I want to make something clear with this review. While Kotoura-San is cute and funny, the famous first episode has all the depth of a puddle of oil. It might look colorful on the surface, but nothing of substance lies beneath.
The first episode of this anime has garnered much attention and praise. It was widely viewed as surprisingly emotional, traumatic, and shocking compared to other anime in ...
I want to make something clear with this review. While Kotoura-San is cute and funny, the famous first episode has all the depth of a puddle of oil. It might look colorful on the surface, but nothing of substance lies beneath.
The first episode of this anime has garnered much attention and praise. It was widely viewed as surprisingly emotional, traumatic, and shocking compared to other anime in the slice-of-life-with-a-twist genre. A cute girl with telepathy loses every human connection due to her condition and lives as a bitter loner until goofy nice-guy protagonist comes along and befriends her. The tragedy Kotoura experiences in the first episode is tear-jerking and earned the show much praise on this site.
However, the tragedy of that opening sequence and all its emotional impact is a lie. True well-crafted tragedy deserving of every tear it creates does not rely on cheap emotional manipulation. Yet that is all the first episode offers.
We have an over-the-top cute girl with gigantic eyes pulling every ingrained heart string we have for baby animals (big head, big eyes, and a tiny body; if Kotoura was a pig-eyed fat girl, do you think anyone would care half as much what happened to her?). This girl has a unique power, she can hear thoughts. We see her at a very young age losing friends by repeating everything she hears.
This is the biggest flaw. Any child that's not suffering from a mental disability would grasp the concept that repeating what others say when they don't move their lips has negative consequences every single time. This child would become introverted and quiet so quickly to avoid people getting angry with them for talking it wouldn't be an issue by the time she left elementary school. But our brain-dead heroine with the irresistible eyes innocently parrots everything she hears, and thus she loses all her friends and eventually destroys her family. Even if she was too dumb to shut up on her own (thus solving every problem she has) how none of her family or any of the specialists she was sent to caught on to what was happening and taught her to keep things to herself is beyond believable.
Thus we are treated to a montage of tragic evens where Kotoura is stripped of everything she loves and the audience is left with a deep sense of sympathy for her and a righteous hatred for the cruel world that hurt her. But just stop for one second. All these emotions you're feeling for this character...they've been created within 15 minutes of being introduced to her. There is no real narrative: no character development or plot twists that reflect any human truths. Instead there's just an insanely cute little girl suffering one unrealistically cruel experience after another until the writers have cheated their way into creating a emotional connection with the audience, without doing any real work.
And then how does the show move forward from here? It drops almost all of it's tragic elements for the next several episodes (it doesn't need them any more, after all) and focuses on goofy, lighthearted comedy. Characters finally begin to have a change to grow some depth, and when tragedy once again rears its head (when Manabe is beaten to a pulp and Kotoura runs away) there is actually a reason to care. We can care without being cheaply manipulated because the characters actually have...well, character now, and their actions make sense and have context gained from our time spent watching them.
Hence I give the show three stars. The first episode is undeniably cheap, emotionally manipulative crap crafted specifically to give the audience a deep (but false) sense of connection to a character we've barely met. However, once the story gets going, there's laughs to be had, and when the plot occasionally becomes serious, the audience now has a real, honest connection with the characters and can invest appropriately into their plight.
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