Potassium-filled painful comedy

What happens when you fuse a girl obsessed with bananas, plenty of chaos, and crude slapstick? The end result will be a show called Aho Girl (aho means stupid) written and drawn by Hiroyuki who is also responsible for other titles being adapted into anime like The Comic Artist and His Assistants and Girlfriend Girlfriend. 

Aho Girl’s plot is very simple: follow the zany antics of banana-loving, dim-witted girl Yoshiko Hanabatake and her friends as she drives them insane is in a whirlwind of misadventures ranging from love, dogs, ear-piercings, to whatever the hell they have at their disposal. The anime is non-episodic which means you can enjoy the show in any order without knowing the other characters that much since it’s mostly focused to Yoshiko; her childhood friend and crush Akkun, and the other supporting and minor characters.

The animation is really great with fluid movements, as well as how expressive each characters’ face can deliver. Also, the animation studio responsible for this anime, whether it is a stroke of genius or just cutting corners due to budget constraints, made a very clever use of the intro in which the characters would interact in the same background where the title is while the opening song is being played. It’s kind of refreshing to see that kind thing but not original since one of my most hated anime, Oreimo, already did that with changing the scenes found on the intro for each episode.

One noticeable thing I discovered comparing the anime from its source material is that they just cherry-picked parts found on the manga and patched it up to make 12 minute anime possible. It’s a shame, but the animation studio shouldn’t have been very selective with what they will get from the source material and just went all out since this series feels like an incomplete work since they left out some of the chapters which expanded the story. I suppose it can’t be helped since this is a short anime and they just adapted what they thought would actually test well with the audience.

And now that we have that out of the way, let’s go now to the meat and potatoes of this anime which is the comedy; and I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand of the comedy is where our crazy female lead would go into an argument with someone, then would use her logic to argue, and it would end with the receiving end either brain dead or mentally scarred which is kind of peculiar to see people lose a battle of wits with Yoshiko considering everyone labels her as stupid. For me, I find it a bit cute and hilarious at times whenever this occurs. Other parts of the show would have the rest of the characters display erratic behaviors that usually results to complete pandemonium which always made me laugh.

On the other hand of the spectrum is not so good portrayal of most of the slapstick where Akkun for the most part, would hit Yoshiko in a healthy dose of techniques from punches, uppercuts, and other forms of physical punishments. I know he can’t tolerate Yoshiko, but hitting her in such cruel manner is portrayed in a way that I don’t find it humorous one bit. Tom and Jerry did it better. Well there are some slapstick that I enjoyed but when it comes to delivering massive blows to crazy girl, well, I really can’t produce any chuckles at all.

Conclusion

Overall, if you can dismiss Akkun’s cruel treatment of Yoshiko through the barrage of physical whacking and look at the other parts of this show, then you might enjoy Aho Girl since this anime might be just the one that you are yearning for. For everyone who dislikes physical violence on women, this anime is off-limits.

-DarkdaemonPK2