. Episode 19 starts off with Kud trying to brush up on her English. She’s taking the national English exam, which is optional, so it’s hard to understand why any student would elect to write it. The rest of the Little Busters help tutor her, and in the process we learn a lot about Kudryavka as a character. On the surface she’s carefree and klutzy, but underneath that she’s actually very studious and overall highly intelligent. She knows a lot about history and geography, and breezes through any advanced physics or astronomy books she can get her hands on; she just happens to get flustered under pressure.
Despite how hard she studies, Kud still fails the exam because she accidentally offsets all of her answers by one row. She gets really depressed, apologizing to her friends for wasting their time and calling herself a failure. On the first day of remedial class she walks in to find the rest of the Little Busters already waiting for her, even Kyousuke and Kengo, who didn’t take the exam in the first place. Everyone else passed the exam, but they didn’t want Kud to have to sit through the class without her friends. (Although she really shouldn’t have to take a remedial class anyway, because, again, it was an optional exam.)
There’s also another episode of Rin’s arc stuck in the middle of Kud’s. The third letter attached to her cat’s paw instructs her to cure the “lovesickness” of a male student in class 2-A. Rin is the absolute worst person for the job, since she gets nervous around strangers, especially men, and has no concept of socially acceptable communication. So she and Riki just charge straight into the guy (Aikawa)’s dorm in the middle of the night and start interrogating him about his crush.
Turns out he likes Sasami Sasasegawa, Rin’s purple-haired rival whose name she adorably can’t pronounce. This makes things even worse, as now Rin has to go be socially awkward around her nemesis to gather information for Aikawa. Amazingly, Rin just flags her down in the hallway and abruptly asks, “What are your hobbies? What do you do on weekends?” The surprisingly honest Sasami eventually admits that her “ideal man” is Kengo.
Aikawa is crushed, but Rin still has a plan. First they want to find a common interest between Aikawa and Sasami. So they try music. By…convincing Aikawa to sing for her. And he’s a fan of hip hop, so he composes a romantic rap song for her. Obviously that goes horribly. Rin’s next idea is for Aikawa to “defeat” Kengo at something in front of Sasami in order to prove his strength. But Kengo is highly athletic and a national Kendo champion. For some reason the three team up to try to trip Kengo, catching him off-guard and proving Aikawa’s strength when he delivers the final blow. But Kengo easily avoids the first two attacks, then flips Aikawa over his head and onto the ground. Sasami sees this and starts to like Kengo even more for looking so damned cool.
Riki and Rin realize that love can be painful. Aikawa’s love is unrequited, but he can’t just get rid of it. It’s strange that they give up there, rather than telling him to join a club that she’s in, or even just start a conversation with her outside of class. No, apparently the only approach is a Wile. E. Coyote-like plan to get her attention. In the end, Rin decides to tell Sasami that someone likes her and manages to get her email address for Aikawa. Now he can at least talk to her occasionally, and isn’t so distracted and lovesick over her; it’s as good a solution to the problem as they could have hoped for.
Resuming Kudryavka’s story, we learn that she’s actually named after Laika, the famous Russian dog which was sent into space by the Soviet Union. The same is true of her pets, “Strelka” and “Belka.” One night, Riki is wandering around outside when he finds Kud performing a strange ritual. Apparently, in her home country of Tebua, it’s the day of a festival in which people “recite an incantation to wish upon the stars.” The ceremony also involves using a cocoa mix to draw crests on oneself. She’s supposed to draw a crest on her back, but she can’t reach it, so she abruptly takes off her top and asks Riki to draw it. Noumi’s arc actually has a fair amount of fanservice, despite her being the youngest-looking Little Buster. Oh, you, Japan.
Kud decides to share her life story with the rest of the Little Busters. Her mother was once an astronaut in training, which is why she left her only daughter with her parents (Kud’s grandparents). This seems pretty irresponsible; it’s not as though real astronauts have to give up their family to pursue their career, and Kud doesn’t even have a father around. Still, she idolizes her mother, and constantly feels pressured to live up to her legacy. She even got into a prestigious school focused on preparing students for the space program, but her classes were all taught in English, a language all astronauts are required to speak. Kud couldn’t keep up because of the language barrier, and the other kids started to make fun of her. She even started to wonder if she was really the biological daughter of Tebua’s national hero. Fearing that she would only disappoint her mother, Kud ran away to Japan.
The morning after the moonlight ritual, everyone sees on the news (since when is there a TV in the cafeteria?) that Tebua is launching a rocket into space, and Kud’s mother will be on it. But the launch fails. There’s some sort of explosion (probably due to the previously mentioned experimental nuclear reactors involved) and they lose communication with the whole base.
Since her mother is a national hero in Tebua, the embassy offers Kud a plane ticket back to her home country. After much soul searching and a pep talk from Riki, she decides to go back. Kud ultimately realizes that she has other talents, even ones related to space exploration, and she doesn’t necessarily have to be an astronaut. But, more importantly, she wants to see her mother again no matter what else happens. Kud promises through teary eyes that she’ll come back as soon as she can. It’s clear now why the Little Busters are so important to her: they’re the only friends she’s ever had, and they accepted her even when she struggled academically.
Episode 23 is unusually action-packed. Native Tebuan rebels have been rioting following the failed launch, which they see as just another waste of money by a corrupt colonial government. Kud arrives and takes shelter in a secluded house with her grandfather. While he and his bodyguard drive off to pick up Kud’s mother, the house is bombed by rebel forces. Why her grandfather left Kud alone and unprotected is beyond me. Kud survives only because she was hiding in an underground passageway out of fear of meeting her mother again. The rebels kidnap her and chain her up in a cave somewhere. And, um, for some reason she’s only wearing her poncho.
How is she ever going to escape this impossible situation? With equally impossible magical powers, of course. Riki can somehow communicate with Noumi while holding her cherished rocket piece she got from her mother. He’s able to give her encouragement when she needs it most, and eventually the metal object even teleports to Kud’s location so she can use it to break off her chains.
I guess I saw it coming this time. She had to escape by her own power somehow, since each Little Buster has to overcome a trial of some sort, with the support of their friends but ultimately by themselves. Still, it’s annoying to have the tension removed from an episode which was doing such a good job of building it up. Homicidal rebel kidnappings are disproportionately intense for this anime. (And yes, I know it’s a metaphor, but I don’t think that was a good time to switch from literal to metaphysical storytelling.)
Kud then stumbles through a waterway and eventually makes it out into the night sky, where she revels at the beauty of the stars as the camera angle drifts low enough to show that the rebels even took her underwear. She seems totally untraumatized by the whole ordeal, and by the next morning the rebel forces have mysteriously disbanded. It’s a weird episode, to say the least.
Also, I googled Tebua: it’s a small island nation that sank completely underwater in 1999. Since the Little Busters visual novel came out in 2006, and there doesn’t seem to be much else to say about Tebua (no offense to any cultural Tebuans reading this), this seems to hold some sort of meaning for Kud’s story. It might have been used to foreshadow the problems surrounding her story: she was doomed to fail that exam, just as the rocket was doomed to malfunction, just as Tebua was doomed to sink. Or maybe they just needed an obscure foreign setting to host a rebel conflict.
In Summary: Noumi Kudryavka feels inadequate living in the shadow of her mother’s career as an astronaut and national hero of Tebua. She loves space and wants to become an astronaut too, but can’t handle her advanced classes taught in English, so she runs away to Japan. The Little Busters are her first real friends. When her mother’s televised rocket launch ends in disaster, she catches a plane back to Tebua, only to be kidnapped by native rebels who hate the country’s wasteful space program. She escapes with the help of Riki and Deus Ex Machina. Also, in a separate episode, Rin completes her third cat-delivered mission to help a guy deal with his unrequited love. Overall, Noumi’s story is interesting and well-done, but it was a bit drawn-out, the ending felt out of place, and there was a surprising amount of fanservice given both the character and the episodes’ serious tone.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Insignia 1080p TV, PS3 with Crunchyroll App; Occasionally 17” Toshiba Satellite Laptop, 2.13 GHz Core i3, 4GB RAM, Windows 7