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Moe, singing, schoolgirls – if moe’s not your thing, run away now…!

The setup: the “Light Music Club” at the high school risk disbanding, since there are only two members instead of the four required by the school rules. Ritsu and Mio are therefore looking for anyone who’ll join. A third girl, Tsumugi, gets convinced to join, but they’re still short one member. The clueless and klutzy Yui needs to join a club, any club. A match made in Heaven? Not exactly, since the only musical “talent” Yui has is playing castanets.

The story: the four girls (five, later in the series) play songs, write songs, and do generally cute things. Don’t expect much character development, or serious challenges. Do expect lots of moe In fact, most of the episodes are not much about songs, they’re more about day-to-day events in the lives of the characters, and the overwhelming cuteness of it all.

The work behind the series: Kyoto Animation (Fullmetal Panic, Haruhi Suzumiya, Lucky Star, Clannad) does, as usual, a great job designing and animating the characters; a bunch of musicians give us bubbly girly songs. The English voices are a bit weird, to be honest: they sound the wrong age… but then again, I find most English dubs seriously lacking. To get the full moe effect, you really need to listen to the original voice actresses.

The results: if you don’t like moe, run away now. Seriously, there is no other reason to watch this series. Yes, you do get a few musical numbers, but not near enough to warrant watching the whole thing, you could just pick the soundtrack discs. If you liked Ichigo Mashimaro, you’ll almost certainly like this: the characters are older, but the cuteness is of the same calibre, and there’s the same lack of real plot. Not that this, of course, prevents the series from selling well: this is another purely commercial product, aimed at a specific market, and it works pretty well at that.

K-On! Volumes 1, 2 and 3 are available now from Manga Entertainment.

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This entry was published by dakkar on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under Anime / Live-Action Manga, Films, Japan, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.