Kujibiki Unbalance v1, Not Awful

Regardless of the packaging, labeling, and episode count, Kujibiki Unbalance is the b-side of this Genshiken single. Kujian TV wasn’t something I was burning to see, but since it was there and the one episode of Genshiken went by too quickly, I checked it out and found the opening four episodes amusing enough. (Here is the Kujibiki Unbalance TV Wikipedia entry if you need background info.)

In a good number of anime, the main characters become the important figures in the story by some seemingly random thing that happens to them or events that were not of their own making, etc., that is, they are thrust into the story whether they meant to be there or not.

As the main character of Kujian, the unlucky Chihiro, and his super lucky and cute girl pal, Tokino, arrive for the first day of school at a prestigious academy. They, along with the rest of the student body, stand in a line to draw who will be the officers of their class. Of course, girl pal Tokino draws the Vice President ticket and Chihiro draws the President ticket. I found the class officers determined by lottery a funny play on the whole accidental protagonist setup that many anime use.

And so begins the long line of anime-isms on parade that is Kujian. It works for me. At first I was thinking that one had to be aware of the satire of Kujian for it to not be torture, as it seemed to me if one didn’t know better it was simply bad, but I’m watching it with a person who happens to be living on my couch for several weeks (or is it months now?) and counting, a casual anime fan, DBZ, FMA, and Eva the extent of his anime viewing prior to funkifying my couch, and he finds Kujian rather interesting, so there goes that theory.

On the other hand, my couch occupying friend, I think, shows how one swallows Kujian boils down to how they relate to the aggressive parade of anime bad habits. He’s likely the odd person watching this, as I can’t imagine many casual anime viewers picking up Kujian. I imagine most people picking this up in R1-land are picking this up because of Genshiken and if they liked Genshiken and are willing to pay $15 for one episode, chances are they’re far more gone than the casual viewer, so there isn’t that ignorant bliss that my friend views this through. For some the string of bad habits will be amusing and for others, no matter what the purpose, a string of bad habits is just bad.

I do get the sense that the Kujian TV series is several steps back in terms of satire when compared with the original OVA episodes, which were trying to be awful to amuse and mock you. The TV series seems to be trying to keep some of the winks at awful while being heartfelt/straight-up at the same time, particularly with episode four where the story dips into the childhood background territory, complete with a “she remembers” portion and a generally quieter mood.

True the childhood memories are pretty typical back-story stuff, but the way Chihiro reacts has me believing it’s not all satire like the OVA. And cliche or not, ridiculous characters or not, really contrived setups or not, Japanese storytellers really know how to harness the rain, don’t they?

English Dub Opinion

I love what Headline Studios has done with the wacky/neurotic characters, especially Angora Deb and Georgette Reilly who are balls-out as Renko and Shinobu, respectively. The “non-explosive” characters, like Chihiro and Tokino are solid and never sound like they’re reading lines. Chihiro comes across as reluctant or indecisive without being a wimp, which is important to my ears. All around a solid dub.

In Short

Episode four itself has me a little curious as to what Kujibiki Unbalance is going for. I’ll mirror the Genshiken crew’s commentary during the next episode preview and wonder what the A-story will be.

Overall, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.