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The Elements in Harmony |
Ueno-san wa Bukiyou has been a short yet fun venture into the exploits of a mad scientist and her ill-fated pursuit of romance. For this season’s crudest short anime, it had so much to bring to the table with its visually appealing art-style, its crass sense of humor, and its endearing yet indecent main characters.
The anime format does wonders in not only bringing justice to its titular character, Ueno, but also molds and shapes the anime to fit her character to a T. The artwork of the manga brings out the cute and mischevious personality in Ueno, but it’s the animation that helps to provide further definition to her facial expressions and mindset. It’s hard not to be taken aback when she looks absolutely adorable when she ends up getting overly flustered from Tanaka’s reactions to her inventions. The ulterior motives she has in her inventions are easy to see through her grin and the color palette her eyes take on, which is further elaborated with in the anime alongside her confusion, fear, and embarrassment. On top of how expressive the anime makes her, voice actress Serizawa Yuu IS Ueno-san. She does so much to bring her to life through how well she pulls off her anger, deviousness, and shock. Honestly, one thing that will be easy to miss with the conclusion of this anime is her voice and accent when she’s screaming at Tanaka.
But as it turns out, the most devious member of the Science Club turns out to be Tanaka. Despite Ueno’s masterful inventions that she uses to trick Tanaka into getting him to be interested in her, Tanaka finds himself either seeing her schemes from miles away or plays dumb by completely misunderstanding her intentions. The unpredictability of whether he’s in on Ueno’s plans or not ends up becoming a part of what makes the anime so hilarious as you’re never sure about if Ueno’s plans will backfire from her inability to commit to her plan as Tanaka gladly falls for it or from his obliviousness to her scheme causing him to get the wrong idea and roll with it. In fact, there are some segments where Tanaka is fully aware and uses Ueno’s mischief as a means of getting away with acting out his own personal perversions. It makes for a humorous dynamic between the two as well as their relationship with their other classmates as they apply their quirks towards how outsiders react to Ueno’s inventions. Similarly, Yamashita is a lot of fun to follow because of the chemistry she has with Ueno and the contempt she carries for Tanaka as he obliviously stumbles in and out of Ueno’s traps without taking her feelings into consideration.
There are many laughs to be had with the bawdy and crude humor of Ueno-san wa Bukiyou. The only misstep I can think of is that there are weird creeper shots that occur throughout a sketch that don’t provide much meaning. With how funny and expressive the characters’ faces are, we don’t really need to state at Ueno or Yamashita’s skirt for half the segment. They’re also missing some chapters like the Desodarant invention, but that one is just a nitpick. One admirable aspect of the anime was how often they switched EDs, my favorite of which being “Cosmo Luminar”, an EDM-flavored pop track that has Ueno moonwalking past the constellations. The anime is a welcome change of pace compared to the more “by-the-books” series’ out there, and should definitely catch some eyes if crass, irreverent humor with a twist of romance strikes a chord with you. All I can say is that it’s been fun to follow Ueno-san wa Bukiyou from start to finish and it’d be exciting to see where the series goes from here, or if it will eventually end with Tanaka and Ueno going out eventually. Until then, at least we have this bold and funny short anime made from the material.
>creeper shots
>>full on ass exposure, pretty much assplug analogies, lolis stripping left and right, piss drinking
>>>creeper shots
>>>>panties eating, panties stripping due to SCIENCE
>>>>>creeper shots
yep, dem creep shots!!!111oneone
you, sir, lack a culture.
But the panty-eating, urine, stockings, stripping and all of that makes sense given that the inventions rely on those kind of unusual/fanservicey elements.
Meanwhile, there’s weird non-sequiter moments where the camera will just stare at the characters’ skirts for a full minute while they’re having a conversation. Like in Episode 12, around 2:46, for no reason, the camera just stares at Ueno’s skirt. The invention has nothing to do with her skirt, the camera just stays on it. It just feels lazy, like you could tell that they didn’t want to frame the scene on the characters’ faces because then they’d have to animate a conversation and maybe the viewer will think that it’ll be visually appealing if you linger on it long enough.
dude, this is fetish fuel lite show with a dash of comedy. and ain’t nothing wrong with having fun watching it. and it surely doesn’t warrant even freaking remembering the time-code for the thing that bothered you. in the immortal words of Chika Fujiwara: dat be somewhat creepy, Show Spoiler ▼
This is hardly a freak-out nor is it me trying to kill the fun. If anything, y’all are taking personal offense to the idea that I thought that the camera shots didn’t need to be there.
I only put the timestamp on the last episode because it was the last episode I watched of Ueno-san and I wasn’t going to skim through every episode for examples. I just wanted to give you a clearcut example of something that didn’t need to be there.
The point is that they got lazy and didn’t want to animate the characters talking so they developed the tendency of just letting the camera sit on a character’s waist. That’s all.
This was a very funny show, I will miss it. I think after the episode where he played her ass like a bongo there is no doubt that he knows what is going on. He just seems to like seeing her embarrassed.