It was back in episode six of Seitokai no Ichizon that we saw the student council members discussing what they should do for their school's culture festival, but it's this tenth instalment which brings us to the actual festival itself.
The trouble is, the intervening period seems to have taken the sheen from the previously decided Power Rangers spin-off that had been selected as a play for the council to perform, and thus the first half of this episode is spent trying to find a suitably tear-jerking and moving subject for the play instead. After some amusing references to Endless Eight and Gurren Lagann, this means traising through plenty of the well-used tropes of anime and visual novels, bringing forth suggestions of stories involving characters with amnesia, characters who die young from terminal illnesses, evil orphans brought up by terrorists and so on. It's all mildly funny, making this one of this show's better efforts without ever really entering the realms of laugh out loud funny.
Unfortunately, a lot of this good will is frittered away by the episode's second half, which sees the council dealing with the aftermath of the culture festival, and in particular the mass of items left in Lost and Found. There's really not a great deal to discuss about this chunk of the episode, and even less in the way of actual comedy, as cheap faux sentimentality threatens to take over once again in the usual needless fashion championed by this series for reasons I've never fathomed.
Still, at least half a good episode is better than an outright poor episode, and there's certainly some amusement to be derived from seeing tired old anime cliches named and shamed, particularly in the way it's handled here by Seitokai no Ichizon - Truth be told, you're probably best advised to watch this episode to the half way point, and then simply pretend that the second half of the instalment doesn't exist.
Sunday 13 December 2009
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