First Impressions / Kannagi

 
Episode Summary:

Focusing on an old closet door handle, Jin walks into his bedroom with a Capirus* Water and starts yelling at the closet after a moment of strained silence. With no reply, he tries unsuccessfully to open the door. Pissed at Jin for whatever he did to her yesterday night, Nagi refuses to come out of the closet for anything. Not swayed at all by Jin’s arguments about food or toilet, she’ll just live in there instead..

Tsugumi stops by with several Tupperware boxes full of food (Tamago-yaki and boiled vegetables), and Jin tells her what’s happened to Nagi. In Jin’s bedroom, they try to convince Nagi to come out together, but to no avail. During this conversation, we learn that Nagi’s magic light can also steal Jin’s Calpis Water from across the room. (Or maybe she took it earlier, but I prefer the cooler scenario.)

Left hand delicious snack, Right hand Calpis – I can last another 10 years with this much! Tsugumi tells Jin she’ll go talk to her alone, but he says it’s fine if she never comes out. It’s not like there’s anything inside that he’d need or be… embarrassed about, right? From outside the closet door, you can hear Nagi’s light beam and the sound of flipping pages. Tsugumi goes into the bedroom alone and makes Jin promise to apologize if she comes out.

Nagi says she won’t come out even if it’s just for Tsugumi. Following some fairly convincing arguments from Tsugumi, Nagi vents her anger at Jin and says she’ll never forgive him for what he did to her while she was in the bathroom last night. Tsugumi comes out in a rage and scolds Jin, completely forgetting about her goal to extract Nagi, and makes him throw away the empty Calpis Water bottle that Nagi stole earlier.

In the hallway, Jin calls Akiba for help on the phone, and claims he was only thinking of Nagi’s happiness, yet it turned out like this. Akiba says he’ll come over to lend a hand, but only after some preparations. Tsugumi remarks on how they haven’t spent time alone together in awhile, but the silence in the room doesn’t last long as a knock on the door reveals the cutest Akiba Jin’s ever seen. Tsugumi protests the obvious while Zange-chan is overjoyed at her one-on-one alone time with Jin. Zange offers to help extract her sister from the closet with a good idea.

Inside the closet, Nagi is hot so she uses a PlayBoya to fan herself, but hides it quickly when Jin comes into the room with Zange at his side. Jin asks her to come out one more time, saying it looks like he can fix what happened yesterday, but Nagi doesn’t trust him or anyone else, calling them all liars. Zange speaks up while moving in a little closer to Jin, and Nagi realizes her sister has come, too. Urging Jin to forget about Nagi and do all sorts of “fun” and “embarrassing” things with her, Jin starts to panic. It looks like Zange didn’t tell him what her awesome plan was before they started. Nagi asks what’s going on but Zange ignores her, pretending that she heard the voice of a house ghost. Pinning Jin down, she has her way with him despite his submissive protests, piquing Nagi’s interest as well as her anger. Outside the door listening the whole time, Tsugumi panics, as well. Following a long silence as Jin’s soul leaves his body, Zange seductively teases, “Oh my.. This much came out?” At the same time Nagi thrusts open the closet door a few inches in shock, Tsugumi breaks in frantically shouting, only to find Jin passed out fully dressed in Zange’s arms.

With several bloodied tissues added to the trash can full of junk food wrappers, Jin makes another phone call, but Akiba is unavailable. Sitting alone at the table with Zange, Tsugumi blames herself for ruining her plan, and admits how scary she thinks Zange is. Kimura and Shino suddenly show up unannounced behind everyone, lamenting that they missed out on some erotic action because they arrived just a few minutes too late. After embarrassing Tsugumi with a cosplay game Kimura borrowed from Akiba, everyone goes into Jin’s room to convince Nagi to come out together.

Sitting collectively in front of Jin’s closet door, Tsugumi accidentally voices her inner thoughts at Zange when she complains about the heat. Kimura begs Nagi to come out for the fan club’s sake, but gave up suspiciously quickly and started taking pictures with her cellphone for the website. Adding one more to the party, Daitetsu comes storming in to beg Jin not to apologize because of some crazy misunderstanding, and notices the crowd that has gathered. Jin wishes Akiba would hurry up and get here…

Somehow Nagi has stolen another Calpis Jin left on his desk. As long as Jin keeps leaving food and drink accidentally in the room, she doesn’t need to come out. Out of the blue Nagi begins freaking out and banging around inside the closet, and everyone worries as a sudden silence falls. Jin opens the closet door a little, but causes an uproar when a cockroach comes out, racing around the room avoiding skirts and feet, and finally landing on Daitetsu’s face before Shino calmly allows it to escape out the back door.

Just as Jin can’t stand the pain of this situation a moment longer and begs for Akiba to arrive, the doorbell rings. Calling out like they haven’t seen each other in years, Jin and Akiba come together in feverish joyful sparkles and bubbles for an overwhelming (and fairly long) spin-hug reunion. He brought what Jin was waiting for. With confusion mounting up unacceptably high, Daitetsu asks what the hell this is really all about…

The truth is, Jin saw a special on television the previous night showcasing cute kittens playing and he thought that’s the kind of thing Nagi would go for. So he recorded over a blank tape he found on the VCR. However, that tape wasn’t blank. It had been used by Nagi recently to record some anime she hadn’t seen yet, so that’s why she got so angry. Thankful that Akiba brought a copy of the anime, Jin is very happy until he whips out a blu-ray disc instead of a DVD. Predicting this might be a problem, Akiba takes a video cassette out of the bag to everyone’s relief. However, after a quick inspection by Nagi, she angrily throws it back outside the closet. It’s not actually a VHS tape, it’s a beta. When asked what a beta is, Akiba very seriously replies in English, “It’s a Sony.”

After everyone leaves and Jin returns to talk to Nagi alone, heartwarming music begins to play that lets you know the long-awaited reconciliation is about to happen. He tells her he’s felt the same pain when he was a child, so he understands how she feels. But he really only did this because he thought she’d be happy. Asking her to please come out and eat dinner with him like always, he finally spits out a difficult apology. Moments later, a toilet flushes in the other room, and Nagi enters the bedroom her with arms and mouth full of snack food. After a brief stare–down, Nagi happily shouts that she’s ready to settle things with Jin.

 
 
Ending Credits:

Magical girl Loliko responds to presidential danger! She battles a large breasted enemy, gets crushed by a runaway truck that makes her drop her toast, suffers disgusting hair attacks from creepy men, and fights alien enemies with two, no.. *three* lives, possibly more! All this while attending school and starting relationships! For a tear-jerking finale, she reconciles with her enemy who has transformed into an equally small-breasted loli! The world is safe again.

 
Thoughts:

I have NEVER laughed this much at a filler, or even a comedy series episode in general. I trust A1 completely with this show – they can do whatever they want with it from here on out with no complaints from me.

Notice that the villain girl in the TV show Nagi wanted to watch had big breasts until she shrank in the end, and became a good guy. Perhaps one of many reasons Nagi empathizes with the main character…

Zange took full advantage of Jin while Nagi was in the closet, and she *almost* came out after the comment about, uh, the quantity of… If only Tsugumi didn’t ruin it ~~ Rather than showing her darker side (as Tsugumi originally interpreted it), I think this was actually a really brilliantly executed attempt at getting Nagi to come out of the closet. She’s up to her usual tactics, and regained some of the upper-hand she lost last week.

Tsugumi didn’t change much for this episode, either. Whenever she’s alone with Jin, even at the front door when she was handing him food, he’s always distracted by thinking about Nagi. I don’t think he’s ever shown much interest in her, so I wonder how much longer she can take the underdog role, here.

Poor Jin spent the entire episode in growing desperation for Akiba to hurry and show up, so when he finally arrived, the bubbly emotions were above and beyond hilarious, but that doesn’t explain why Akiba was equally overwhelmed to see Jin. Akiba’s English about “It’s a Sony!” also cracked me up. Leave it to the most sociable otaku I’ve ever seen to bring only the oldest and newest media instead of a more common platform.

The best thing about these last two episodes is how much they explored (or exploited?) the friendships between all the side members in the Art Club. In the first episode I was a little thrown back because I’d never met these people before who were supposedly great friends with Jin, but I’m glad they spent some time developing, or at least showing us, hilarious situations in which their friendship really shines through.

I’m suddenly craving Capilus, err.. Calpis Water.

-Trillian

50 Comments

  2. I need to stop watching most of this stuff this season. It gets kinda bad when you don’t know whether you’re laughing at something because its funny or just really stupid. BUT, hiding in the GD closet for having one of your shows taped over is DAMN STUPID. I can’t tell if Nagi is 2 years old or 2000 anymore…

    Megas
    Reply

  3. This show has never tried to be deep, even though there are many deeper unanswered questions that are somewhat more plot-centric than anything we saw in this episode. But that doesn’t mean it’s stupid – It’s just exceedingly lighthearted. The reason a god is acting like a child is one of the bigger questions that *will* be answered eventually. In the meantime, I enjoy Nagi’s bad personality a lot.

    Trillian
    Reply

  4. Akiba is definitely my fave character. His “Its a sony” line completely sent me to the floor laughing. To think that he will bring a bluray and a betamax. It would been a finisher if he also brought the ps3 with him and say “Its a sony!”

    This makes me think of a situation that will be equally hilarious.
    “Here is the video Nagi.”
    “What is this Jin?”
    Akiba smiling. “Its a MKV!”

    Falryu
    Reply

  13. I would put this one right behind Toradora when it comes to LMAO funny. I can’t keep my gut intact at all when watching these 2 shows. The dark cave analogy was amusing enough but I can’t disrepect Amaterasu like that by comparing her to Nagi 😛

    Megas
    Reply

  16. This was indeed a hilarious episode. I liked it so much that I actually had a stupid smile on my face from the beginning to the end of the episode. And like others, the “It’s a Sony!” line got me to LOL too. Two thumbs way up for this episode.

    nckl
    Reply

  20. xD Akiba is favourite charatcer in this show by far!

    I don’t know what it is, but…
    Either I’ve started to like all anime crap or not, or either this season has been superb for anime..have my standards lowered or has the bar really been raised~ UWAH CONFUSED~ BUT FUNNYY!!! XD ITSA SONY~!

    KonaKona4
    Reply

  26. I can’t agree more with the majority who found this episode very damn funny! Simple punch lines that that deliver good amounts of comedic impact. XD

    One of(or even)the funniest fillers I’ve ever seen!

    real13
    Reply

  29. I guess I am a complete perv, since I took Nagi cooling off scene as she was physically aroused from looking at the porn mags (Trillion appears to think it was completely innocent in nature imo)

    MidnightTide
    Reply

  32. Kannagi is hilarious. The characters and antics themselves are pretty funny, but the double meanings and subtle references really take the delicious cake.
    Definitely one of the best anime this season, along with Michiko & Hatchin and maybe Ga-Rei Zero.

    anon
    Reply

  38. @KonaKona4
    I say the bar for Anime standards HAS been raised (and will continue to rise). Though standards are relative to the watcher. However, most shows are showing in HD now as well so at the very least animation quality has gone up.

    @cythas
    Remember, Aniplex is owned by Sony. I’m not really surprised that they would be referencing their own products. Beta (and other products like MD) were Sony’s rather obscure formats, but Blu-Ray on the other hand has won the HD disc format war, so I wouldn’t call Blu-ray obscure unless it somehow dies off within the next 5 or so years.

    ZeroAlpha
    Reply

  40. omg, the use of comedic silence is incredible in this show, the time that nagi and jin were just staring at each other at the end of the episode was the hardest ive laughed in a long time

    saxdemigod
    Reply

  47. yeah, i guess you could say that this plainly shows Sony’s record of obscure formats. now i wouldnt say Blu-Ray is obscure, but it does seem to be about ready to take a hit with the commonplace of people downloading HD content nowadays. i say in about 5 years, more people will be downloading HD content than actually buying blu-ray dics. but anyway, this episode was absolutely hilarious. after a little bit, i realized this was completely filler with absolutely nothing to add to the main story, but by the end, i told myself that that was the BEST filler episode i have ever seen. i couldnt stop laughing

    GGear0323
    Reply

  48. I just don’t know. I found the Sony and porn mag references funny but the show seemed to drag for me. I really enjoyed last weeks but this one probably went too much to situational comedy. Next week goes to drama and back to the manga storyline.

    Irie
    Reply

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