I heard a really good way of describing this anime… What was it..?
“Have you ever eaten something kind of hot, and as you eat more of it gets spicier and spicier until your mouth is on fire? School Rumble is kind of like that. It starts out kind of funny, but as it goes on it gets funnier and funnier until you’re in hysterics.”
Honestly, that’s PERFECT.
When I first began watching this anime a couple of years ago, I wasn’t very impressed with it. It seemed good, but not great. Worth a chuckle or two, but not the kind of anime I would hunt down episodes for so I could continue the plot. I watched the first five episodes and that was it.
Recently, it became available for streaming on Netflix, so I decided to continue it out of sheer boredom, and I’m glad I did.
The story revolves around Tenma Tsukamoto, cute (albeit naive and dim-witted) high school sophmore, and Kenji Harima, high school delinquent (also a sophmore, also dim-witted).
Tenma is in love with Oji Karasuma, her odd, spacecadet classmate. Harima, however, is in love with Tenma. For the greater part of season 1, Harima and Tenma spend their time trying to get the objects of their affections to notice them in… really interesting ways. Shooting love letters attached to arrows, posing as doctors and policemen, nothing is out of the question when it comes to expressing how they feel. Except, of course, actually saying it.
Eventually the plot moves away from Tenma and Harima and starts focusing more on some of their classmates.
So much goes on I don’t really know where to begin. It’s something you should just see for yourself. You could watch a whole episode through and not realize until it’s finished that what happened didn’t actually make any sense at all! (Harima jetting through the city on a giant curry dish and avoiding fish flying at him like missiles; A shoot out in the school with replica guns that was taken a little too seriously; bicycle riding at warp speed) This is one of the few animes that ever had me laughing at loud more than once or twice.
I give School Rumble 8.5 out of 10. It’s entertaining and heartwarming, but like so many other anime out there, it didn’t have a very satisfying conclusion, so it gets points off for that. But I’d recommend this to anyone and everyone. Who doesn’t like something funny?
[[This is based on the English dubbed anime. I have not read the manga, nor have I seen the only two existing episodes of season 3, though I do plan to one day in the far future whenever I get around to it.]]