Well I’ve done the maths and turns out writing about the first episodes of series, even if I don’t like them, are popular on the site, so I’ve decided to do more of them this year. And that won’t just be limited to anime, still getting a surprising number of people visiting my review of the first episode the College Humor Show too.
Just my luck that the first thing I turn to is Ladies versus Butlers, the latest show from Xebec and their new cash cows Atsushi Ootsuki and Akio Takami (Buso Renkin, Shaman King). The pair were behind Xebec’s Kanokon, a similarly saucy light novel that got an anime adaptation on satellite channel AT-X.
Saucy comedy is a perfectly legitimate genre to delve into, indeed anime used to be really good at it. Shin-chan still is good at it. However late at night, things started to get weird, and in the last 10 years you’ve had this strange breed of near sexless sex comedy for otaku. Xebec and Ootsuki took advantage of the satellite broadcast to put some sex back into the sex comedy with Kanokon, however there was one major problem.
Ootsuki can’t direct comedy for shit.
Instead it felt like some weird piece of erotica that contained things you recognised as technically being jokes even if they weren’t executed as such.
Ladies versus Butlers is similarly problematic, if not more so. Instead of a plot, it just appears to have a variety of fetishes layered on top of one another. All but one joke you will have seen before if you’ve watched any anime comedy in the last 20 years.
There is one clever idea, that the hero is so uncouth his mere presence makes high class women faint in his presence, but it is executed appallingly – the hero is no more uncouth than a dozen other anime heroes and the women no more high class than a dozen other anime heroines. It lacks comedic exaggeration in all areas except one character’s ridiculous hairstyle.
Ootsuki’s timing of gags is dreadful, preferring instead to linger on the anatomy of his female characters, rather than get the rhythm of a joke right. It’s like a cartoon Carry on Emmanuelle. If you wanted to make something erotic, why fill it with terrible jokes? If you wanted something funny, why fill it with terrible erotica?
Too often a gag is instigated just by having someone inexplicably fall over. I’m sorry, the old accidental embarrassing physical contact gag
is not funny unless you put a lot more effort into the set up than just tripping up. And it’s definitely not funny the third time it happens in the same episode.
Clearly though, there is an audience for this stuff, and as bad as Ladies versus Butlers is, it’s hardly the worst of this sort of material out there. Outside of his specific comedy timing Ootsuki is a competent, consistent, director. And at least it’s more honest than a lot of its rivals in what it’s setting out to do, it’s just mediocre at doing it. Unfortunately mediocre is a home run for much of this sort of niche anime.