Kurenai OVA - Episode 2 (Completed)

Watching the first episode of this Kurenai OVA back in July was a bit of a tough one in many ways, with a hugely different art style from the anime I fondly remember while the story's manga form has clearly moved on a long, long way from where the anime left off.  Nonetheless, I kind of enjoyed the experience, so here I am again for the second of these two OVA episodes.

As per the first half of the OVA, this half hour instalment is split into three.  The first of this trio is the most vaguely serious of the bunch, with monosyllabic and shy killer Kirihiko deciding to pay Shinkurou a visit at school, only to bump into Murasaki who has ditched her own school in an attempt to do exactly the same thing.  Cuo a montage sequence of this unlikely duo goofing around at school, before a slightly ridiculous moment involving blowing out a school wall with a knife from Kirihiko in the name of saving a falling Murakami.  Aww, isn't friendship grand?

The rest of the OVA is played purely for laughs, first via a search for the cause of a leak sending Shinkurou's "fan club" rifling around under his sink and finding what seems to be a "treasure trove" of "interesting material", leading the group to try and test him out to see if the magazines in question really do belong to him.  A handful of misunderstandings later, everyone is seemingly in a worse position than they started off in mentally, not least Shinkurou himself.  Finally, the last segment of this episode sees Murakami taking on a job as a counsellor of sorts after getting the idea from TV, interviewing all of her friends about what is troubling them before thinking up a rather convenient solution which again drops Shinkurou into all sorts of problems.

So, almost all of this episode (and most of the OVA as a whole) turned out to be pretty light and fluffy, and it certainly had none of the intriguing elements of the initial TV anime, yet at the same time there's a certain charm to Kurenai and its cast of characters that you can't help but be drawn in by - for all its simplistic slice of life-esque fair, it can be pretty fun and the character interactions work surprisingly well however predictable they may sometimes be.  It's almost enough for me to wish for another full series of the anime rather than this simple spin-off of a manga which has clearly moved and changed a lot in the past couple of years.