Monday 10 October 2011

You and Me (Kimi to Boku) - Episode 2

After a tepid opening episode, can Kimi to Boku improve with its second instalment?  No... no it can't.   Can I go home now?

Essentially, this week's entire story revolves around random animation of cats - or at least, I wish it did.  Instead, what we focus upon is Shu offering a plaster to a young girl with a grazed knee, only to find that her response to this is to bully him and accidentally, his friends) mercilessly as a result.


Why does the girl do this?  Because she doesn't like accepting people's help, and moreover because she knows that Shu help her because she's special but because he's a nice guy.  If this idea hadn't been hammered into your skulls already, Shu's kindness to a fault is demonstrated by a flashback where he tries to save some tulips from the cold and snow without even thinking that they might be hardy enough to stand up for themselves.

While this might give us a nice, tidy little wrap up to this episode's story, it doesn't hide a more pertinent truth - that this entire episode was incredibly boring and almost unfailingly humourless.  While I can sympathise with its female star's lament about someone acting in a friendly and kind fashion towards you when you know they act this way around everybody but wish their eyes were only focused upon you.(a pertinent dilemma indeed), it's delivered in a boring and predictable way that does nothing for it, and perhaps more importantly does little to make any of its characters any more interesting.  Unless there's a sea change coming up, it feels like Kimi to Boku is already irrevocably holed beneath the water, and it isn't going to be too long before it sinks beneath the weight of its own dull, uninteresting niceness.

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