Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Tesagure! Bukatsu-mono Encore (2014)


Tesagure!  Bukatsu-mono Encore is the second season and is once again consisting of 12 episodes of approximately 11 minutes each.  An original work not based on any manga or light novel, it is animated in MikuMikuDance (MMD), with the same level of quality in animation as the first season.  The animation is fairly good thanks to the simple aesthetics and colorful palette.  Continuing from the end of the first season, this is about how a high school girl, Koharu, was roped into joining a club with no prescribed club activity.  The club members spend their time discussing about other club activities and it was revealed at the end that this was deliberate, helping the newbie grow and mature through "trial and error".


The anime follows the characters Yua Suzuki, Hina Satou, Aoi Takahashi and Koharu Tanaka, with Koharu being the newest member and most teased upon as she is "always boring and uninteresting".  The first episode is unfortunately a waste of time, being a clip show summarizing the events of the first season.  Then, just as you are wondering when they are going to introduce the two new characters, since Yua and Hina graduated at the end of the previous season, they pull the rug from under your feet and breaking the fourth wall, states that they're going to go for the "characters don't age" route and bring back the two to reinstate the club.


The characters are essentially repeating the first 12 months again as if the first season did not happen, or rather, they are in a parallel universe yet still remembers all their memories...  If this is confusing, then just ignore any sense of logic and accept that they keep on doing what they have been doing.  Most of the episodes uses the exact same formula, where characters pick a topic/club activity, discuss about it in terms of what first comes to mind, then how it is portrayed in manga and anime, before suggesting new twists to it.  Then it skips to the assembly hall where they find help to put their new twists into action.


Topics discussed include basketball, judo, art club, volleyball and kendo.  However, Encore does try to shake things up, including a school festival episode where they play a song, which was really good.  It takes the fourth wall breaking to the extreme where at one point, the characters state that they animators are going to run out of time and to make it less difficult for them, they will not move much during the episode.  Cue 0.5 frames per second for the rest of the episode, so it seems like stop motion.  Another episode has half-finished animations and coloring.  Thankfully, these stunts work as intended and doesn't get on your nerves, becoming fairly enjoyable in the process.


Most of the enjoyment comes from the gags and jokes, but it uses puns a lot, which is very difficult to get unless you are a natural speaker of Japanese.  Therefore, episodes can get fairly boring since it is mostly just four characters sitting around a table talking to each other.  Overall, Tesagure!  Bukatsu-mono Encore is more of the same thing as the first season, so if you enjoyed the first, then you'll enjoy this one.  Granted, the jokes and pacing seem to be more even, and characters have a lot more defining personality traits rather than being generic like before.

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