The Anime Network is getting ready to bring on board a number of new summer 2015 series as part of their streaming program this month with shows that Sentai Filmworks has picked up and the first out of the gate is Wakaba*Girl. The first episode of the thirteen episode run is now available for guest viewing here on the service.
Wakaba*Girl is directed by Seiji Watanabe with Jukki Hanada handling the scripts and Kana Ishida adapting the character designs. The series is being animated at Nexus, which has done a lot of production assistance and 2nd key animation for several shows, but Wakaba*Girl marks their first formal full production.
The main cast includes Ari Ozawa as Wakaba Kohashi, Mikako Izawa as Moeko Tokita, M.A.O. as Mao Kurokawa and Rie Murakawa as Nao Mashiba.
The show is based off of the single volume work done by Yui Hara, which ran back in 2010 with four chapters overall. The block is an interesting one as it’s set to have three short form series that run ten minutes each, giving the show more room to breathe than the usual three or four minute episodes, but not trying to deal with the scale and cost of a full length episode with so little original material to work with.
Yui Hara’s other work, Kiniro Mosaic, had its second series start up in April 2015.
Plot concept: The story centers around the activities of Wakaba Kohashi, “a slightly out-of-tune super” daughter of a well-to-do family, and her friends. Wakaba (literally, “young leaves”) looks like an elegant rich daughter, but she admires the trendy “gyaru” fashion subculture. There is also the pure, innocent, fairy-tale-like Moeko. Mao is capricious and behaves in her own way. Nao used to be an athletic type of girl, but now loves the boys-love genre.
