Wednesday 25 August 2010

K-ON!! - Episode 21

With their last ever school festival performance out of the way, odd goings-on are at large as K-ON!! enters its twenty-first episode. For starters, Yui is certainly incredibly worried about her hairstyle, and then there's Azusa who simply can't stop spacing out...

While the latter's problem is simply a lack of post-festival motivation, the former's issue is even more easily explained. In short, it's nearly time for the older girls of the light music club to have their yearbook photos taken, and in typical girly fashion this has everybody worried about their looks. It's Yui in particular who is concerned however, having failed to "get it right" for previous yearbook photos during her school life so far.


Thus, we're treated to an episode of seeing Yui sport a number of different hairstyles (without mentioning Ui doing her spot-on Yui impression once again), before deciding that her bangs are too long and trying to shorten them by cutting her own hair in the club room... the rest probably writes itself on that front.

Away from all of the barnet shenanigans, Mio also makes a decision about her future education after leaving high school - a decision which isn't particularly surprising all things considered, although it does mean that the possibility of a third season of K-ON has just tripled. Would KyoAni really dare to take this series to a university setting?

Anyhow, it goes without saying that this episode didn't have a hope of topping last week's incredibly emotional instalment, so thankfully it doesn't even try - aside from Mio's change of plans which might have elicited a little "awww" from some, this episode seemed mostly concerned simply with being as funny as possible, which it managed to do a pretty darn good job of. K-ON isn't always exactly a regular laugh out loud franchise, but this instalment managed to coax laughter out of me on a number of occasions - indeed, I'm wondering if Yui's hair couldn't successfully navigate a comedy anime series all on its own, although some of her one-liners were well worth the price of entry too. All in all, it was actually quite nice to see the series getting back to being fun after going all tear-eyed on us last week, although it will still be interesting to see how it holds up as we move on towards the show's inevitable climax.

3 comments:

Michael said...

Wow, yes, that was a bit of a surprise, I wonder what they put down as their occupational choices.
It makes sense to some degree, you can see that they really love playing music together, and that dream of getting to the Budokan is still there. If KyoAni ended it simply with them graduating from school and going their separate ways, it would have been a bit disappointing. This way they can go at least one step further.
Similarly, with Azunyan's popularity, I wonder what they will do with her, I can almost see a spin off series happening.

ahchiew said...

Its nice to see Yui in different hair styles. And with Mio's decision, it does give the thought of having another possible season of K-ON in Uni. But would KyoAni go for the challenge?

JW said...

This is the first time I've seen an episode that features yearbook pictures in an anime. Am I being forgetful?