Anime Meta-Review
Boy's Be
Index's
Home
Alphabetic
Quality
Genre
People
Recent
By Date
Title Info
- seen: 1-3 of 13
- type: TV
- grade: watchable
- Series state: Can't find any more to watch.
- made: unknown
- Review created: Thu Dec 14 12:09:04 EST 2000
- mod: none
Ever wondered if young boys and girls really are just a bunch of shallow, sexually obsessed individuals. Well, let me present exhibit A.
The setting is high school, of course. The idealised land of school girl beauties in incredibly minimal skirts. We get to meet three guys who are busy casting their eyes over this environment. One of them is clearly a bit of a sensitive type, he paints and is seriously unathletic. Another is the `female expert', the type who collects statistics about every girl in school and rules to get any girl you spy, yet who is perenially dateless himself. The final is the `jock' type, who despite his seemingly cool attitude is actually an earnest romantic at heart. Needless to say there's also a number of females, although only one of them looks set to really become a main character. That's because she's the childhood friend of one, too `jock' for the girl hunter and clearly too much of a friend for the male jock. As such she's safe.
Needless to say, being young males, these guys are obsessed over all elements of dating, romanticism and the physical charms of young girls. They're not amazingly subtle about it either. And thus begins boys be, where we get to follow episodic `incidents' of romance, dating....and who knows what else as the series progresses.
Certainly in the early episodes there's not much more I can say about it. The characterization is fairly thin and the focus almost mono-maniacal in it's intensity. Given the seeming need to have one `encounter' per episode it all feels very rushed and somewhat artificial. Not that the stories are deep, it's definitely on the male fantasy side of the spectrum. In addition, because we really don't get to meet these people when they're not chasing romance, it's hard to really care about them as characters. But perhaps that's the point, perhaps they only really exist for us (males at least) to imagine ourselves in their position.
Don't get me wrong. The `young love' angle, while it's been used many times before, still has drawing power. And while the stories are simple they're relatively positive and good-hearted, leading to it being quite watchable. Likewise while it doesn't do anything radically new it does know how to paint a good scene, run a dialogue or suggest a moment in order to give it the certain power this sort of material can have. But at the end of the day it feels very familiar and fairly shallow.
There's also some pretty strange design decisions. The opening is basically filter shots over live action. The cut-scenes in and out of the adds are little more than live action up-skirt, down top or even disrobing scenes which are pretty unneccessary. At one point, about episode 3, we got a shot of a dog instead, got no idea what that means. Other than that the production has a certain manufactured feel and lack of warmth to it. The lines and colors, showing signs of digital production, are so strong, clean and minimal as to seem fairly featureless. Likewise the motion animation and character design is also fairly basic. Then again, stories of young love do not live on production alone, and the ability to represent cute guys and girls, while not the most attractive i've ever seen, is sufficient.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:16 WST 2009