Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Yoshida Kiyoko has a crush. Kiyoko [Nukui Yuka], a friendly, kind, and if we’re being honest, slightly dim high school girl finds herself seated next to Yano Tsuyoshi [Amasaki Kouhei] at the start of the school year. Yano, himself friendly, kind and a bit dim, is also horrifically accident-prone, getting knocked with all sorts of bumps, bruises, breaks, and other injuries. This is, naturally, played totally for laughs.
Yes, in a world full of girl-with-a-gimmick romcoms—a subgenre I’ve covered extensively in these seasonal premiere columns, ranging as they do from the good, to the merely okay to the confounding—Yano-kun is a boy-with-a-gimmick romcom. I’m not going to go so far as to say that merely switching the usual genders makes some huge difference—if this show didn’t have the fundamentals nailed down it’d be as tedious as any lesser example of this style—but it’s refreshing in its own right. That the show is actually pretty good makes this a quietly charming early seasonal highlight.
I’d pitch the series this way: if you’re the sort of person who enjoys screencapping characters making gag faces or doing silly things, likes lines written with the kind of amusingly clever dumb-ness that you can only get from someone with a keen eye for character, and generally pointing at your favorite and sarcastically asking “are they stupid?” (the answer is always yes), you’ll probably get a kick out of Yano-kun. If you don’t, you probably won’t. It really is that simple, and so in a sense, there’s not much more to say. Especially in terms of what passes for a plot here. Yano is seated next to Kiyoko and it really only takes a few days of worrying about him and his endless parade of injuries for Kiyoko to realize she’s got it bad for the boy. So invigorated, she and her friend Mei [Tanezaki Atsumi, doing what’s essentially a slightly higher-pitched take on her Frieren voice] brainstorm ideas as to how to get the two closer together.
This leads to a few amusing hijinks on its own, but it turns out that they needn’t have bothered. The final stretch of the episode sees a horribly worried Kiyoko run to the hospital after finding out that Yano’s been hit by a truck. It turns out this isn’t actually what happened, and he’s fine (or at least as fine as Yano ever is). But it leads to a sweet, short scene where Kiyoko asks if there’s anything she can do for Yano, offering to treat his injuries when they happen while she’s around (a small medical bag she carries as the result of being an older sister comes into play here), and Yano, touched, responds that he just wants to live an ordinary high school life. Roll credits, simple and sweet.
A premise this bone-simple is always going to come off a slightly corny to a certain kind of person. Honestly it is slightly corny, but it’s also very sweet, and the overall light and fluffy tone presents it from feeling cloying or overbearing. Many of the show’s best moments are in little details that are tough to nail down outside of their home medium. In addition to just generally having a very pleasant art style, Yano-kun frequently deploys a further simplified one for straightforward reaction shots.
There’s nothing technically crazy going on here, but they’re incredibly endearing, and, as the friend I was watching the premiere with (hi Josh) pointed out, they give Kiyoko a tiny dash of Bocchi-ness that makes her even more likable. Tied together with the gentle, flat coloring of the art style, and rookie director Matsuo Shinpei‘s team at Ajiado capably translating mangaka Tamura Yui‘s realistic character designs into something slightly more stylized, Yano-kun is, overall, filled with the exact kind of easygoing warmth you’d want out of something like this. If you’re looking for a simple romcom anime to round out your Fall season, consider this one an easy recommendation.
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