High school humor with a raunchy edge at times.
What They Say:
When the all-girl Ousai Private Academy goes co-ed, freshman Takatoshi Tsuda finds himself in a situation that most guys can only dream of – one of only 28 boys in a school of over 500 girls! Unfortunately, that fantasy slams into a hard wall of reality when he runs into Student Council President Shino Amakusa and she drafts him onto the council!
That might not be so bad… except for the fact that Shino, council secretary Aria and even faculty advisor Ms. Yokoshima are all seriously sex-obsessed, while tiny treasurer Suzu has rage control issues, and the head of the school newspaper spends her time peddling candid pictures of the council members! Will this lead to Takatoshi becoming a Big Man on Campus? Or will he end up as the council’s whipping boy?
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this series gives us the original Japanese language in stereo only and it’s encoded using the DTS-HD MA lossless codec. What we do get is a pretty solid audio mix that works the forward soundstage well here as it is largely dialogue with a couple of comedy action elements along the way. There’s a couple of bigger action moments in the final episodes, but that doesn’t stretch the show all that much either. What we do get are some decent moments of placement for the character’s dialogue and some good areas of depth in the action pieces. Overall it’s a pretty serviceable mix that does the job well while the opening and closing sequences are where things have the warmest feelings. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout and we didn’t have any issues with dropouts or distortions during regular playback.
Video:
Originally airing in 2013, the transfer for this TV series is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.78:1 in 1080p using the AVC codec. The set is spread out in a fashion that works well in that we get two discs for each of the seasons and a fifth disc that has the film on its own. While they could have scrunched it down to four, I really prefer having the physical break between seasons like this as a kind of mental bit. Animated by GoHands but with a standard style school design, the series has a really good look with bright colors throughout, a solid level of detail as warranted in many scenes, and just a good clean and vibrant look overall. It’s not using the kind of flashy style that GoHands uses in some of their high-profile original series but this one fits the material and really captures it well. Colors are bold and solid throughout and the animation when it has a lot going on holds up well with no breakup or other issues. It’s a smooth and clean presentation that will delight fans.
Packaging:
The packaging for this release has a thicker than standard Blu-ray case as it has to hold five discs overall. The set comes with four of the discs on hinges while the film gets the back wall. The front cover uses one of the main key visuals for the property as a whole at this point, at least in how it’s presented overseas, with the core group of four together under the cherry blossom trees at school. It’s a fairly simple cover when you get down to it but it hides within all the craziness that’s coming for this four-panel gag manga gone anime. The logo is kept to the upper right with its own brand of silliness and it makes clear – though not large enough for my tastes – that it includes two seasons of the show and a movie. The back cover is bright and colorful with a graph paper backgrounds on top of which we get a few pink and green widgets, a few shots from the show that are just a bit better than the usual small ones we get, and a good summary of the premise since it is a basic show. The extras are clearly listed as well. The bottom throws a pink block up where it digs into some of the production credits before going into the accurate and easy to read technical grid that covers things accurately. No show related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Extras:
The extras are pretty basic here but expected as we get the clean versions of the opening and closing sequences for the TV series while the feature film gets the Japanese promos for it.
The adaptation of four-panel manga to anime can go in a lot of different ways. Seitokai Yakuindomo is based on the manga by Tozen Ujiie which began in 2007 and has eighteen volumes to its name so far. It spawned its first anime season in 2010 which ran for thirteen episodes and then another in 2014 for the same, with a ten-episode OVA series also getting the nod. With a movie in 2017 and a new one due out in 2021, the property has had a solid life over the past decade and it took some time to get licensed, which is surprising because it has a good mix of general school comedy and some solid raunchy material as well. I had seen a bit of it when the second season was simulcast way back when and had wanted to see more. This collection brings the two seasons and first movie together in one set and it’s definitely a strong introduction to the property as a whole.
The show works in a way that really does make it hard to talk about in a lot of ways because it’s filled with lots of small stories even within the block stories that we get. The base premise of the Ousai Academy opening up to boys and girls has one of the newly arrived boys, Tsuda, being cajoled into being the student council vice president. This introduces him to a wide range of women that are very much friends there or at least are aware of each other as they interact. For Tsuda, it’s a crash course in the way all of them are going to handle having boys there. There are places where in the first episode it really does set the tone as there’s an interview sequence where Shino, the council president, is interviewed for the school paper by Ranko and it’s like navigating a strange course of questions that nobody would actually ask anyone else in that setting.
The show in its first season works through a lot of these kinds of basic stories but it’s the character interactions, the sight gags, the wordplay, that really sells it. We see things like a judo club being put together, student council birthday parties, awkward commitments, and even the familiar school legends being investigated. These are largely familiar stories that you tell in many high school based showed and there’s a lot of fun to it with how the cast acts, especially since it leans heavily on Tsuda and Shino and the way they play off each other. It’s a lot of fun but it’s all quick-hit gags and the like. But at the same time, I love how it does lean into the familiar, including giving up an entire episode just about halfway through to the council doing a beach day and an overnight trip. That has its own special kind of shenanigans, but it again reinforces that this is a show to watch in piecemeal instead of binging because it all blurs so much.
With the second season, which came a year later, it opened in the right way to remind you what it’s all about. We get a lot of raunchy jokes before it segues in doing something a lot of second seasons don’t do, and that’s going through introducing the range of characters that populates the series as everyone returns to a new school season. It’s a lot of characters to take in with all their quirks, but it’s mostly standard kind of stuff in a way with a good dose of pervy material mixed in, such as one of the girls that’s excited to find her lost S&M magazine while walking to school. It’s little stuff like this mixed into the more normal material that’s largely done with a straight face that makes for some good fun.
With the academy having formerly been a girls-only academy that is now co-ed and people largely used to it, there’s still a few quirks to be had by having the genders mixed and dealing with the no relationships rule. There are natural groupings of boys and girls and lots of smaller pairings off, but a lot of what the episode does is to just lay out the location and the basics of the characters before focusing a bit more on what seem to be the leads and their own quirky sort of relationship while looking at others and judging whether they’re immoral or not. And like the first season of this series, it leaps between mini-stories quickly but smoothly as we see some of what the student council does and how they work things out. It’s definitely female-heavy in terms of the characters abound in the school, but it manages to have a decent flow about it and avoids being completely weird or overly focused on it.
If anything, the second season feels like it moves faster and harder between the gags, adapting more of the four-panel elements while at the same time working with the standard two or three story block configuration so that it has some framing to it all. But within them it’s just flying fast and the laughs are good while thankfully – for the most part – not being too culturally deep. It’s not like you need the references of a Urusei Yatsura set of liner notes but there are bits and bobs here and there where a little more explanation is welcome. You can get most of the gags when Shino gets approached to be an idol, for example, but considering the years a little more on galge fashion from one of the earlier episodes would make for some better laughs. But even without it the show works as a whole because of how everyone interacts and the reaction shots that we get.
The film that’s included clocks in at just about an hour and it’s essentially a packed version of the show. It’s a bit more hyper at times in how it cuts quickly from place to place as it’s not dealing with real longform storytelling or anything but rather just an hour of some comical bits and weirdness strung together that sometimes actually connects together. It’s the kind of piece that basically is a love letter to the fans as it embraces all of the good stuff from the series and just goes all out. It does make out with a bit of a bigger budget and it has some slight theatrical qualities about it but it largely plays that up for jokes itself. But at the same time, when you get finished with the film and close out the set (until the 2021 film arrives), you really do realize that this is a very static series in terms of characters. Which is fine because it works so well as a gag comedy.
In Summary:
Seitokai Yakuindomo is the kind of show that really needed to have been brought over years ago but we’re glad to have it now. It’s aged well enough that it still holds up very well and the comedy is timeless enough to work. While it gets a bit more raunchy than some other shows it does remind me of a different time with anime comedies and it hits that sweet spot just right. I’m not surprised such a dialogue-heavy show and one that’s older doesn’t have a dub for it but at the same time I wish it did just to hear the performances and some of the localizations that would have to be done. Regardless, Sentai put together a very good looking release here and has a lot of material at a great price for fans who can finally own it. I love the look of the show to begin with and getting it in high definition like this is definitely a treat.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 DTS-HD MA Language, English Subtitles, Japanese Promos, Clean Opening Animation, Clean Closing Animation
Content Grade: B+
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B+
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: B-
Released By: Sentai Filmworks
Release Date: December 10th, 2019
MSRP: $79.98
Running Time: 710 Minutes
Video Encoding: 1080p AVC
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
