Review of Mitsudomoe Zouryouchuu!

According to the principles of classical conditioning by Ivan Pavlov, animals can be conditioned to respond to neutral stimuli in unconventional ways by means of pairing two unrelated stimuli. For example, if food is brought to a dog causing it to salivate every time a bell is rang, the dog will begin to associate the food with the bell and begin to salivate at the sound of the bell, even without the presence of food. Likewise, if one happens to laugh his or her ass off after watching an episode of the first season of Mitsudomoe, he or she will begin to associate great humorwith the catchy, kiddy opening theme of this anime. Thus every time the catchy, kiddy opening of Mitsudomoe Zouryouchuu starts playing my face broadens into a wide, wide grin; I preemptively humor myself in anticipation.

And all you watching Mitsudomoe should do so too, whether consciously or not, because Mitsudomoe is still funny.

Mitsudomoe is a gag comedy. The basic premise is the same as last seasons: the insane crazy life of the three Marui triplets: Mitsuba, Futaba, and Hitoha. The jokes consist mainly of slapstick comedy and raunchy toilet humor (although the animators drew the line one step before Gintama and don't actually show anything.) Like the first season, there is no over arching plot or epic quest: you don't expect such things in a comedy like this. What's taken advantage of is the character development done in the first season. We have a general sense of who the characters are, what are their quirks, and what makes them tick. What's done quite well in this second season is the mixing and churning of these old characters in order to create novel situations and thus novel humor; no joke is overused or stale in this show. That doesn't mean that the writers have abandoned character development as a source of humor. It's present, albeit in amounts appropriate for a gag comedy.

Each episode essentially contains three or four little "short stories," each of which is independent to one another. I also noticed that they have aired these short segments out of chronological order i.e. they air the class swimming in the pool before they air the segment showing the class cleaning the pool. Also some of the events are split into two different segments, i.e. the Christmas story, which was split in two. However this uneven airing of episodes does not cause continuity issues due to the lack of actual plot.

I did have qualms with the first episode. Instead of an actual episode featuring the Marui triplets, we got basically a full episode of the Gacchi Rangers and their apparently screwed up antics. Although I didn't mind this kind of development, it seems a bit wasteful for an adaptation that lasts only eight episodes.

The art is clean and consistent. The backgrounds are fairly detailed and the color palette fairly vivid. The one thing that may bother people is how childish everybody looks. The Marui triplets look like third graders to the untrained eye when in fact they are supposed to be sixth graders. This my be due to the stylistic decision to give all the characters especially round cheeks and squat faces reminiscent of a fat baby. This design is applied to almost all the characters and in the end is just the style of the art.

For comedies such as these, the voice actors have the especially important role of not only giving the characters life, but giving the jokes that they make impact. And in order to do so, the voice actors often have to make their screams and expressions loud and exaggerated. The seiyu playing Mitsuba, Takagaki Ayahi does a particularly fine job of screaming “DIE!!” at the top of her longs in a squeaky voice.

The Opening theme and the Ending theme are well suited for this anime. As stated before, the opening theme suits the mood and the style of this anime well. A catchy, kiddy song sung by the Marui triplets heralding the screwy antics yet to come. The ending theme is better than last seasons. It is certainly pleasant to the ears. It sounds like it's being such by someone with a voice similar to Rie Kugimiya's voice, which I have no problems with.

The enjoyment level is certainly up to par with the first season of Mitsudomoe. I highly recommend those of you who haven't seen the first season to check it out first before indulging in the second.

My only other qualm with this series is the length; eight episodes is certainly not enough Marui antics for me. Here's to a third season hopefully.

I welcome questions, comments, criticisms and compliments whether you found this review helpful or not.