OP Sequence

OP: 「girl meets DEADLINE」 by M@N☆GIRL!

「こちらコミック アース・スター編集部」 (Kochira Komikku a^su . Suta^ Henshuubu)
“This is Comic Earth Star’s Editorial Staff”

Mangirl! is a series funny shorts about four female manga editors, with the operative word there being “funny”. I found myself chuckling multiple times during this first episode, and they even managed to fit something like story progression into only three minutes! Colour me impressed.

It’s no fun to explain jokes, so I’ll briefly mention a few that I found funny: Aki (Komagata Yuri) going all deredere for Hana (Miyamoto Kanako), Hana bribing Tsugumi (Otaka Moemi) with snacks, and Ringo (the blonde on the left, Ohashi Ayaka) casually mentioning how the magazine will probably fail. In fact, what impressed me the most is that they managed to fit so many jokes into so little time, and only make it seem a little bit rushed. I feel like there’s some nice comedy potential here, and studio Dogakobo is really showing their comedy chops by being able to bring it out so quickly.

Some other thoughts: the OP sequence is cute, even if the song isn’t terribly good; the main seiyuus are all competent newbies, but the minor characters are being voiced by seasoned pros (which is pretty standard in anime nowadays, even though it’d be weird in practically any other entertainment industry on the planet); and I’m impressed that they actually made the story (such as it is) move a little bit in this first episode, even if I did snort at how they abruptly managed to find 15 artists during the preview. Well, more of chortle than a snort, but that’s a kind of laugh, right? And I’m pretty sure that’s what they were going for.

So the big question is, will I be watching this, and should you? Shorts are always tough since they don’t have enough runtime to become truly compelling, but this one is a pretty easy choice for me. The first episode of Mangirl! proved funny enough that I’ll be on the lookout for the other episodes, if only to have a good, low-calorie comedy on hand when I have a few moments to burn.

tl;dr: @StiltsOutLoud – Only three minutes long, but I got at least four laughs. That makes this show well worth the time in my book #mangirl

 

Preview

21 Comments

  1. Everytime I see this title, I can’t help but think of Half Man, Half Girl or Manly Girls. Yeah, I know its Manga Girl. But its more fun to just go with the misleading title.

    Why are some of the better anime this season being made into 3minute episodes. I’d much rather have a regular length series of this or Yama no Susume then the likes of De Crapo III.

    JustSaying
    1. Yeah, I agree. I don’t understand why they keep continuing Da Capo with new season while the story is crap and boring most of the time. Season 1 was okay and Season 2 botched everything up.

      Aznonymous
    1. I agree…it’s bad. I gave it a try — it’s only 3 minutes, right — and came with an expectation of something like Poyopoyo Kansatsu Nikki that could crack you up. However, with this one, the jokes were really bad, and the limited time was spent on moe. Thank God that I only wasted 3 minutes of my time.

      ronbb
  2. I guess the shorts are good for one thing: testing my basic knowledge of the Japanese language. I chanced upon the raw for this and took a look at it. I was surprised at how much of it I could understand without subs. I might just start watching the other shorts without subs as a challenge.

    Oh, right. As for my thoughts on this first episode… Meh. 3-min shorts about a bunch of girls making manga. How much can one expect from that? It got a chuckle or two out of me.

    junglepenguin
  3. I thought it was pretty funny; it had a Yuru Yuri feeling to it (same studio and perhaps same character designers).
    It also looks like it is becoming a trend to make series with 3 or 5 minute long episodes. I guess it is cheaper to make. I’m not sure if there is a proper nomenclature for it, but I call them Short Episode Anime or SEA for short.

    J-Luke
  4. Hmm… Honestly, this went too fast for me. I couldn’t laugh, because I barely had time to recognize a situation where I was supposed to laugh before they had barreled completely through it and were into the next segment. Too much, too quick, too frentic, I couldn’t keep up.

    Wanderer

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