Thursday 7 March 2013

Joshiraku OVA

Joshiraku is back!  Okay, so it's only for one episode thanks to a DVD bundled with the latest manga volume, but we'll take what we can get here thank you very much.

As the first opening theme to School Rumble opined, "it's all about timing", and it's certainly all about timing - or the lack thereof - for Marii in the first segment of this episode, as she expresses her frustration at applause during the wrong part of her rakugo performance.  Then again, Marii is hardly a paragon of perfect timing herself; whether it's at concerts or reading a manga, something isn't right and there's only one way to fix it - hypnosis.  Or heart surgery.  I forget which.


Next up, the girls take their usual trip outside of their room, this time with a view towards paying a visit (and tribute) to Kodansha, the publishers of Joshiraku itself.  After a few mistakes take them around the houses in terms of manga publishers (complete with ribbing of Hunter x Hunter because... well, why not?) they finally make it to the Kodansha offices, only to find that the office for their host magazine isn't quite what they had hoped for.

Finally, we get to see the ill effects of too much focus ably (if terrifyingly) demonstrated by Kigurumi - cue jokes about AKB48 and the like before morphing into a bunch of gags surrounding manga and anime constructs such as focus lines and the like, which can be unsurprisingly annoying when they start following you everywhere.

So ends this bonus episode, which also feels like the funniest episode of Joshiraku we've seen - maybe it's just a case of absence making the heart grow fonder, but this episode had me crying with laughter on several occasions as it lampooned whatever it could get near, and with a seemingly sharper eye for doing so than the TV series managed for the most part, possibly because of its manga bundled status.  All of a sudden I'm rather missing this show... roll on season two some day, perhaps?

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