![[Review] School Rumble 2nd Semester](http://www.anime3000.com/images/front_page/school_rumble.png)
School Rumble 2nd Semester
Comedy anime is something that is very hard to stomach at times. For every FLCL, you have an ear-grating, try-too-hard Excel Saga to go with it. Let’s not even get into the black holes of funny that we’re getting this season, making Son of the Mask look like Charlie Chaplin.
So when seeing posters for School Rumble, with its plain white covers decorated with busty schoolgirls complete with quarter-inch hemline, it’s easy to think that would be one firmly in the black hole side of things. Fortunately, rather than a mindless harem comedy or overly cynical vacuum of fun, we get something that reminds ever so vaguely of Undergrads: a slightly surreal, good-natured romp fueled by likable characters and countless misunderstandings.
While this is the second season and the first episode makes no effort to reintroduce any of it’s enormous cast to first-time viewers, it’s not too hard to pick up the basics. Juvenile delinquent and sometime up-and-coming manga artist Kenichi Harima is madly in love with the airheaded Tenma Tsukamoto who in turn is madly in love with Oji Karasuma, whose personality makes Rei Ayanami look like Bob Hope.
Not content with just a love triangle, the show has a massive supporting cast that makes everything spiral out into various romantic polygons. Separating this from any number of high school shows is the Monty Python-style logic to things: The editor of the manga magazine Harima works for is a 20 foot giant brute of a man. The school decides to settle what do for a festival with a two-part Battle Royale/Hong Kong action parody. A student winds up going back in time after drifting away on a kite during a rainstorm. Why? Stop asking these questions and roll with it.
In fact, these endless snubs at logic and reality are key to making this show so much fun to watch. It’s unpredictable events are off-set by the identifiable and likable characters. Just about everyone on this show is an idiot, to put it mildly, and those who aren’t idiots remain content to watch the lesser beings among them run amok for their amusement. Yet everyone genuinely gets along despite the constant bickering and misunderstandings.
I get the sense of remembering all those stupid rivalries and seemingly endless drama from my high school days being put into context: it was all utterly irrelevant, senseless and taking things way too seriously, but you grew out of it, and became a little wiser as a result. Nobody ever explicitly says these things of course, but there is a sense of it. As the 2nd Semester rolls on, there is a sense of change. Nobody actually gets any big dramatic revelations, but things gradually start heading in certain directions. Like real life. Except with more Super Sentai homages.
Review by: Fernando Ramos
Director: Shinji Takamatsu
Animation Production: Studio Comet
Distributed by: Funimation Inc.
