EBITEN: KOURITSU EBISUGAWA KOUKOU TENMONBU

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGAEbiten
OVA ComedyEbiten: Kouritsu Ebisugawa Koukou Tenmonbu OVA
SPECIAL ComedyEbiten: Kouritsu Ebisugawa Koukou Tenmonbu Specials

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  70/100
  For a random gag comedy, it's surprisingly well written.

  Since the dawn of mankind, several existential questions have remained unanswered. What is the meaning of life? What awaits us in the afterlife? Is our entire existence as a species due to billions of years of cosmic coincidences, or is there really some powerful deity out there somewhere, deliberately shaping the universe for us to exist in it and observe it? Why do we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway? And perhaps the most salient of all, what’s the point of having a highschool Astronomy club when everybody’s supposed to go home before it’s dark out? Well, luckily for the students at one particular Japanese highschool, the answer for this question is quite simple. Instead of an astronomy club, they have an ASStronomy club, whose members prefer to just ass around until it gets dark enough to stargaze. For their newest member, Noya Itsuki, this means being forced to crossdress, putting up with insane cosplaying otaku, and getting wrapped up in a 2012 plot to end the world, all so he can end each day by the side of his new friends and their elaborate, expensive telescopes. It’s not ideal, but life at The Asstronomy club is out of this world!

  A few years ago, when I published my review of Kotoura-san, I brought up Ebiten as being from the same production company, AIC Classic. Well, maybe not so much a production company all its own, but Classic is a smaller subsection of AIC, a massive anime production company that’s been pumping out titles since the eighties, and who have dipped their fingers into basically every genre of anime imaginable. The subsections, like AIC Classic, started popping up throughout the 2000s, and only had a few anime assigned to each of them, especially if you’re just looking at the titles they had primary responsibility for, so basically just Ebiten and Kotoura-san. I haven’t seen anything else by Director Hideki Okamoto, I honestly think the only thing he’s done that’s more well known than Ebiten was something from the Bakugan franchise, but just going off of production history, I can say that Ebiten and Kotoura-san have some things in common.

  For one thing, and I kinda have to put an asterisk on this, I’ll tell you why in a minute, the visuals for Ebiten are, for the most part, perfect. Now, that’s not to say it’s a visual marvel or anything like that, it would probably look like shit if you compared it directly to something from Miyazaki or something, but at absolutely no point does it feel like the quality of the animation ever drops, and I haven't noticed any obvious budget cuts. And yet, it really doesn’t strike me as a necessarily high-budget series. Rather, this series never needed stellar animation or a lavish budget. Ebiten was directed in a way that was ultra sensitive to the pace of the comedy and the tone of the story, so while pretty much all on screen movement is consistantly fluid and smooth, it’s also true that there may not be as much on-screen movement as it appears. There’s also no small amount of exposition dumps playing out over static images, and extended key-frames that allow characters to extend their jokes when needed, and because both of these things are acceptable as just another element of the show’s comedic style, these tactics that could have brought the show to a halt are almost impossible to notice.

  On top of all that, the director was no slouch about visual presentation either. Okamoto makes liberal use of dynamic framing and cinematic lighting, and the editing keeps pace with the tone of any given scene, utilizing faster cuts whenever the material calls for it, and much longer cuts for the more serious, tense and somber moments, and yes, there are a few. Still, the editing is on point, and I really have nothing but praise for the visuals of this series, except for one detail that may or may not bother you... The character designs. I don’t think I’ve seen any other anime whose characters look like this before. They have the giant moe eyes that you’ve come to expect from the genre, but they’re slightly tilted, and to make things ever more uncanny, their faces are narrow at the chin. Combine this with the fact that their bodies have an hourglass quality to them, despite being skinny already, and it starts to genuinely feel like they’re supposed to look like some kind of twisted parody of the moe design template.

  As for the dub, I don’t think it has one at all, or at least I certainly can’t find any evidence of an English version existing, and yet, the Wikipedia article for the series lists an English voice actor next to the description of each character. I saw this, but I couldn’t find any actual evidence to back it up. You can only watch the series in Japanese, as far as I can tell, but the Japanese actors approached their roles with obvious enthusiasm and energy, with just enough of a spark of insanity per character, so that’s fine. Also, I don't have anywhere else to put this, but if you're wondering where the "ASStronomy club" came from, the original gag was that it wasn't the Astronomy club, it was the Astronomical club. There's a joke there, but it takes too long to explain to be funny. The localized translation of the joke is only a slight improvement in my opinion.

  I’ve commented before on, well, a few different trends that Ebiten is trying to chase, so I’m going to address the first one right off the bat. As you should know by now, after The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya became a massive financial success, countless anime came out that tried to rip it off to get a piece of the action, and only a few actually succeeded in doing so. Thus, thoughout the 2010’s, we received an asstronomically large amount of anime involving eclectic school clubs who existed as an excuse for the members to fuck around and embark on slice-of-life shenanigans. For some of these, they would begin with a weird female highschool student with an outgoing and domineering personality, and maybe a male main character who gets sucked into her bizarre world alongside the other quirky clubmates. Yes, this was a trend for several years. There have been shows that would directly lean into this, trying to parody, subvert or deconstruct Haruhi and/or the phenomenon that surrounded her, and there were show that would just take the basic idea and do their own thing with it, and Ebiten... Kinda does both.

  For one thing, only half the cast can be directly connected to Haruhi characters. Kyouko is such an obvious Haruhi parody that they didn’t even bother changing her haircut. Hakata is the Mikuru clone with the generous figure who’s always being undressed for laughs, and Rikei is the stoic and soft spoken girl who shows little to no emotion, ala Yuki. I guess you could make an argument for the rest of the cast, but they’re made up of a student council president who’s always threatening to shut the club down(a staple of the school club sub-genre), a club vice president who’s mostly polite but can turn threatening on a dime, and Itsuki and Izumiku, who have a few quirks of their own, but are mostly just there for the plot. Because there’s a plot. I’m not gonna lie, that plot sometimes feels like it’s coming right the fuck out of nowhere, but it’s actually set up really well in the previous episodes, and as the series goes on, it’s advanced by sudden twists that are also really subtly set up in previous episodes, and which go on to support that plot as it unfolds. And yeah, if you’re going to accuse this show of deconstructing Haruhi, you should bring up the fact that this big elaborate world-ending plot is unfolding around Kyouko at all.

  What I find a lot more interesting, though, is how Ebiten uses the Haruhi Suzumiya/eclectic school club template to explore a relatively unique approach to another popular trend, random gag comedy. It’s actually really rare for any piece of media to FEEL genuinely random. Most of them are trying very deliberately to appeal to some modern demographic or another. Like, don’t get me wrong, I like Invader Zim too, but you can’t deny how hard it was trying to pander to the memes that the Hot Topic crowd were familiar with at the time. I don’t consider Ebiten to be genuinely random either, but I also don’t think it was ever trying to be. The comedic style of this series strikes me as more of an example of ‘controlled chaos.’ Yes, there is a spark of insanity to the content and writing, but it restrains itself in a few very important ways. First off, there’s almost no use of non-sequiturs, which is a huge departure from the genre. I don’t think the people who produce most of these titles are aware of just how lazy it is to just pull random comedic elements out of their asses, like characters pulling weapons out of nowhere, or breaking the reality of the show’s universe just for a quick gag.

  With Ebiten, just about every joke that’s made throughout the series... At least until the plot starts to get serious in the last few episodes... Is, in some way, consistent with in-universe lore. When a character uses a prop, like a gag-weapon, it’s either something that’s been in the club-room the whole time, something that will remain in the club-room afterwards, or something that’s going to feature prominently in the episode. Jokes involving characters always have some kind of significant connection, either to that character, or another character who’s initiating the joke. Jokes that work with one character probably wouldn't work with another character, This is one of the only gag comedies I’ve ever seen that actually had a strong sense of continuity and attention to detail, which is something I can’t even say about some SERIOUS anime. Like, I know I’ve used Your Lie in April as a punching bag before, but when Kousei’s piano student pokes him in the eyes, breaking his glasses, why are they in perfect shape in the next shot? How am I supposed to feel bad for little Kousei being beaten over the head by his mom until he bleeds, when he bounces right back from severe head trauma multiple times in the present day, just two years later?

  When your writing is inconsistent... Even when your slapstick comedy is inconsistent... The audience is going to notice it. You can punish or straight up ignore them for paying attention, like Your Lie in April, or you can reward them for it by actually following up on what they might perceive as a mistake, thus affirming them for it. For example, in Ebiten, there’s a scene where a boy is crossdressing in a female uniform, and he gets berated for wearing boxers under his skirt instead of panties. So one girl just abruptly puts panties on him. Now, any attentive viewer might ask, ‘I didn’t see him remove the boxers first, so is he now just wearing the panties over his boxers?’ And while that viewer might think they spotted a mistake, a few shots later, it’s revealed that yes, this is exactly what happened. Good job, audience, you were paying attention! For another example, there’s a window in the clubroom showing a sunny day outside, even though it’s evening, and the clubroom is in the basement. Congratulations on noticing this, that whole wall was a secret passageway, and the window was fake! Such a smart audience!

  I am personally of the belief that creativity blooms the most beautifully under restraint, rather than total freedom. Yeah, you may have the freedom to create whatever you want without limitation, but eventually it’s going to grow stale and repetitive. Under restraint, you suddenly have rules to deal with, and it’s honestly exciting to see what a creative mind can come up with to achieve their visions in spite of those rules, working around those rules and circumventing them in clever and unpredictable ways. Ebiten is a gag comedy that colors inside the lines, making its own rules and following them, establishing an overarching plot that takes its time to develop, and which simultaneously makes both no sense and weirdly perfect sense, and it all works because of a sense of whip-smart comedic timing and balance. The comedy is so perfectly controlled that even though every episode is technically a partial anime parody, you don’t have to have seen the anime in question to get the jokes. The first episode is apparently a Saint Seiya parody, and while I don’t know jack shit about Saint Seiya, I still found that episode funnier than the later DBZ episode.

  There is fanservice in this show, because of course there would be, I don’t think ANY gag comedy anime would have the balls to try not adding some silly debauchery to keep the audience’s attention, but much like Softenni, that fanservice is used for comedy more often than not. Oh, don’t get me wrong, this anime doesn’t have any actual nudity like Softenni(until the specials), but you know what? Even the censorship is often used as part of a joke. Still, if I’m being completely honest, while the overall plot is set up pretty well throughout the first half of the series, I’d be lying if I said I found it that entertaining. I don’t think it’s straight up boring, but the second half of the series is a lot slower than the first half, and I do feel like the amount of focus they put on that plot is a part of the problem, because it is dense, it is complicated, and my first time through the series, it was incomprehensible. Also, as well written as I think the comedy is, it’s definitely not for everyone. I like it, but I still have to admit, Ebiten is a weird fucking show.

  Ebiten is currently out of print from Sentai Filmworks. Physical copies are pretty damn expensive online right now, but if you were to acquire one, you’d find two OVAs attached to it. There’s a five episode special that exists solely for the purpose of showing you all the characters naked... The value of that is up to you, but it delivers what it promises... And the other one is a full-length OVA episode where the cast breaks out of their anime and into the real world, and it’s actually one of my favorite OVAs of all time. The manga is not available stateside.

  If you’ve previously read my Kotoura-san review, you may recall me saying that Ebiten was so weird that I had drastically different experiences both times I watched it. In retrospect, I don’t know if the fault for that lies with Ebiten or me, but here’s what my experience was like. The first time I watched it, I hated it. I didn't get the humor, I found the writing exhausting, and it just never clicked with me, to the point that I found it a chore to sit through. My favorite part was in the OVA where they realise they’re in an anime, because it actually insulted the series a few times. But on my second viewing, a long time later, everything was reversed. I loved it. I laughed out loud through the whole show, because for whatever reason, I actually “got it” that time. This time, though? I feel like I’m falling somewhere in between. I love this show, I find it deceptively tightly written for a gag comedy, and I find there’s a lot to appreciate about it, even if it’s also true that it does NOT make a good first impression, and it is very distinctly NOT for everyone.

  I give Ebiten a 7/10.

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