The trouble is, there's little time for the girls to practice together as they're all (Mio aside) involved in other festival activities, but eventually they manage to get together and spend a little time practicing, while Sawako has "helpfully" spent some time designing costumes for the girls - Why this changed from a swimsuit and nurses uniform for Yui and Tsumugi respectively to something vaguely more "normal" during the course of the episode isn't explained, but I suppose I'll let that continuity issue slide in the name of humour.
Inevitably, it's Mio who is the focus of much of this episode as she struggles to overcome the shackles of her shyness and the knowledge that she's going to have to get up on stage and sing in front of everybody - Even when she exudes a calm exterior, her hands tell a different story while holding a cup of tea in one of the more amusing moments on show this time around.
Eventually of course we reach the performance itself, and thankfully KyoAni decided against suddenly turning the group into perfect musicians for the sake of it, leaving us with a respectable but hardly high quality performance, complete with the husky voice Yui carries around all episode after too much voice training last time around (a great voice acting performance in itself by the way, and a definite highlight of this episode for me). We're also treated to a Thelma and Louise-esque music video during said performance, which was fun in itself although I can't help but think I would have preferred to see them actually performing rather than cutting away from it like that. Oh well, you can't have it all.
So, we can chalk this one up as another fun little episode of K-ON! I suppose - Not incredibly funny in itself but entertaining to watch, a nice example of tightening the bonds of friendship between the four girls, and oozing the kind of lovability we've already come to expect from this series. It probably goes to show how masterful KyoAni are at pulling in the punters when I've found myself genuinely looking forward with something approaching excitement to seeing the girl's school festival performance ever since last week's episode.
Agree with you here. This is comparatively "weak" episode I think, and I already saw people complaining, which make sense. The jokes are not as good compare to previous episodes. But I think you are right on the fact that we can't have them show a great performence just yet. In that sense, I think they did pretty good job on (intentionally, I assume) making a mediocore performence. The only shame is that they decide not to put on an efford to animate the whole show. I guess it's either budget or they want to keep it for later.
ReplyDeleteI was really disappointed that they didn't show their first concert and instead showed the music video. It kind of ruined the episode for me and dampened my interest in K-On!.
ReplyDeleteAbout the only saving grace is that I can pretend that the music vid actually was a character building moment, and Mio's way of coping with shyness was to completely "zone out" and the music vid was what she was seeing in her own mind. But it was still cheap.
I actually enjoyed this one a lot. A lot of great gags, and a nice build-up of Mio's tension. We are so used to seeing music performances like this as the climax of a series, it coming so early (since they are aiming higher than a simple high school performance) in the show was a bit sudden (especially given Yui's slow learning curve), but understandable.
ReplyDeleteIt's strange seeing negative comments so frequently lumped on this show, and then we get the singles from the show easily break into the top 5 charts in Japan (the ending theme stayed at number 1 for three days), that's no mean feat for a KyoAni show that is somewhat deriled...
K-On! does well because it is a moe show, and Japanese otaku will go mad and buy all its merchandise.
ReplyDeleteI don't dislike K-on. Its one of the more pleasant shows to watch this season. But it is not yet a very ambitious show and kind of coasts on the popularity of its character designs and archetypes.
Its music is okay - the ending theme is nice. The rest is fairly average and certainly not up there with shows like Nana or Macross Frontier, which utterly blow it away in terms of music production (and also sold well).