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Digital
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Wednesday, 29 June 2011 13:03 |
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 Take one jerk-ass boy. Dress him up as a pretty high-school girl, place him in an elite Catholic girls' boarding school, and have him room with the new girl, who happens to be a lesbian and allergic to men. Result? Epic fun...
Kanako Miyamae has just arrived at the Ame-no-kisaki Girls' Academy with the hopes of finding a true love that won't cause her to break out in hives - she's chronically allergic to boys, you see, and she's hoping to find her ideal match in another girl. The first people she meets are the pretty Mariya Shidou and her rude maid Matsurika, and Kanako is instantly smitten with Mariya - until she finds out that the cute, sweet girl she met earlier is actually a coarse, cross-dressing boy...
Until quite recently, the connection between "SHAFT", "Shinbo" and "batshit crazy" had pretty much passed me by - sure, I'd seen previous examples of Shinbo's work, going through Moon Phase all the way back to Tenamonya Voyagers (marks for anyone who remembers what made the R1 DVD release of that notable), but it wasn't until Madoka Magica and the fan furore around that that I drew the connection between the name in the director's credits and a certain amount of fan anticipation. Maria Holic predates Madoka Magica slightly, and it's a very different beast, but having been alerted to Shinobo's style now, you can certainly see it. Maria Holic is a series that revels in the wacky, and the more frenetic it can be made, the better.
So. We have Kanako, who's the female equivalent of every male pervert you've seen in anime (Tomoki from Sora no Otoshimono stands out as a recent example - a true lover of the female form, and almost completely unable to have her way with any of the girls that she has her eyes on. Mariya was the first "girl" at Ame-no-kiseki to catch her attention, but give he's a guy you can work out how well that worked out. Mariya comes complete with a maid, the silver-haired, forked-toungued Matsurika, who'll never let a sentence pass without it including an insult, if she can possible manage. Together they live in a dorm block controlled (and that's too nice a word to describe it) by a young-looking, cat-eared caretaker who insists on being called God. And maybe, just maybe, that's no exaggeration of her abilities. Around this merry bunch you have the other girls of Ame-no-kiseki that Kanako falls for - who are far too many to mention - and Mariya's twin sister, Shizu. Who dresses as a boy and goes to the all-boys' school next door, a revelation that really shouldn't surprise anyone. There is a reason for all this cross-dressing, but I'll leave you to watch the show to find out what it is.
There are brief moments of real plot scattered throughout Maria Holic, but most of it revolves around Kanako making a fool of herself with her brand of lesbianism (which is really doomed to failure), and Mariya doing his best to make her life hell - something he's particularly good at. It's heavy on the slapstick, visual humour, and it never really lets up - getting screenshots of each episode with no subtitles on screen was always a nightmare, as there are so few moments when the characters actually shut up for a few seconds. "Frenetic" only goes partway to describing the pace of it all.
All of this is wrapped up in highly distinctive presentation, too - Shinbo's shows do tend to stand out artistically, and Maria Holic is no exception to that trend. I'm still not entirely sure that I like his style (a little too abstract for me in places), but I can't deny that it makes it clear who's behind the show.
In case you hadn't guessed by that slightly-gushing writeup, I like it. A lot. There's not a hell of a lot to be said about story, as any attempts at plot are wafer thin and pretty much irrelevant anyway, but as an exercise in something that will simply make you laugh (often in a politically-incorrect way), there's a lot to like about it - which makes me partcularly happy that there's a second season (still airing at time of writing). Because I could definitely live with seeing more of this. Well worth checking out.
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