Kodomo no Jikan
(Watch- almost an "Avoid")
(All episodes watched):
I was surprised that this first episode of the TV series didn't have the same goofy mood as the OVA which I'd already seen. Instead, we get a look at the dark side of school life, with insolent, angry children who are contemptuous of teachers after their experience with an abusive one. Far from falling madly in love with Aoki at first sight, Rin is initially suspicious and dislikes him; it would take a few episodes before she became attached to him. What with all the bitterness, there wasn't much comedy at this point. Episode two seemed almost completely different, and much more like what I was expecting at the beginning. However, I was having one major problem with this show, and that is that I didn't particularly like two of the three girls who are it's main characters. No plausible explanation has been offered for Rin's falling in love with an older man, or more precisely, being so aggressive about it. Her "love" seems more like a tactic to humiliate Aoki than a genuine affection; consequently, she just seems annoying and unlikeable. Black-haired girl (shows you how much interest she generates) is even worse and I wish I could slap her. I feel sorry for Aoki-sensei, but I'm also frustrated that he can't seem to think of anything to do to control these girls. A disproportionate share of the humor consists of fanservice jokes with dirty words bleeped out--it gets repetitive in a hurry. There is so much bleeping that I found it hard to believe that all of the missing dialogue could have been controversial, it seemed more like a lame joke to me. I assumed this was intentional, that the show had been designed from the start to run like this, but apparently it was in fact heavily censored by the networks which ran it--two of the four networks which had originally committed to this series refused to run it at all! As a whole, I suspect Kodomo no Jikan is a show which seriously miscalculated what viewers--at least this viewer--would find interesting and amusing.
Episode six finally gives us the stories behind Rin and Reiji's troubled pasts, and I can't help feeling fairly sorry or them--better late than never. I wish this had been done as episode two or three though. Still, it's hard to like Rin when she is tempted to push a female teacher (who she sees as a rival for Aki's affection) down a flight of stairs! And Reiji only gets worse--this guy is scary, in fact he may well be insane. KnJ seemed a fairly well-known and popular manga, so I assumed this would be a 24-26 episode anime. And then came episode twelve, which employed the common final episode tactic of ommitting the usual OP sequence--that was my first hint that the series would be ending abruptly. I was left unimpressed; pretty much all along KnJ had been a "meal show" for me, i.e, a low priority show which I watch while eating my dinner. Call me an old fogy, but I don't find children sexually attractive. Thinking back, the storyline of KnJ was a mess, giving me mixed signs as to whether Rin was maturing at all or remaining a little bitch. It just goes to show, you cannot ignore the rule which states that the principal characters of a comedy/drama must be likeable!
Last updated Wednesday, January 02 2008.
|
