Sometimes, it really feels like the whole ‘cute-girl-doing-cute-things’ formula is getting a little played out and tired. Given that this little sub-genre’s idea of innovation is ‘cute-girls-doing-cute-things WITH X’ where ‘X’ is something ever so slightly different to what has come before. The preferred staple is to have ‘X’ be some sort of after-school club, and even then it’s getting utterly banal. A bunch of girls in a light-music club! A bunch of girls in a club where they ostensibly cheer up other students! A bunch of girls in a club just amusing themselves doing whatever the fuck they want! And now comes Yuyushiki, and what does it bring to the table?
A bunch of girls in a data-processing club!
Riiiiight.
But Yuyushiki is not done laughing at its less-imaginative peers! For it has yet more ground-breaking, bar-raising innovations to make:
There are only 3 main girls!
Seriously though, Yuyushiki is fucking fantastic.
A s’life anime lives and dies by its characters and their chemistry. Archetypical personalities that have by-the-numbers conversations and not an original interaction in sight? It’s going to be tedious and boring as hell. Hell, they don’t even have to be original, just well-done. Fortunately, Yuyushiki nails this perfectly with a small cast that feel incredibly natural being around each other. Their jokes, the way they tease each other, the way they run with the setups made by the others, this show does a really good job capturing the idea that these three girls have known each other for a long time, are fantastically close friends, and just ‘get’ each other.
I’m inclined to thank the fact that there are only three of them for this. It’s not a common number for these kinds of groups, as variety can become an issue with too few personalities to roll with. With larger groups there’s a much greater scope for possible conversations and interactions, and it allows the writer to start with a fairly blank slate; create a fairly solid outline of the personalities of your cast, and just start writing until you find an organic state in which they exist. Azumanga Daioh is a great example of this, with its unusually large; while everyone was fairly balanced to begin with, it just naturally progressed to largely centring around Chiyo.
With a smaller group of characters – and 3 is about as small as you can get – there just isn’t that room there to do something similar. Characters can be introduced to make up the defecit, but they’ll never be core. To pull off such a small cast the writer has to really make them feel established in their little world already – a blank slate just won’t work, the characters and their relationships with each other have to be reasonably developed from the start. And as you might have already gathered, I really feel that Yuyushiki succeeded here.
Yui, the blonde-haired straight man in our little group, and is as close to a focal character that we get. Yukari’s childhood friend and a friend of Yuzuko’s from middle-school, she’s all rather serious about things (someone needs to keep the other two in check), but is certainly not unsusceptible to Yuzuko and Yukari’s shenanigans. While rarely outwardly acknowledging as such, she will admit to herself when something they say is actually funny, or inwardly concede that despite how it’s ‘wrong’, she wants to see how Aikawa reacts in certain scenarios, and she will occasionally join in on their non-sequitur conversations.
She provides a needed level of balance to the humour, keeping it from getting too silly/providing biting retorts to the silliness, but nothing more than your average straight man. Her real charm comes from the moments when she gets swept along by Yuzuko and Yukari, or when they decide to tease her – Yui’s generally reserved nature just makes these situations inherently funnier due to the breaking down of the image she likes to put out there. These also serve to make her more rounded as a character (more than just a regular straight man) and strengthens the idea of them all being good, long-time friends by demonstrating a level of comfort and familiarity with the two of them. Yui is also generally the one to provide the more sentimental moments in the series, usually by showing that she genuinely does love her friends, despite what she says and puts up with. Yui gives Yuyushiki a solid grounding to work off of.
Yuzuko, the energetic/loud pink haired goof of the group, delivers and sets up the vast majority of the comedy here. Typically, it’s either absurdist wordplay, something physical and situational, or trying to embarrass/annoy/generally have fun with Yui. There’s little to be said about her – this is hardly a series running on intricate and complex characterisation, after all – but she’s a fun character and, as mentioned before, the friendship between her, Yui and Yuzuko really shines through. She gives off a feeling that she’d never starting teasing someone who couldn’t handle it, although perhaps I’m reading into it too much – either way, she never comes across as mean-spirited regardless of what she does. Also, she gets all the best expressions and reactions. They’re glorious.
The last of the trio is Yukari, a girl with purple hair from a rich family with an absent-minded and weird streak a mile wide. Typically either joining in with Yuzuko when making jokes or teasing someone, or bringing in some humour through her cloud cuckoolander non-sequitur tangents, Yukari also brings plenty to the show. Her odd, wandering mind does a good job at making the show as a whole feel a little more off-kilter, a bit unpredictable, which helps prevent what could have otherwise been a pretty stale experience, after a while. But besides what she lends to the comedy, she also has an important role in the relationship between the three, effectively acting as a bridge between Yui and Yuzuko. Yui and Yukari are childhood friends, so they were already pretty damn close, meaning that Yukari gets away with a lot more than Yuzuko. It helps that Yukari also doesn’t initiate the teasing as much as Yuzuko, instead just joining in. The net effect is a means to keep the relationship between Yui and Yuzuko feeling more likely; Yui and Yukari is a believable friendship, as is Yukari and Yuzuko, but without Yukari there a friendship between Yui and Yuzuko feels like it would have been strained a long time ago. But with her there, the closeness between them works a lot better.
The best part about the three characters, as alluded to before, is the fantastic chemistry they share. They do genuinely feel like friends that hang out, not just a bunch of anime girls forced to share the same screen. As a result, even when the intended humour falls a bit flat, the chemistry – the very interactions between the characters – helps carry the show, making for an entertaining experience even when the jokes don’t really work.
Even better is that this chemistry extends to the secondary characters. Mom-sensei gets on great with the three of them, coming across as a friend but maintaining just enough of her professional attitude to still seem an authority figure that they respect. It never feels like there’s an inaccurate relationship between them. And then the second trio of Aikawa, Fumi and Okano – even given only a small amount of screen time, they also feel close and genuine. There may not be many characters in this series, but they’re all written remarkably well considering the genre.
I guess one can’t escape the obvious; that is, the ridiculous yuri undertones on display. While it’s pretty low-key to start with, it sneaks up on you and gets pretty fucking blatant at some points to the extent that you have to wonder if the creator just wanted to make a shoujo-ai story instead (to be expected, considering it came from the same manga magazine as Hidamari Sketch and Yuru Yuri), but at the same time… it doesn’t feel too unrealistic? I went to a single-sex school myself, and the amount of good-natured (well, it was good-natured at the time. In retrospect, some of it was pretty homophobic. But we were teenage boys and I digress) homoerotic teasing and joking going on would probably surprise some people. It feels exaggerated in Yuyushiki, but I could still see that kind of thing happening, to some extent. The way they’re all blatantly in love with each other, on the other hand…
One thing that will stick out to most everyone on first glance are the character designs: tall eyes up on their forehead and mouths on the bottom of their chin is pretty weird and a little off-putting at first, but as with many things you get used to it in no time at all. And as for the production values… they’re fine? No QUALITY, animation totally unremarkable, standard stuff really.
There’s only so much you can talk about with a cute-girls-doing-cute-things high school slice-of-life, and I’m about done. Yuyushiki is a great little series, one that definitely rises above the crowd to be something genuinely entertaining and worth checking out, thanks to some marvellous chemistry between the characters and a pretty good sense of humour. Will it be remembered? Probably not, as it ‘only’ does its thing really well instead of defining new standards or what have you, but that’s perfectly fine. It takes a couple of episodes to find its feet, but starting from episode three I found Yuyushiki to be consistently one of the best shows each week. Go give it a watch if you like this kinda thing.
8/10
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