Tuesday 26 April 2011

Maria†Holic Alive - Episode 3

With Nichijou doing anything but impressing me and little other comedy on show this season, it's to Maria†Holic Alive that I turn for my weekly dose of laughs - thus far, I have to say that it hasn't let me down either.

This time around, Kanako's plans for a day in town looking out for flustered office girls is ruined when she realises she can't fit into her clothes saved for just such a special occasion.  What on earth is going on?  With even her scales showing far too large a number for her liking, it can only be Maria's tempting snacks or the evils of the pâtisserie and the sugar cane at fault.


Nonetheless, the only way forward for Kanako is to go on a diet - a task she attacks with entirely too much gusto whether it's chewing on marbles or otherwise trying to starve herself entirely - a tough task when the student council meeting is about updating the cafeteria menu, although thankfully she's largely saved by her complete ignorance to all the foreign names, only to be caught in hungry reverie by the council presidents croissant-esque hair.  Come the end of her starvation, Kanako is relegated to chewing on dogs to satisfy her hunger before finally seeing the light and taking on a proper diet, although this being Maria†Holic it is of course all in vein.

This was actually a bit of an episode of two halves for me - I absolutely loved the first half of the episode from the cutting open of chef's hats through to the ubiquitous "melons" gag, but after that it actually took the whole dieting and hunger joke a little too far and it became (to use a food pun) a little bit stale and over-worked, to be saved only by Maria's pyramid selling spiel at the end.  However, I can forgive the episode for over-egging (sorry, another food joke) its proverbial pudding simply for the fact that before it ran out of steam the various diet and fat-based jokes were hilarious even if it's the kind of plot device that's been over-used by comedy anime in the past.  Don't stop doing what you do Maria†Holic Alive, you're a lone pool of humour in my comedy-starved spring line-up.

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