Kurenai - Episode 6

After everything that has come before in Kurenai, episode six was a rather bizarre distraction from the normal business of this excellent series - Indeed, you could probably go as far as to call it filler. However, I think it's safe to say that I haven't seen a filler episode quite as hilarious as this one.

The episode begins with Shinkurou receiving a visitor at home who is looking for volunteers for a musical as part of some kind of local cultural festival. Despite trying to avoid it, both himself and the others he shares the apartments with are dragging into having to sing and rehearse for said musical.

Never mind the obvious jokes based around bad singing (which are actually pretty amusing in themselves), it's really the dialogue that wins out in that episode. We've already seen Kurenai boasting plenty of great conversations, both humorous and deadly serious, but with their thoughts seemingly turned almost entirely to ramping up the comic value, almost every scene has been filled with fantastically funny dialogue by the script writers, and not just from Murasaki either. By the end of it all, I couldn't believe twenty-five minutes had passed as the time flew by as if it barely existed at all.

After enjoying an episode such as this, I have to start questioning whether I'm simply too enamoured of the show to be able to see its faults, but that's probably something that you'll have to answer for me yourselves. I have to admit that the animation took a definite downward turn here, to the point of actually feeling pretty awful at times, but considering the light-hearted nature of the episode it didn't detract from things too much. At the end of it all though, we learned nothing from this episode, but it was the most enjoyably funny waste of time I've watched this year so far - It's certainly very telling about the quality of this series that even its meaningless episodes allow its positive points to shine through.