What They Say:
A silent high school girl anime that’s still cute, even if no one talks! This is a story about three girls and their fun high school life, centering around the unfortunate beauty, Momoko, the cool girl with glasses, Shibumi, and the gentle little Mayumi. Fun alone, fun with all. The daily lives of slightly dumb yet cute high school girls.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Based on the manga by Ken Wakai, Joshi Cause is a short-form anime series with studio Seven handling the animation while Noriyoshi Sasaki is handling both the scripts and direction for the series. I’m still a huge advocate for short-form shows but we’ve had a couple of weak seasons in terms of offerings, so something new that’s being a bit creative is definitely of interest to me. The manga itself is interesting as it’s a “silent” manga with no dialogue and that can make for some creative decisions in how to tell stories in that medium as well as the anime medium.
If anything, the show is an easy one for Crunchyroll to subtitle as there’s just a few things to be done such as episode titles and any potential signs. What we get is a show focusing on a trio of high school girls, Momoko, Mayumi, and Shibumi as they’re introduced here. While we don’t get dialogue we do get sounds and squeals at times and it’s mostly just a bunch of silliness in how they interact with each other as they’re pretty unguarded in how they hang around at school, such as Momoko laying across a couple of desks with her legs wide open while the other two basically play with her legs to hilarious effect in ways that feel decided wrong. There’s a really nice relaxed tone to it as well that we get out of Momoko as it progresses that’s nice to see, at least until she struggles with a bug, as it shows another aspect of her personality.
In Summary:
Cute girls doing cute things can be a hit or miss genre when you get down to it but Joshi Kausei looks to work some interesting angles for it with a bit of pervy material that’s playful and grin-inducing. Momoko pretty much is the central focus of attention here and what we see as the others interact with her and as she gets things done herself is that we get a good feel for how the series is going to be handled. It’s basically a couple of minutes of light physical comedy combined with interesting direction to handle the fact that there’s no dialogue in how everything must be conveyed. I’m definitely curious to see what stories they’ll tell.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
