Director: Kōtarō Ishidate
Screenplay: Kōtarō Ishidate
Voice Cast: Asuka Nishi as Yua
Suzuki; Satomi Akesaka as Hina Satou; Karin Ogino as Aoi Takahashi; Ayaka
Ōhashi as Koharu Tanaka
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
This is going to be difficult to
review as, following from Season 1, Kōtarō
Ishidate's micro-series Tesagure...
doesn't drastically change the template in the slightest. The premise is a high
school club of girls that doesn't officially exist on the books, but exists regardless,
devoted to entirely be about talking about other clubs and new alternatives,
going through anime and manga clichés along the way. To its advantage, Tesagure... never explicitly references
any other manga or anime, so even a novice to this medium could appreciate this
series as you'd learn about these clichés, even for genres you've never
encountered, and still find it funny. Like Ishidate's
other work, improvisation where the voice actresses, who are predominantly the
main leads for his work rather than voice actors, takes place where they have
to actually improvise jokes even if the mistakes and embarrassment are kept in
and animated around.
Here, redacting the melancholic
ending of the first season, the youngest members Koharu (shy, put upon) and Aoi
(the brash and energetic one obsessed with puns) decide to not follow a natural
chronology and instead just repeat their original school year with their
seniors Yua (the club leader) and Hina (meek, and explicitly this time
uncomfortable with even saying crude things) again. It leads to more
conversations about group activities and leading to the actresses involved
building off the initial characterisations for further humour.
The series does even begin by
breaking the fourth wall, the cast having to work around the animators being
restricted in resources, even leading to what can be described as the most
jarring (but funny) uses of recycled footage in even shots of the characters
you could get. If anything, this season feels over the usual length of
episodes, twelve that are merely eleven minutes each, as a stretching the
original minimalist template to new layers, just in terms of playing with the
opening credits being "sung" on the first lyric by different people
to the content afterwards.
The only structural difference is
there are less of the group activities this time, which ended the episodes with
reinterpretations of famous games, some episodes happy to drag the
conversations out for the whole episode. The few activities we get are
memorable - kaiju volleyball, where you have to project model buildings on your
side of the net from the giant volleyball, or a game of trying to create poetry
by way of painting abstract images quickly. There's even a school festival
episode where the quartet have to take over from the absent musical band meant
to perform, which is also memorable.
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Notably as well, the characters have grown in ticks even as stereotypical figures, as little aspects of their personalities (and, frankly, their actresses' as well) grow - be it Koharu not being able to catch a break, until the one moment she succeeds by slurring her words for a joke, and getting nicknames she doesn't want, to Hina being meek to the point she doesn't like cruder topics in the slightest, the shots stretching her position as far back in the room used well. Even the running gag about "worn panties" from the first season returns, more than likely the result of letting your cast improvise and, getting a friendly banter, recollecting old jokes as friends would.
Anime clichés are still parodied,
still without using examples so anyone can still learn from the joke, but more
striking if you get the references. Probably the best, as it's a question I
have always asked myself, is about the fact anime high school always has
characters eventually going on the roof, when they should be locked; others
including the oblivious male protagonist having a male friend who knows
everything, and an amusing touch in this show where the apparently prolific
amount of security cameras around this campus are actually modesty protectors for
the female students, demonstrated to Koharu'ss chagrin.
Even the Sonata sisters, insanely
numerous identical sisters introduced from the first series, looking the same
as star eyed and pink haired schoolgirls all voiced by the same person, have
more to do this time. Even the voice actress Reina Ueda gets a moment, getting annoying at one point when the
other cast members demand her to create new family siblings, male and female,
just to have her do more silly voices.
Again, they even manage to have a
sweet final ending again, seeing a side of a character when they were not quite
the pun obsessed figure of after. In general, its small steps taking place
here, but in this context it's all very well done. This type of dialogue heavy
and minimal work is becoming more common, as its likely to be a lot more easier
and cheaper to produce, but alongside being a great training ground for actors,
just because comedy usually demands them eventually pulling out odd voices on
various ranges of the tonal and emotional scale, even helium voice here, but
because even this is a fine art as a series to try to pull off. Even the
limited animation quality becomes a joke in the first quarter, so the creators are
even aware of how to economise their limitations and even make jokes at its
expense.
From here, the final series takes
a different director. A larger cast and normal twenty plus minute episodes are
what are added to this franchise for Season 3, which could make or break the premise
completely in execution; whatever the result, it'll be fascinating to see Tesagure... take a giant leap in
structure. Certainly in terms of this type of series, when it's hard to say any
particular episode stands out but the quality is so high it sticks, the greater
risk does evoke questions of what to expect.
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