Sunday 6 January 2013

Minami-ke Tadaima - Episode 1

It might not be the pinnacle of slice of life anime comedy, but nonetheless winter brings the return of the Minami sisters for the fourth (yes, fourth) season of Minami-ke.


In this latest series, we rejoin Haruka, Kana and Chiaki as they fight off unknown supernatural forces in a post-apocalyptic Japan... okay, not really, nothing has changed in the life of the main characters as they go about their home and school lives as per normal.  This brings us a number of skits to open things up in Tadaima's first episode - Kana attempts to garner someone to help her study after another far from stellar test score, which needless to say isn't all that successful, a fortune suggesting that Kana is about to meet a potential boyfriend gives her something to get excited about even though poor old Fujioka is entirely overlooked once again, and deciding when to pack away the kotatsu causes a little friction and debate in the household, as well it might.

All of this combined to make for an opening episode that was decent enough - not the absolute heights of hilarity, but with a few laughs and smiles to serve as a reminder of why the series has managed to last through to this fourth anime season, and a respectable springboard for the rest of the series moving forward.  It's also a pretty good example of what Minami-ke is about as a whole - a nice little show with some fun characters and ideas, but not one that's ever likely to set the world on fire, and a series that you can pick favourite moments from rather than entire favourite episodes.

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