My Senpai Is Annoying, directed by Ryota Itoh. Shunsuke Takeuchi and Tomori Kusunoki. Doga Kobo, 2021. One episode (of 12). 24 minutes. Rated TV-14.
Available on Funimation (so avoid the dub when it comes out).
The first episode of My Senpai Is Annoying has dropped, and I decided to give it a look-see since the manga is so maddeningly slow at releasing new volumes. Readers may recall that I previously reviewed the extant English-language manga volumes, which I found amusing but unspectacular. The first episode of the animated version, however, indicates that it’s going to both improve and expand on the comic—which it probably has to do because it would run out of material otherwise.
The story is quite simple. Futaba Igarashi is an office lady but looks like a little girl and has a hard time convincing people she’s grown up. Her older and more experienced coworker is the huge and loud Harumi Takeda. The story is a largely plotless but pleasant slice-of-life in which they work together, hang out at bars after work, and so forth, with romantic tension thrown in.
Summary
I mentioned in my review of the manga that the office setting was so vague that we didn’t even know what their company was or what it did, and I even suggested that the setting seemed superfluous. Already, the first episode of the show has fixed that issue and made the business central to the plot. We’re actually given the name of the company (but don’t ask me to remember it) and we know at least broadly what Futaba and Harumi do for a living (they’re salesmen). There are also hints that the story may develop some of the other characters beyond what the manga does; there’s a short vignette, which I don’t believe is in the comic, in which one of Futaba’s coworkers shows off that she brings a vodka bottle to the office every day.
Although this pilot episode draws some of its material from the manga, it rewrites it almost entirely, building a cohesive storyline from the beginning of the episode to the end, and it centers that storyline around work: Futaba goofs up a contract with a major client, and Harumi helps her fix it. It’s not exactly an involved plot, but it’s more involved than what the manga typically presents. For the foreign viewer, it also offers a few interesting bits of Japanese business culture: The ritual-like exchange of business cards, bowing in apology, and employees who think nothing of working until after dark.
Of course, you should never trust anime for accurate cultural flourishes, but most of this doesn’t seem too far removed from reality.
Quality
The animation in this show is, so far, unexpectedly good, though it’s taken on a generic look and lost some of the uniqueness of Shiromanta’s art. The voice acting is also pretty good. The only flub I see is the generic opening, which features a girl getting out of bed and getting dressed—a scene that a lot of anime creators think, for some reason, is a fantastic way to begin a story. I will however say, as an aside, that I did get some slight amusement out of this scene because Futaba has to stand on a stool to use the bathroom sink. I laughed because my wife also has to use a stool. Don’t tell her I told you that.
Conclusion
Anyway, since this is a “slice-of-life” series, we can’t expect too much from it, but the manga was already an unusually likable example of this genre, and the anime promises to build on it rather than adapt it directly. We could probably argue over whether that’s good or not, but given how loosely structured the material was to begin with, I don’t think the changes can be considered violations of the story’s integrity. From what I’ve seen so far, I think the anime is likely to improve on the material.
