Review - The Wallflower Lesson 1: My Fair Bishonen
Reviewed by Richard Brownell on 2.21.2008.
Score: 8/10
The director of The Wallflower, Shinichi "Nabeshin" Watanabe, has quite the cult following. Perhaps best known for the zany comedy series Excel Saga, he is the master of really out there Japanese comedy. "Out there" is the best way I can describe the oddness that is present in almost everything he does. It's off the wall, slap stick, parody, satire, tributes, and commonly hilarious. But at the same time, the sheer level of crazy turns many people off, which is why Nabeshin's following is more of a cult following than a huge fan base.
But The Wallflower has a potential to break away from the preconceptions that his previous efforts have created. It feels like a more traditional comedy anime but with a Nabeshin flavor. Maybe that's because his shows usually aren't very gothic and don't feature bishounen; maybe it's just the differing subject matter. But so far, I'm enjoying the slight change of pace from his previous shows.
Four devilishly beautiful high school boys live together in a giant mansion living the life of luxury for no cost at all. They aren't four of the five cast members of "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy", but rather just your average everyday set of bishounen that happen to be best of friends. Everything is perfect until the landlady has need of them. Her niece, Sunako, also a high schooler, has some major problems. She's a horribly maladjusted goth chick with no social skills and a hideous demeanor. The landlady challenges our four anti-heroes to clean up her act and make her a presentable beauty. If they fail...they have to start paying the rent.
The four boys are all fairly typical bishounen characters, which makes sense since it wouldn't work to create new character types when parodying established cliches. The niece, on the other hand, is the odd one out. She's sort of a cross between Saki Hanajima from Fruits Basket and your typical death-obsessed goth girl. But there's a reason she has become this way. It seems that in the past when she opened her heart to a boy, he rejected her because she was too ugly. Since then, she has vowed to show her face to nobody and live a life of gothly solitude. Oh, and her best friend is a skeleton.
The premise is really quite simple. Take four bishounen boys; add one goth girl; hilarity ensues. Review over? Pretty much. Hilarity, in fact, does ensue. It's sort of a reverse fish-out-of-water story. Except instead of taking the fish (bishounen) and putting him out of water, they put hot acid (goth girl) into the ocean. Sunako is immediately a part of their daily routine. At school everybody is shocked to see the four beautiful boys accompanied by a hideous female, making Sunako's life even harder than before. To complete her torment, she feels pain in the presence of beautiful people whom she amusingly calls "creatures of light."
The scenarios put forth in Wallflower are mostly pretty typical. They center around the boys trying to make Sunako beautiful in one way or another and of course all fail miserably as her horror nature takes over. For the school culture festival, for instance, instead of a snack stand or something normal, she creatures a haunted house. When she gets cleaned up just this once and a picture makes its way into a photographer's hands, he wants to do a shoot with her which produces horrible results when he sees what she normally looks like.
But of course there are some plot lines that will run through to the end. This first volume shows hints of her falling for one of the boys. And obviously they'll need to clean her up before the show ends or the rent must be paid. These first five storylines really set a good tone for the show, with ample humor from the original manga source material and some extra added in Nabeshin style.
The artwork is something that may turn off some people; mostly just people with no sense of humor. If you really can't stand bishounen boys, you may not even want to watch a parody of them as they get almost all the screen time. But Sunako is almost always hilarious, especially once they start drawing her in small character design. And every time "creatures of light!" is stated it's always funny. The Wallflower is a comedy that stands out above all the slapstick that we usually get from anime. It's not high-brow humor by any means, but it's different and that's a good thing.
Special Features
· Clean Opening & Closing Animation
· On-Air Opening for Episodes 1-13
