K-ON! - Episode 1

Yui Hirasawa isn't exactly the kind of girl you'd automatically associate with being a great musician - She's clumsy, struggles to co-ordinate her feet let alone her hands, and is hardly the kind of person you'd call motivated. Oh, she is pretty handy with some castanets though...

However, this opening episode of K-On! brings us to a turning point in Yui's life - Her first day at high school. She's determined to join an after-school club for the first time ever, but what club does a girl with no real talents join?

Meanwhile, Ritsu Tainaka has already set her heart on joining the light music club, dragging her friend Mio Akiyama with here. The trouble is, all the existing members of the club have graduated, meaning that the club will be closed unless it can find four members by the end of the month. You can probably see where this is headed....


After somehow press-ganging Tsumugi Kotobuki (a girl so posh she's never eaten fast food before), someone initially looking to join the choir into joining, Yui ends up becoming the final piece in the light music club's puzzle, finally deciding to join after the others employ a number of persuasive techniques with varying degrees of success. So, the stage is set for my most personally anticipated series of the year.

It's always suicide to judge a series by its first episode, so as always I'm certainly not going to do that, but all things considered K-on! managed a pretty passable opener - Setting the scene, introducing us to the characters, and pulling out all the manga's best jokes and moments at its disposal to create an episode that, if nothing else, shouts out "fun". In short, it did everything that it needed to, no more and no less. Thus, while it hasn't somehow managed to exceed my expectations from the very start, it has at least matched them, and that's good enough for me - Besides, let's face it, if nothing else girls with guitars are invariably cute.