Should I just say that this series was made by Kyoto Animation and end the review here? I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts, but I’m a pretty big KyoAni fan. I won’t go into the details of why exactly, but basically I’ve enjoyed everything they’ve made. I love the feel they give their series, and they’re nearly always a ton of fun to watch. The amazingly high production values and impossibly cute girls certainly help things as well. But I think it’s safe to say that somewhere during the run for Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! I stopped being a mere fan, and have become something of a fanboy. For better or for worse.
So what is Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!? Well, it starts with our protagonist, Yuuta, as he begins high school. He purposefully chose a relatively far-flung school to minimise the chances that anyone who knew him from middle school would be there. But why? Well, he was afflicted by the dreaded ‘chuunibyou’, which roughly translated is ‘eighth-grader syndrome’ – a condition where young adolescents have delusions of power and magic, believing themselves (or at least acting this way in a misguided attempt for attention) to be special and what have you. Basically, they think they’re the protagonist in some crappy shounen action anime. Well, Yuuta outgrew this towards the end of his middle school life, but the first impression he gave entrenched him as a weird loner. This way it’s a fresh start for him and, more importantly, there’s no-one there to remind him of his ungodly embarrassing past as the Dark Flame Master.
But he ends up meeting and being in the same class as Rikka, a girl still caught in the throes of self-unaware chuunibyou.
Cue cute girls, hilarity, romance and some unbelievably fun animation courtesy of KyoAni.
The series begins with a little speech from some unseen narrator. What is chuunibyou? He helpfully defines it for us, and introduces Yuuta, along with the result of his chuuni affliction: Dark Flame Master. We segue from seeing the Dark Flame Master in action to a closeup of a piece of paper with a drawing of him and a detailed description, held by Yuuta. Yuuta promptly and repeatedly smashes his head against the wall of his bedroom and rolls around clutching his pillow for comfort in embarrassment and shame. You see, Yuuta is packing up all of the old artifacts from this dark period of his adolescence in preparation for high school, not wishing to be reminded of the Dark Flame Master more than absolutely necessary – an outright rejection of his fantastical and magical delusions! But wait, what’s this? While moving his boxes out onto the balcony, a rope unfurls down from the balcony above his! The lower half of a girl soon follows, clothed in a frilly, elegant gothic Lolita style dress. This girl struggles to get down, accidentally kicking Yuuta in the face, until Yuuta provides his hands as support for her feet, helping her down slowly onto the balcony railing. Before him stands the image of a young girl, bathed in moonlight, wearing an eyepatch, speaking some obtuse words about whether he “wants to see”. See what? Before he has a chance to respond, the wind picks up, letting loose some cherry blossoms, forcing him to close his eyes for a second – and she’s gone. Could the rejection of his past, his belief in magic and power and innate drama in the universe have been too hasty? Could there genuinely be some mysterious forces in this world, and this girl has attained them? He rushes forwards, checking to see if she’s simply dropped down, knowing full well that this is a futile endeavour as – no wait, there she is, still slowly climbing down the rope.
That one scene rather succinctly summarizes Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! rather neatly. We get a look at the typical sources of humour, see one of the key, defining aspects between Yuuta and Rikka’s relationship, and get a good feel for the style of it as well. By no means is it everything that this show has to offer, but it certainly starts as it means to go on.
From there, the series progresses roughly as you’d expect. Some wackiness early on as we get to know our main two a bit better, more wackiness as the principle secondary characters – Dekomori, Nibutani, Kumin and Isshiki – get introduced proper, and Rikka forms a club with them all. In many ways, it can be thought of as something of a blend of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and K-On!, but with some pretty major differences. Most obviously is that the character dynamics bear little resemblance to those of the other two series – although Yuuta and Rikka make for a surprisingly close inversion of Kyon and Haruhi – but the development of a budding romance between Rikka and Yuuta, as well as the taking a turn for the more serious and dramatic towards the end, help to further distinguish Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!.
As you probably ascertained earlier, much of the humour is derived from over-reaction, reality undoing Rikka (and Dekomori’s) attempts at the supernatural and dramatic, as well as the very personalities of the characters and how they all play out. As a comedy, Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! is a success. The ‘over-reaction’ aspect is fortunately nothing like your typical anime over-reaction comedy – instead of changes of background and exaggerated facial expressions and lots of shouting, we get fast-paced, mostly self-destructive outbursts induced either through embarrassment or irritation, with quick-cuts and great timing. It adds a small, refreshing amount of slapstick to a series whose comedy is largely very character-driven.
KyoAni are very good at character-driven comedy, bringing out the best features of each character’s personality and playing them off with others for great effect, and it’s no different here. Yuuta and Rikka are at odds due to the former rejecting his chuunibyou and suffering embarrassment by proxy, and the latter not only embracing hers but also admiring his, a situation compounded by their mutual attraction; Nibutani can relate, but doesn’t sympathise, with Yuuta by being in a very similar boat, while also constantly clashing with Dekomori; Dekomori herself idolises Rikka as her master, and constantly admonishes Yuuta for trying to get Rikka to become more normal; Isshiki is a good friend of Yuuta’s but doesn’t take himself particularly seriously, and has the unrequited hots for Kumin; Kumin is completely oblivious, amiable, sleepy and cute as the dickens. An eccentric core cast of characters like that is a recipe for some great moments, and again this series delivers; from Yuuta misusing various pieces of equipment on Rikka out of annoyance in the nurse’s office, to Nibutani helping Rikka navigate the complexities of romance with advice gleamed from shoujo manga, to Yuuta reacting violently to Isshiki comforting him in a manner exactly the same as the girl’s did – by resting his head on Yuuta’s shoulder – there are tons of hilarious scenes that really make the best out of these characters, giving all of them plenty of time to shine.
New to a KyoAni series that isn’t a Key adaptation is the inclusion of, and focus on, romance. Yep, Yuuta and Rikka have a thing for each other, and it’s handled pretty damn well. It takes a while for it to come up, as the two get to know each other first and become closer, but once it does it builds quite rapidly – in the events leading up to the confession scene, the pair have all but declared their feelings for the other. There are many delightfully heart-warming moments where the two, through their adolescent naïveté, flounder and bluster and mess up in trying to express these sentiments. The confession itself is absolutely fantastic too, and isn’t just left until the end – it’s still climactic, but by having it occur earlier the relationship between Yuuta and Rikka, as a couple, is allowed to be explored. And this change in the dynamic between the two does become very important a little later, as the tone and events become more serious.
By and large, I am very happy with the presentation of the romance in this series. Not only is it well paced, developed and discussed, but holy fuck is it cute as hell. KyoAni are well known for having perfected the art of moe, but never before have they thought to marry that with romance. The results? I… I honestly think they were trying to induce heart attacks across the world. It is effective. Not just because the characters leant themselves to it (although that is also certainly true), but also through all the little details in the animation of the characters, the direction, and just about everything else KyoAni are well known for.
As mentioned a few times before, Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! does move in a more serious direction towards the end. We discover that Rikka’s chuunibyou is not entirely a product of an overactive imagination and lack self-awareness – it’s ultimately a coping mechanism for her, so when Yuuta forces her in a fairly harsh manner to ‘grow up’ and become normal, it does her more harm than good as she isn’t truly accepting and moving on from what happened. In some ways, her delusions act as a connection to what she has lost. There are also hints that the other characters who have suffered, or currently are suffering, from chuunibyou aren’t so much entirely delusional, but rather rejecting and escaping from a reality that they dislike, although this isn’t as explicit as it is with Rikka. This matter is handled with surprising sensitivity and grace, and is afforded the emotion it deserves, only getting a touch melodramatic at times.
There is one key theme running throughout the series, perhaps not a particularly surprising one – that of what it means to grow up, and embracing your inner child. We see, at every turn, Yuuta rejecting this childish aspect of him, hoping to banish it as nothing but an embarrassing memory. Despite that though he still gets excited by some of Rikka’s collection of random artifacts, in particular one of her guns, and does occasionally get taken in by her antics. As much as he may try, he can’t escape from this very real side of himself. He nonetheless forces his idea of what maturity and adulthood is onto himself. There’s a conflict there, and a major part of his development and growth comes from a small amount of reconciliation and learning to embrace the Dark Flame Master, to some extent. But in the meantime, he forces his idea of adulthood and maturity onto Rikka, which has a devastating effect, and it takes all he has to try and convince himself that it was the right decision and is the right path. His rejection of anything remotely chuunibyou is driven by an understandable embarrassment on his part, but we discover many secondary and side characters that have also had these fantastical delusions in their past; perhaps this embarrassment is merely a result of everyone putting on the same façade of maturity in order to mask their embarrassment?
Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! doesn’t state, however, that chuunibyou is always a great thing and being a mature grown up is terrible; Rikka and Dekomori are obviously barely capable of operating competently within society. Worse than that, Rikka is simply using her delusions to escape from reality and the pain she has gone through, instead of learning how to cope with the painful realities of life. This is obviously not healthy, and makes up the bulk of her character development.
The problem as shown lies in the extremes: you can’t grow up and mature by entirely denying important parts of yourself, but you also can’t if you refuse to face reality. The series instead opts for striking a balance: embracing and enjoying the childlike part of you is far more mature than outright rejecting it, as long as it’s done with enough self-awareness that it doesn’t become an escape from real life. It’s a bit of a cliché, but C.S. Lewis more or less nailed it: “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
For those that have seen the series already, you’ll know that there’s a fairly large elephant in the room that needs to be addressed: the final episode. The build-up to the final episode was excellent – the drama was handled fantastically, the tension was raised, Yuuta begun to realise his mistakes – how could they possibly screw it up? It was so obvious how it would all pan out, how it would all work out, and what should happen. Unfortunately, there were issues.
It’s not that what happened was unexpected – Yuuta and Rikka make up, and everything works out, she finally finds the strength to move on, etc. etc. It’s just the execution of it all was surprisingly disappointing, in many ways. The pacing felt off, some of the humour felt out of place, the events were somewhat forced, the secondary characters weren’t utilised well, the narrator suddenly reprising his role at the end with awfully cheesy dialog just did not work – in many ways, it was poorly directed. But there were two things that stood out in particular as Bad Things.
Firstly, Yuuta receives a letter from his chuuni self from two years ago, indirectly encouraging him to chase after Rikka. Admittedly, it didn’t feel out of character for the Dark Flame Master to send a letter like that, but the timing of it was just a little too convenient. Had the episode been better, I could easily have forgiven this, as it plays into the idea of chuunibyou actually having some worth, but as it was it just added to the problems in this episode.
Secondly, and by far the worst aspect of the episode, we learn that while Yuuta was all chuuni and shit, Rikka had at some point visited her sister’s apartment and saw Yuuta enacting out his delusions outside. She thought it was cool, and was inspired by him to become something similar. This completely changes the nature of their relationship. If she had seen him, and was inspired by him, why was this never mentioned or hinted at before? Why did this not play into their interactions at all? And surely this goes some way to invalidate the idea of her using these delusions to escape reality and cope with her loss? The worst part though is that this revelation is just kinda brought up and then never mentioned again. It accomplishes nothing other than inducing plot holes and changing the perception of the characters – it was a completely worthless inclusion! There’s no two ways about it: this was bad writing.
Not to say the final episode was entirely bad or unenjoyable – I was smiling a fair bit throughout – but it was certainly a disappointment for a series that had, up until this point, been expertly handled and directed.
Everything else about Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! is pretty excellent. While I haven’t talked about the side characters much – for example, Yuuta’s family, Rikka’s sister, their teacher, and so forth – they all get their moments to shine and, in Rikka’s sister’s case, actually greatly contribute to the story and the more serious events later on. Production values are top-tier. What did you expect out of KyoAni? The animation is simply godly, packing tons of little details amidst the fluid and consistent character movements, with the ‘delusion spots’ (wherein Rikka and whoever fights in some manner with their magical weapons and it’s all epic and big and very, very shounen magical fightan anime) being an utter joy to watch, the animators obviously having had a ton of fun making them. The other art in general is fantastic, detailed, realistic and gorgeous. Musically, the BGM was pretty good, albeit nothing standout, the ED was basically a rejected K-On! ending, not that it was bad, and the OP was a ton of fun, with a super entertaining animation to go with it.
If you’re a fan of KyoAni’s other works, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t enjoy Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!. It’s an absolute blast, but the disappointing final episode does cast something of a shadow on the overall experience. That said, up until that point I was having a ton of fun with this series, getting surprisingly invested in the characters and genuinely caring about the progression, and it speaks volumes about the quality of the preceding episodes that a finale that was merely decent can qualify as a pretty big disappointment, and I’ve made a bigger deal out of it than it necessarily warrants. Had the final episode not been like that, I would have no hesitation in giving it the score I do, but as it is I am left somewhat torn. In the end, I can’t deny just how much god damn fun I had watching this series – even if the destination wasn’t as good as I had hoped, it was only because the journey getting there was just fantastic.
Ultimately, Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! is an excellent series – a great mix of comedy, romance and typical moe cuteness with a surprising amount of thematic depth and maturity underpinning it, allowing for meaningful character development and drama with a measure of actual emotional weight.
9/10
[…] a bit of a Kyoto Animation – AKA KyoAni – fanboy. Y’know, if that wasn’t clear already. The animation, the presentation, the direction, the sheer charm they imbue their series with, I […]
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