Awkward Senpai
不器用な先輩
(Anime)
Workplace romcom by Makoto Kudou
Era: 2020s
Rating: D
Plot: Azusa Kannawa has the reputation of being a stern, no-nonsense office worker, until she is tasked with mentoring fresh hire You Kamegawa and turns out that was just a cover to hide how awkward she is around other people, and her attempts to emulate her own mentor in turn just bring the two closer... non-profesionally.
Length: 12 episodes (covered from #26 to #37)
Thoughts: I'm not one of those "watching shows about high-schoolers feels kinda gross" types, for the most part I just think there should be more room for shows featuring adults, coming up with Cute Women Doing Cute Things shouldn't be that hard, but anyway, when picking new shows to watch, I'm more likely to pick something I'm undecided if it features older characters. This was one case, mostly because I thought it could be something in the ballpark of I Have a Crush at Work / Can You Keep a Secret, only with a main character with internal gremlin tendencies. Hey, should, be a winner, right? Well, here's the thing: I realised halfway is that there is little point in making shows about adults if you're going to make them act like kids anyway. I've complained about many of the storylines how you could replace the office setting with an afterschool club, give Kannawa a skirt and a blazer and Kamegawa to... dress mostly the same, and you don't have to change that much to make it your average highschool romcom. Even if some episodes work (there's a reason why every romcom does it) and are perfectly fine even accepting this is just a regular reskinned high school romcom, there has to be josei manga out there out there who can do it better.
Visually... heh. Looking at the show before I really dug the art style on the manga, but here it felt they took so many shortcuts to make it easier to animate it ended up looking like some of the worst time-constrained filler episodes of the 90s in comparison, but it isn't just the visual style: the less said about episode 4 the better, a complete mess with endless panning shots, cuts to black and very limited animation. This episode is a key point in how Kamegawa sees Kannawa, and yet it's a mess of an episode. Doesn't make things better when you make the next episode about Kannawa forgetting an umbrella, at the end you have her holding one from work until she gets up and it's gone the moment you need Kamegawa to hand her one for plot reasons. I mean, sorry, is this a show about adults but for babies? Episode 8, the maid cafe one, is other episode with a glaring continuity error and just poor animation overall. Honestly amazed this happens in the beach episode and the "main character dresses like a maid for some reason" episode. The episode before the finale where Kamegawa just straight up hints he's going to say is a complete mess for several reasons: it goes overboard with good faces, just throwing every major expression imaginable since the 80s and it doesn't work because it's just too much, there's no coherent style. Doesn't help the regular faces often look off, characters and the environments lack detail or look incredibly rushed and nothing looks well put together. Honestly made me wonder if that episode was made using AI or just rushed. On the upside with the technical aspect, while I usually don't comment much on the VA side of things, Lynn does a great job as Kannawa, going from her professional and awkward voice is one of the (few) highlights of the show.
Personally, this was a show not worth losing time over. It has a few cute moments even if you might feel it's ripping off from (insert any high school romcom of the last 40 years), but that isn't enough to make it a full show. I know shows about characters outside school age aren't that common, but if this is what gets picked for adaptation, and done this way, your time is better spent watching something anything else. It just barely edges past getting an F because Kannawa has some cute moments, Lynn does some fairly funny voice work until Kannawa stops using her professional tone, and some episodes are just passable when it's doing the same sort of thing you've seen a million times before. Otherwise it's a show that mostly existed to annoy me.
Plus:
Lynn is great doing code-switching
Minus:
In visual terms it's one of the worst non-CG modern shows I've seen.
Don't make characters in their 20s just to make them act like high schoolers
