A Review of the Anime School Days

I watch a lot of anime, and now that I have an outlet for reviews, I may just use it. Here's hoping this becomes a long running series. I'd also like to remind everyone that today is Shinkai day in celebration of legendary director Makoto Shinkai. If you don't know the man's work, you should.

This anime has 12 episodes of roughly 25 minutes each, and is based on a bishoujo game (bishoujo literally translates to beautiful young girl). These types of games generally focus on either the romantic or sexual side of relationships around the high school years, and may or may not be considered hentai (hentai translates as literally pervert and in the west refers to erotic comics or animation). 

*clears throat for actual review*

Be forewarned! This review may contain spoilers, but I'll try to refrain.

So, the protagonist of this story (bear in mind while watching it that protagonist does not mean the good guy, but rather the guy who the story is focused on) is Makoto Itou, a young man with a kind heart, and a very romantic view of the females he knows from what I can tell. He rides the same train on the way to school as a quiet girl, Kotonoha Katsura, who often reads. He falls in love with this girl essentially through staring at her every morning on the train ride to school, however, he is too shy to approach her and feels content to stand silently by and watch her through the camera on his cell phone. That is, of course, until Sekai Saionji takes an interest in his delimma and befriends Kotonoha by sitting with her during P.E. class in an attempt to set the two of them up. She is eventually successfull in this endeavor, and spends the next few episodes doing whatever she can to teach Makoto about how to properly deal with women. At this point in the story, I liked the show fine, but was fairly unimpressed with the direction in which it seemed to be moving. At times, for example, the fanservice, unnecessary elements of a storyline (IE odd camera angles) used to highlite girls in the show in a sexually explicit way, got completely ridiculous, and I get tired of stuff like that because I tend to watch a lot of shows about high school aged kids, and there tends to be lots of fanservice in those. However, when you realize that the story is being told through the eyes of a seventeen year old boy, it seems not at all unnecessary and even adds a touch of sincerity to the story. Not only that, but it is rare for an anime to actually emphasize sex, and by emphasize I don't mean in a wierd and fetishist way, I mean in the traditional sense that I, as a high school student, think of it as being emphasized in my everyday life which is noteworthy by itslef. Now, lets talk about symbolism, there really isn't much to be had here in the way of symbolism, its a fairly cut and dried story with few loose ends or arguable plot points which is odd for a genre that is almost defined by how subjective the ideas in the story are. This is not to say that the story isn't deep, as anyone who ever felt like they were betraying a friend or being betrayed will understand that there are a variety of very comlex emotions at play here. So, unimpressed as I was, I determined to finish the show as 12 episodes is rather short for an anime. In doing so, I committed myslef to one strange ride. The first, say, 4 episodes are romantic alright, but otherwise pretty mediocre. From there, however, episodes 5-7 quickly descend into a frankly evil mood that I simply didn't foresee. To make matters even more confusing, episode 8 is truly a funny episode with only momentary blotches of darkness where necessary to make a comment on the character growth. Episode 9, however, sees the show back to its old, evil, depressing, and infuriating (I say infuriating because the show focuses mainly on the interactions of the characters, and the characters in this show are moralless assholes to one another with startling regularity) tricks. Episodes 10-12 continued to fuel my rage towards both Makoto, and various ancillary characters, and fuel my melancholy over the general mood achieved in the latter bits of the story. Now, for anyone still reading and still interested, this show has a twist ending, I won't give it away in case anyone decides to ever watch this, but I will examine the method in which it was implemented and executed. So, first the pros of this ending: it has two parts to it, the second even more of a mind fuck than the first, even I with my warped mind didn't see the events of the second part of the twist coming, which is great, I still can't even believe what happened, and that excites me because I thought I had it well figured out. Now, the cons: I DID see the basic outline of the twist coming, the episodes leading up to the end imply and foreshadow the ending in a pretty obvious way, thats really my only complaint there, but its a big one since a show with this much WHAT THE FUCK infused into it should be able to properly deliver a twist ending.  

I'm not sure what to say about this show as a whole, so I'm going to summarize my feelings section by section in short thought blurbs. Also, please try to keep in mind that I won't be giving this show a review out of ten or on any point scale. If it sounds interesting to you, see it.

Begining: While necessary to understand later episodes, the beginning of the show is not that entertaining but not bad per se either if you like awkward romances.

Middle: Too dark for its own good at times, but overall very entertaining if you like to watch seemingly innocent characters essentially devolve into madness and do things in the name of love and general horniness for each other that they would have, at the shows beginning, considered unthinkable.

End: Poorly executed, still manages to be surprising in just how far things get carried away, perhaps a bit too dramatic to be believable for some, but not for me.

Overall: I'd recommend it for seasoned anime veterans or if nothing else people with several shows worth of experience. For a beginner though,this show is simply beyond your taste, most  likely. If I had to compare it with anything, I'd say that you should try to imagine what would happen if you took the movie Carrie and the movie Say Anything and mashed them together with a porno (Note: even though I said that this show is pretty much focused on sex, you never actually SEE anything particularly explicit).

The moral of the story: *spoilers in this section*

Don't think with your dick, you will lose your moral compass down a well and completely ruin not only your lives, but the lives of most anyone around you. Also, I think that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned works beautifully with this show given the ending.