Chu Bra!! Episode 1

For a show that’s about schoolgirls starting an “underwear club”, this isn’t as bad as you might expect. Assuming you were thinking it was going to be the worst thing in the world.

There’s a kernel of a good idea here – a comedy about a character who is a genius at fitting underwear. There’s plenty of manga and anime about characters with genius ability in something either utterly mundane or bizarre, and that idea could be made to work well too.

The question is though, why would you need to set it in a school?

Turns out the answer is so you can draw schoolgirls in their underwear. Obviously.

From Yumi Nakata’s wikipedia article, it’s mentioned that she’s a friend of Towa Oshima. Oshima’s High School Girls has a lot in common with Chu Bra, in that ostensibly it’s supposed to be a female author showing a male audience a glimpse into what girls are like around each other. Both have been marketed as “shoujo for males”. But all of that comes across simply as an excuse to draw schoolgirls in their undies. Just because a woman created it doesn’t make it any less sleazy. It just means the characterisation is a little better than the usual copying and pasting of it out of Tokimeki Memorial. Or the nth generation erogame clone thereof. The fact of the matter remains you’d be better off just buying shoujo, rather than some creepy version that’s been filtered through the minds of marketing men and editors trying to grasp a niche male audience.

It’s disappointing that Nakata took this approach (presumably because that’s what sells rather than some deep seated artistic need to go in this direction), because there’s also a much cleverer shoujo comedy about puberty trying to escape here. But you’ve got to look really hard for it as it’s buried under the panty shots and some of weird and creepy tangents the story takes. What it amounts to is that the whole “shoujo for males” idea is a godawful one and you invariably end up with the worst of both shoujo and seinen in one creepy mess. The whole basic plot of this first episode could have been presented in more traditional shoujo manner and it would have eliminated 90% of the creepiness hanging over it. Instead, as it plays out, the plot ends up acting as an excuse for the creepiness.

So why isn’t it as bad as you’d expect?

Well, while it’s not as honest in its decadence as Ladies Vs Butlers was, and contains a lot of frustrating missed opportunities to be far cleverer than it is, it is better made. Director Yukina Hiiro is firmly focussed on the gags, and while they aren’t great gags, they are well executed. The dialogue and performances aren’t as trite either, it certainly benefits from Reiko Yoshida (Maria-sama ga Miteru) overseeing the scripts. There’s two segments in the ending sequence that visually knock the rest of the show for six (and in doing so look really out of place). And it has a line in English that doesn’t sound like it’s been learnt phonetically. Yes, I’m scraping for positives now, but given the synopsis I was expecting much, much worse.

However, unless you are the target audience for this, all that probably won’t get you over the fact it’s constantly making in-story excuses for it’s own sleaziness. Or, indeed, over that sleaze in the first place. As well made as it is, let’s face it, it’s not the gag execution or script that’s selling this to it’s audience, it’s the schoolgirls in their undies.

Anyone who claims any different is making worse excuses than the show itself makes.