Skip and Loafer

Ah, little dude and I have found another shared one that we really like that we'll have to start collecting the manga for. Not that we need to add any more series...ah, well. 

So, Skip and Loafer is another sort of slice of life one and I suppose you can call it a romance anime, but there's actually been very, very little of that really in the first season. There are hints, but it's more about the friendships and the whole circle is fairly well developed. 

Mitsumi moves to Tokyo for high school. She's from Ishikawa (which I found really interesting because I follow VisitIshikawa on Instagram and it's on my list of places to go) from a very small seaside town. She's very rural and inexperienced, but she's book smart and has big plans -- she wants to become a politician and go to a big uni in Tokyo and work on the depopulation problem that is all too evident in many areas of rural Japan. So, big dreams. 

But she's pretty unprepared for big city life, even though she's so confident. She gets lost on her first day of school and runs into Sōsuke Shima who is a lot more chill and directionless (though there are reasons for that). Bemused, he helps her and sort of immediately adopts her under his wing, even though he's that super popular, every girl fawns over him, every boy wants to be him kind of guy. 

He has some dark secrets though -- he was a child actor and even once involved (with a model friend) in a sort of scandal (though you get the sense it wasn't really his fault) and his family has definite issues. I don't think they ever go out and say it, but it seems like his parents got divorced and his mom has a new toddler with her new husband. He obviously feels distant from them (and his brother). 

It's actually really lovely the way all the characters interact together, including the girl friends that Mitsumi makes. As I mentioned before, there's essentially no progress on an actual romantic relationship between the two main leads, but the ground work is there. What it does, it does well, though it's not (again, I feel like I've been saying this a lot lately) groundbreaking or particularly innovative. The animation/style is also just "okay" -- Shima-kun looks like literally every other blonde handsome boy in about 30 other animes/manga. Mitsumi has more character and is definitely showing her rural roots. 

The humour level is good and it's those little moments that elevate. One of my favourite came towards the end:

During the school festival, Shima's model "friend" that blames him for a previous scandal when they were young (they were caught at a party where there was drinking, though it doesn't seem like they were; they were just there) that dried up her work for awhile, has come to rain on his parade. Mitsumi senses it and goes into this weird protective stance to distract her, telling her to make sure to hurry to find a seat. It's comic because Shima had just read a book to his little half-brother about anteaters and what they do when threatened, and here's Mitsumi doing exactly that pose. And he sees it and recognises it and has this little moment of joy. 

So, anyway, we're going to start collecting the books on this one and we're waiting for Season 2. Definitely glad we watched it and looking forward to discover the books as you get the feeling that there must be more there. There was a lot of secondary character development even so, but somehow you feel there's even more in the books. And these are all definitely characters you want to cheer on.