Category: Mitsudomoe

It’s rare for a comedy sequel to be better than the original. Here is one, though. The original Mitsudomoe had its moments of hilarity, but it also had many problems: milked out jokes, trying to be way more disgusting than what was tolerable, and the endlessly repeated forced misunderstandings between the characters. Those problems are actually fixed in the sequel, Mitsudomoe Zoryouchuu.

The keyword here is balance. In the sequel, the creators make sure that no character is overexposed or milked out. Everyone gets some decent time to show off his collection of quirks and jokes. Most episodes are separated into five sketches, and those sketches either centre around one theme or are completely random, but they continue to be different and dynamic. Even the final episode still is hilarious.

The humour in this series works especially well because of how it uses its characters: in the first season it relied a lot on innuendo humour, but this too is much more varied here. The series is at its best when there are a lot of different characters involved who all play off each other, where their emotions quickly change from one to the other. At these points it becomes incredibly dynamic and fun to watch.

The more solid execution also makes the characters a lot more down to earth and likable. The first season was way too full of toilet humour for this. The second season still has that, but it’s much more restrained. The result is that now, the characters in this show are much like your typical children with their childish antics and sometimes perverted minds. Most series about children in elementary school age try to portray them innocently, but Mitsudomoe goes out of its way to show their bratty and naive sides. The second season makes it surprisingly easy to relate to.

In Mitsudomoe 1, the ratio of sketches that worked versus the ones that didn’t work was about 50:50. In Mitsudomoe 2, this is around 75:25. Most episodes have one sketch that is absolutely hilarious, and several others that are quite funny. As for the bad ones though, those are the ones in which either the creators don’t try hard enough, the joke they use just falls flat, or the creators just fall back into the flaws of the first season by repeating jokes for too long. or just being disgusting for the sake of disgusting.

I wouldn’t recommend checking out Mitsudomoe 2 without having seen the first season, as it relies on running gags that were started in the first season. However, if you’ve seen the first season, then watching Mitsudomoe 2 will only make this show better. It has a number of bad sketches, but those are vastly outweighed by the good ones. It’s a much more solid and enjoyable comedy.

Storytelling:	8/10 – Hilarious, solid and varied comedy, knows most of the time that it shouldn’t milk its jokes.
Characters:	8/10 – Some characters are just bad. Most of them are pretty good though, especially their chemistry is on fire in this season.
Production-Values:	8/10 – Bridge’s debut could have been much worse.
Setting:	8/10 – It’s an elementary school. Yet much more believably presented than in the first season.

Suggestions:
– Muteki Kanban Musume
– Ga Geijutsuka Art Design Class
– Hanamaru Youchien

Yeah, this one is part of the first season. The sexual innuendo is less subtle than ever, jokes get repeated and the misunderstanding jokes are back again. It still had its funny moments, but overall it was also a bit forced, and nowhere as hilarious as most of the episodes of the second season.

By far the worst part of this episode was the “Hitoha’s cheeks are like boobs” joke that just got repeated ad nauseum. It was a bad joke to begin with, but it was dragged out horribly and gave Yabecchi eventually an excuse to bring the misunderstandings back again when. The two parts about Mitsuba’s weight loss also had some of the same repeated jokes, but it had some good laughs. The sushi bit was pretty hilarious though.

One thing that I especially noticed in this episode was that it went a bit overboard with the facial reactions of everyone. Especially Mitsuba was yelling for the largest part, and there were a tad more overacted gasps than were comfortable. To close off this series, the previous episode really was a better choice.

Overall the past year has been interesting in the way that much less series were released than usual, and they were also much smaller than usual, the majority not even going beyond thirteen episodes. This allowed me to blog much more different series than usual, and also series that I normally never would have considered blogging: this series, Gosick and Zombie. It was an interesting year, but in the end I really do prefer the large seasons like the upcoming spring. Sure, there may be more crap, but there are also more interesting series. Blogging these pure comedies was fun, but I’m probably not going to weekly blog any of them for a while unless a comedy that is as good as Level E or Geijutsuka Art Design Class pops up.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

Okay, so the next episode is supposed to be not part of the second season, but instead it’s something like “the deleted scenes of season one”. I’m really not sure what the creators meant by that, but it looks like it’s going to be new content. Because of that I’m going to wait till reviewing this series until next week.

In any case, for the official last episode, this was an excellent one to close off the series with. Perhaps it wasn’t the funniest, but I almost have no complaints about it either. There was just one minute that didn’t work, the rest of this episode left a great aftertaste behind. I really enjoyed this series much more than I originally thought I would.

The first sketch interestingly actually fixed one of the annoying subplots of the first season: the endless misunderstandings between Hitoha and Yabecchi about the Gachi rangers, which was one of the most dragged out jokes of the entire first season. Finally Hitoha actually cleared up this misunderstanding.

Sketch two was pure comedy gold. It again made use of a lot of different characters in its jokes as the characters practiced for and participated in the relay race at their sports festival. Even here the creators still combined some of the things we already knew about the characters with new jokes. Chiba especially was on fire in this part.

Sketch three suddenly brought in a new character: a sweet potato seller. This also was quite fun, especially in the way that Hitoha mind-screwed him. It did go on for a bit too long, though. The sketch should have ended when the kids left. There was no need to get this guy to ask the ages of two more teachers. Especially since the latter gave the annoying female teacher more screentime. She by far was the worst character of the entire season.

Finally, the final part of this series wasn’t meant to be funny, but instead showed how the triplets and their father changed from when they were still four years old. A really great way to technically end this series with.

As for next week, I think that it’s all going to depend on what exactly got cut during the first season, and whether or not it was written in the production of the first season or the second season. Like, did they animate a bunch of sketches and were they redeemed inappropriate, or are they some manga chapters that were originally left unanimated? I mean, the series changed significantly between the two seasons, so it all depends on whether it’s going to be like the first season, or the much more balanced second season.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

The Christmas sketch at the beginning of this episode may very well have been the best sketch of Mitsudomoe yet. It was just absolutely hilarious to see the different kids try and pretend to be Santa Claus in front of Miku’s younger brother. Every time when I thought that things couldn’t get any worse, they went even further. The punchline was in true Mitsudomoe fashion completely wrong, but the funniest part of the entire thing. If the creators are indeed saving the best for last, I’m really looking forward to the next episode. Just don’t ask me why we’re already back at Christmas again when we just had that episode a month ago. That makes three Christmases in 20 episodes…

Anyway, the second part was all about the interplay between Miyashita and Hitoha. Especially Hitoha’s deadpan humour was wonderful, but Miyashita also had her moments near the end when she got overly excited. The same excitement got taken too far in the next too sketches, though. The third had the typical Mitsudomoe problem of making characters artificially stupid for the sake of a joke that doesn’t fall. It was mostly about a teacher who was standing in for Yabecchi (who was sick), her chemistry between Futaba and her lack of speech was just too forced. At the same time though, her worries about her age made up for it: those were quite funny.

After that we got a sweaty Mitsuba getting worked up over how hot it is. This was the weakest of this week’s episode, because it’s just Mitsuba overacting and screaming the entire time. That one-sidedness is not what makes Mitsudomoe funny. It’s instead the interplay between the different characters and their constantly changing emotions. This was just forced and went on for too long.

Finally, the show gets quite creative when everyone ends up playing human curling while cleaning the pool. Okay. I have to give points for the idea there. It perhaps wasn’t the funniest skit, but the punchline still was a great one.

On a side-note, I’ve looked into the mysterious ninth episode for this series. It looks like it’s just going to be a compilation episode, so I’m just going to review Mitsudomoe’s second season next week. Heck, one of the reasons I decided to blog this series was because of its short length, which would make blogging Supernatural a bit easier, so it would have been quite inconvenient if this series went on for a few more weeks…
Rating: ** (Excellent)

This episode breezed through three entire months as we visit the new year, valentine’s day and april fool’s. It neither was the best nor the worst of this second season, but again it had some sketches that were really funny. My favourite was the april fool’s one, with its excellent punchline (seriously I’ve had nearly the same trick pulled to me when I was a kid, only it wasn’t on April Fool’s).

The worst was the valentine’s sketch, though. It’s the umpth one about the triplet’s father invading the school and being mistaken for a pervert. It’s good that the creators didn’t drag it on for too long though, like make an entire valentine’s episode out of it. That probably would have been really boring. The new year’s sketch meanwhile returned to the toilet jokes, but it had some really good ones.

Beyond that, this episode also took Satou’s three stalkers to a completely new level of creepiness. It was by far the most disgusting part of the episode when Mitsuba started throwing those snowballs. This is just one of those sketches that’s wrong on so many levels, but at the same time really well delivered so that it becomes hilarious, unlike for example the urine jokes of the first season that were just weird and forced.

The parents meeting meanwhile could have been good, but that one felt a bit forced to me. It seemed just like “let’s show off some crazy personalities that the parents of the different children have”. It would have been appropriate for early on in the series… but there are only two episodes left.
Rating: * (Good)

Not the best we’ve seen from this sequel, but still really funny. There were some jokes that were of the milked out category, but there also were enough new and hilarious ones.

To start with the positives: this episode finally made Satou’s three stalkers into three individual characters. Satou meanwhile also kept himself out of awkward situations and instead works much better as a straight man type of character. Usually the creators seem to try too hard with his character, but this episode avoided that. Oh, and to my delight the female teacher also finally proved to be more than the dumbest woman on earth, when she ended up teasing the girls and their attempts to screw their own measurements.

Now, as for the bad stuff… the lesbian jokes were kindof out there. Generally this show is at its worst either whenever it’s milking the misunderstanding jokes (although that quick dog poo joke in this episode was dumb, yet strangely hilarious) or when it’s artificially making its characters dumber than they usually are. I mean, a lot of this episode was about the usual nonsense talk between kids of their age, but the point Miku started eating the cookies of that occult girl’s face was just… weird. The same goes with that scene of Miku’s mother, sneaking into the classroom, but that one was saved by the way in which she smacked Mitsuba’s face on the table when she got caught.

In a way, Mitsudomoe is also a lot more nostalgic than I’d want to admit. Sure, it’s very exaggerated and all, but at that age I too was just discovering toilet humour,and started caring about what my classmates thought of me. This is also why I appreciate how the second season has gotten more down to earth compared to the first that just tried too hard. I’m not fond of admitting it at all but some of the scenarios and lines in this showw are surprisingly easy to relate to…
Rating: * (Good)

And this episode is hilarious again. Seriously, this show is inconsistent, but that’s also part of the fun: this way you won’t know what to expect, which is definitely good for a comedy. This episode was mostly made out of random sketched, but the good thing about this episode was that all of them were pretty much different from each other. Again: unpredictability is great for a comedy.

And among these sketches were a number of great ones. My favourite was the one where Miku photoshopped a bunch of pictures of Mitsuba. There’s just so much wrong about that: the fact that Miku had been stalking and secretly taking pictures, to the way that she actually tried to make them into a ghost story. The best part was when it turned out that she ended up photoshopping Hitoha’s face on all these pictures. It was quite well built up and completely hilarious. I also like that the occult girl turned into a nice running gag here,similar to the ones that Gintama used.

The last sketch of the episode, the swimming pool one, was also a great one, especially when the creators kept toying with Hitoha’s death, accompanied by conveniently appearing violinists, only to be followed by a huge anti-climax when Futaba appeared. The ED that followed there was also priceless. It perhaps wasn’t as good as the custom ED of that one episode of the first season, but it’s still great to see the creators pulling this again, while not overdoing it with every single episode.

There also were a number of sketches that had their minds into the gutter, but I actually found them pretty funny this time. Especially the first one, which was wrong on many levels, but the fact that the same thing pretty much went on into the mind of all four of the girls made it hilarious.

And yet again: this episode avoided what was milked out the most in the first season: the misunderstandings. It did continue with Yuudai’s perverted techniques, but even there it built further upon it, instead of just repeating the same jokes. The worst part of this episode was for me the festival one: that was just the umpth time in which the creators tried to put some panties on Shinya, which has gotten really old by now.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Okay. Um. Mitsudomoe’s second season’s episodes so far have all been completely different. This is very good for a comedy, but this episode showed the bad side of this. I mean… it did just about every bad thing that the previous two episodes avoided so well. What the hell?

Last episode I noted how the previous two episodes now only made a sex joke when they had a genuinely funny one. This episode showed what happened to the bad ones. I mean, seriously: this entire episode was full of bad sex jokes. And a bad normal joke is bad enough already, but when a sex joke falls flat it’s ten times worse. To make things even worse, this episode also brought back the worst misunderstandings that were already milked out too much in the first season.

I mean, this was bad. Really bad. There only were three or four good jokes in the entire episode. Especially the triplet’s father suffered here: he went completely out of character for the sake of a bad nude joke (by far the worst part of this episode was when he randomly started to strip; when did this guy turn into a complete and utter moron?!). Another really bad segment was the earthquake test. Again, there is a fine balance between silly jokes and the utter stupidity that that segment devolved into.

I don’t think I have ever seen a comedy that jumped from this good to so outright bad from one episode to the other. Due to the random nature of this series I’m going to give this one one more chance next week. If next week’s episode is good and like these first three episodes completely different, then there’s no problem. If next week’s episode is as terrible as this one though, then the first two episodes were just flukes and I’m going to swap it in with Gosick…
Rating: — (Bad)

As for the series I’m not going to blog:
– Let me get back to Gosick when either Heartcatch Precure ends or Showa Monogatari’s first four preview episodes are over. By that time the characters will hopefully be less annoying.
– I remember noting how Cardfight Vanguard at least didn’t contradict its own rules in its first episode. It did in its second, though. Not to mention the huge amounts of cheese.
– Freezing’s second episode was even worse than the first. Plus, it has one of the worst male leads of the season, only eclipsed by the one from Cardfight Vanguard and Oniichan.
– Oniichan no Koto Zenzen Suki Janain Dakara ne… just… no.

Meanwhile, there are two reasons why I decided to blog Mitsudomoe:
1. Convenience.
2. It’s rare for a comedy sequel to actually be better than the original.

In regards to the first reason: Mitsudomoe 2 will only have 8 episodes. That will be very handy considering this. In case you haven’t looked at its official website, let me elaborate: the official site lists the following release dates for its DVDs:

Blu-ray＆DVD 『SUPEARNATURAL THE ANIMATION』
ファースト・シーズン/全22話
◆2月23日⇒Vol.1-3（第1-6 話） レンタル開始／Vol.1（第1-2 話）発売
◆3月9日⇒Vol.4-6（第7-12 話） レンタル開始／BOX1（第3-12 話）発売
◆3月23日⇒Vol.7-9（第13-18 話） レンタル開始
◆4月6日⇒Vol.10-11（第19-22 話） レンタル開始／BOX2（第13-22 話）発売

Basically, episodes 1-6 will be available from February 23rd, episodes 7-12 from March 9th, episodes 13 to 18 on March 23rd and the final four episodes on April 6th. That is a whopping twenty-two episodes of Supernatural in only a month and a half. If Mitsudomoe ends a month earlier, then at least I’ll have a bit more space in the hopes of being able to properly cover it….

As for the the second reason: this sequel is just unbelievable. The first season had its problems: about 50% of the jokes were hilarious, the other 50% just fell horribly flat. In the second season, this ratio shifted to 80% of hilarity with 20% of jokes that just aren’t as good. These past two episodes have been absolutely hilarious, and to my surprise this second episode was even better than the first.

In this episode, this show finally shows that it knows the difference between repeating a joke ad nauseam and running jokes. This episode took the material of the first season, and really started toying with it. The start of the episode was the perfect example, in which that creepy occult girl suddenly appeared. Right from the start, you could sense the tension and the huge probability of things going wrong.

It also helps that these episodes were much more varied than the first season. Even the previous episode which was just focused on one big story never felt like it dragged on. This episode was the complete opposite in that it had many different scenes that prevented these jokes from dragging or milking themselves. The entire second half for example was about Christmas, and yet we saw the preparations to the Christmas party, the Christmas party itself, the hopeless way in which the teacher spends it, the part where santa clause arrives, and its aftermath. The story here flows much more naturally than the first season, which just was a bunch of random scenes pasted together.

Now, this show still has its mind in the gutter, but it’s much less deep than the first season: it only makes a tasteless joke when it’s got a really good one (like Hitoha’s hairy leg) and even the resident pervert didn’t keep on rambling about panties like he did in the first season. On top of that, this show can also boast Mitsuba: the first female lead character who actually doesn’t look like a supermodel in a long while (Kuragehime only counts half, because the only thing that prevented Tsukimi from the same thing is that she didn’t bother to spend time on her looks).

Now, there were some bad jokes in this episode. The female teacher… even this sequel didn’t really manage to make anything out of her. She’s such a hopeless character that I don’t think that anything can make her funny. The mother joke also felt a bit flat. Still, this episode had me in stitches during the largest part. This is really one of the series this season that majorly exceeded my expectations.
Rating: ** (Excellent)