3 Episode Taste Test: Seitokai Yakuindomo

If ever there was a need to reit­er­ate it: suc­cess­ful com­edy hinges on the deliv­ery. Sei­tokai Yak­uin­domo some­how doesn’t under­stand this and after cram­ming joke after staid joke into an epis­ode, it still comes across as bland and unin­spired. All the con­stitu­ent parts are there: the all-girls school recently turned co-ed, the straight-man prot­ag­on­ist, the over­com­pens­at­ing short girl; but none of them gel together. The first three epis­odes never break that threshold that turns a smirk into a laugh into a guf­faw. Instead, pre­dict­ab­il­ity and tedium set in and what could have been a ster­ling com­edy, preg­nant with pos­sib­il­it­ies, falls flat and doesn’t find the spark to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it.

“pixelated shots of sex toys and gen­italia dur­ing the open­ing demon­strate the taw­dri­ness the jokes aim for”

Takatoshi joined Ousai Academy because it was close to his house. It is no ordin­ary school how­ever, up until recently it was an all-girls school mean­ing the ratio of females to males is high and though Takatoshi didn’t join to build a harem, other male stu­dents cer­tainly have. On his first day he is accos­ted by the stu­dent coun­cil pres­id­ent, Shino, and forced to join the coun­cil as vice pres­id­ent and rep­res­ent­at­ive for the male stu­dent body. As well as the filthy mind of the pres­id­ent, he is joined by the ultra-rich Aria and the genius trapped in a child’s body, Suzu in his daily duties involving an inor­din­ate amount of paper­work as well as loaf­ing around the coun­cil room dur­ing breaks.

No sur­prises that the source mater­ial is a four-panel comic aimed at teen­age boys: the jokes are crude and come thick and fast and, thanks to some off-the-wall scen­arios, it feels like a smut­tier and charm­less ver­sion of Azu­manga Daioh. The fun­da­mental prob­lem is that all of the char­ac­ters intro­duced so far are as tenu­ous as the humour and only the dimin­ut­ive return stu­dent Suzu eli­cits any kind of con­nec­tion; primar­ily as she is the only one dis­play­ing more than aloof indif­fer­ence to ongo­ing events.

Cer­tainly jokes about fem­in­ine hygiene items under­score the kind of ideal­ised envir­on­ment Takatoshi is sup­posedly in, but pixelated shots of sex toys and gen­italia dur­ing the open­ing demon­strate the taw­dri­ness the jokes aim for but miss by leagues. Most of the char­ac­ter arche­types have been done before to vary­ing degrees — the naive and nou­veau rich girl a par­tic­u­larly tired example — but none of them are truly cap­it­al­ised upon with many of the jokes involving them aban­doned before their time. It’s telling that while most com­ed­ies roll out their best mater­ial in the first epis­ode, here there is only a budget burn­ing anim­ated fly-through of the school and over­sat­ur­ated cherry blos­som trees.

Per­haps Sei­tokai Yakuindomo’s prob­lems lie in a cul­tural rift, men­tion of het­ero­sexu­al­ity being “nor­mal” indic­ates its voice is for a dis­pos­i­tion and age range that is dif­fi­cult to be noticed in. Or per­haps it is blitz­ing through its source mater­ial at a rate which the pro­du­cers con­sider sus­tain­able, but when a slower and more meas­ured pace, let­ting the char­ac­ters and run­ning gags take root, would be more advant­age­ous. Or maybe it’s exactly what is to be expec­ted from a lacklustre source, and a stu­dio and dir­ector whose only not­able pre­vi­ous work was Prin­cess Lover.

It’s dif­fi­cult to believe that the series is so humour­less with a premise that seemed impossible to foul up. It isn’t through con­cer­ted effort that the open­ing epis­odes fail to tickle but more through mis­man­age­ment of resources; with any luck future epis­odes will be less frantic, more meas­ured and enjoy a bet­ter cal­ibre of com­edy. The ped­i­gree of the pro­duc­tion staff and the first three epis­odes them­selves don’t give this a high prob­ab­il­ity though and even with an injec­tion of more inter­est­ing char­ac­ters, redemp­tion for such a mediocre and unin­spir­ing start will be monu­ment­ally dif­fi­cult. ¶