Review of A Couple of Cuckoos

It's been a while since an anime opened up without a cold open and jumped straight in with the opening song. And the opening of Kakkou no Iinazuke is pretty great. It's punchy, catchy, creative, vibrant, well directed and animated, and overall just feel-good. Everything this anime isn't. Warning: This review CONTAINS SPOILERS (but this show sucks and has very poor sense of foreshadowing so it honestly doesn't matter) and is quite long The Westermarck Effect is clearly a product that has not yet found import into Japan. I haven't seen such aggressive pandering on incest since Domestic Girlfriend. But whilst Domestic Girlfriend actually went into thecharacters' psyches and explored how a relationship such as being in love with your (not like they're blood related) sibling could actually impact your life and the relationships of the people around you, this series doesn't scratch a single micrometer past its initial gimmick. And that's the whole problem with this show- it's all just pandering without any sort of pay-off. There's a distinct lack of any sort of direction being applied to this series outside of being a pure, cold-blooded advert for the manga because I make no small assertion when I say this anime, at it's hollow core, does nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The cast is made up of some of the most unlikable dregs hauled over from the south side of Rent A Girlfriend. We have our supposedly smart male protagonist who lacks any sort of common sense. We have the classmate he has a crush on. We have the one he was swapped at birth with and is engaged to and is the most nonsensical tsundere I have ever seen. And we have the little sister. None of these characters have any sort of redeeming qualities to them and none of them rise above the haphazardly -stapled-together-skeleton of tropes and cliches they are made of. I'll get into more detail on them later. The anime sets him up quite well early on as he has a goal of winning the heart of his classmate Segawa Hiro by taking first place in school marks since she has a strong inclination towards those better than her yet the MC always remained second-best to her. It's this small plot point that mixes with his mutually-unwanted engagement with the second harem member Amano Erika that drives the story for the first few episodes as the anime focuses on the hi-jinks and escapades which result from such a ridiculous situation.

Umino Nagi - our proud harem protagonist - is just every other generic harem protagonist who is perverted, indecisive, always misunderstands every situation, selfish, and just a huge moron in general - yet he somehow is surrounded by girls who like him for no reason. I'm constantly surprised by how stupid the anime can make him look every episode. It's actually impressive how awful he is. When given a simple thought experiment to determine who he loves, he ends up with all three of the main girls (including his own sister mind you) and it's this indecisiveness that kills any sort of serious character interaction in this show. Segawa Hiro seems like a nice girl at first but the actions she takes as the series goes on - especially near the end - are so bizarre and almost cruel. I'm sure she was intended to have some sort of implication that she wanted to escape from her fate (she's also engaged against her will) but she practically constantly leads-on Nagi with various "dates" and other fun interactions - knowing that he likes her - and yet afterwards always ends with "Yeah no I'm engaged" which ditches him in his mire of indecisive thoughts and a cold, ambiguous feeling of what her real feelings are. It's not just the main character being naturally a massive idiot who overthinks things but Segawa doesn't help at all.

Of course this means nothing actually happens between them the entire runtime of this anime. And get used to that because nothing happens with every other contrived plot the author managed to shit out. Amano Erika is supposedly the main girl of he show given her status as the main character's fiance and the token tsundere of the harem. Yet for her supposed importance she is given very little spotlight. Her interactions with the male lead are limited and forced. And it was so easy for it not to be since she shares the same opinion with our male lead that arranged marriages in the modern world is stupid and they could have naturally build up from that. Instead, because this anime has no concept of pacing, her time on the screen is butchered apart and smeared thin throughout the anime. Because of this there's no consistency between her actions. Is she trying to help Nagi get together with Segawa like in the first few episodes? Or is she being a jealous bitch trying to ruin that pairing at all cost like in most of the second half? Because we see so little of what she thinks and feels all if it is jarring to say the least. She's also the one who introduces one of the stupidest and out-of-place plot twist in fiction with the introduction of her (Nagi's biological) older brother near the goddamn end of the show. It's a valiant attempt to give her any sort of personality and try to justify her also starting to lead on Nagi but it comes off as unnecessary and too-little-too-late. And how does this anime treat this pretty important plot development which is almost as contrived and bullshit as Nisekoi's keys? Nothing. I told you this show doesn't do any sort of payoff.

And finally there's the little sister Umino Sachi. I don't know where Japan's obsession with incest is but I can honestly forgive that as a simple quirk if only she was given any sort of writing to explain why she is so thirsty for her brother. The anime just writes this off as "Oh yeah, incest. That's a thing" and shoves it down our throats without questioning exactly how these two siblings would develop any sort of romantic feelings towards each other. They literally just do it to pander to the incest imouto audience because it is quite literally just dropped in like Sachi goes all "Oh so he's not my biologically-related brother that means I can sleep with him". The series makes no attempt to explore anything about her developing feelings towards Nagi and it plays the same game of "Will they won't they" with those two as it does with Nagi and every other girl. And you know what's worse? The anime actively encourages the shipping between Nagi and his sister. Segawa, Erika, and the poorly-written father guy are not averse to such a relationship and I can deduce this to be more pandering from the writers. It wouldn't even be so bad if Sachi was actually given any sort of personality but she never steps outside the "imouto who is jelly of her onii chan and wants his dick" circle. And she isn't even the only incest wannabe. Erika is also unable to escape such a fate as the author seems to believe that it is not possible for siblings to grow up together and NOT want to bone each other. It really baffles my mind how such a simple premise was turned into unironic incest pandering this hard without the full intention of the hack of an author.

I haven't seen a piece of romance fiction where the characters have this little chemistry with each other. It's written like some predictive text AI that was fed bargain bin mid-2000s harem anime because the anime seems to think that loud and funny interactions is the way people grow to like each other romantically when in fact the end product is contrived, uninspired, and generic and doesn't make me like the characters in any way. Thanks to the actual lack of substance in the screenplay, this has got to be one of the slowest anime ever made. It has 24 episodes yet the amount of major developments is small and spread thin. Half of every episode is narrative chafe that pads out it's runtime with the aforementioned loud haha funnies. The actual "story" so to say is mostly made up of a bucket list of every harem romcom ever made and there's little done to add any sort of twist to it. It's so generic I could see the curve of every half-baked interaction between the characters and tell exactly where the story was going at every minute. There's almost no setup for any of the few plot points that grind this anime along its rusty tracks and the anime ends seemingly in the middle of an arc so there's no resolution to any of these initial setups. Though you can forgive yourself for being unable to find any sort of story arc in this show since it's mostly made up of random scenes that are hastily glued together with little thought as to what level of progress the characters are actually on. And yeah they do progress. Slowly. Eventually. Sometimes. As the series went on it became a complete chore to watch. I got tired after the male lead walked in on a bath scene like it was 2003 (which was played completely straight). I got tired after the 5th time the little sister basically said she wanted to bone her brother. I got tired after the 7th time the parents outshone the rest of the cast but quickly got shafted. I got tired after the 7th time Erika did some poorly designed and drawn cosplay as some sort of attempt to give her a quirky character trait but ended up being a cringe-fest instead. I got tired after the 9th time they brought up "fate" as a theme but then immediately abandoned it for more stupid scenes. I got tired after the 5th time this one comic relief character whose whole shtick is that he's the funny man whose name no-one remembers isn't being funny at all. I got tired when they tried to bait a new character (the missing childhood friend trope) very late into the series in a hypothetical second season. I just got tired.

The animation is like the story and characters - hollow and lifeless. Off-model and awkward movement is the norm for the entire anime from the first episode to the last. There are even scenes where there is more than one character and each character looks like they were drawn by two different people who didn't check what the other was doing. There are plenty of examples of the characters looking less like humans and more like garden gnomes since their heads are drawn way larger than the proportion of their bodies. And the same is true for the opposite in many shots where the head is too small. I would like to say this happens only a few times but it's an epidemic in this series. It really feels like no one checked it and everything was rushed. The actual anime also has a cheap feel to it with it's terribly bland colour scheme and it's often poor mixing of backgrounds and foregrounds. The cheap feeling also spills over into the direction. There's an uncomfortably high frequency of extreme close-up shots of the character's faces for literally no reason. It's especially prevalent just past the halfway point of the show where I was mostly internally screaming at the screen to just pull back the camera for even a few seconds because the camera was that close to the character's mug shots. To be fair most of the wide-angle shots are poorly animated so this must have been a way to save on time since faces are less detailed than full bodies. There's very little polishing done in this show outside of some select few scenes and indeed this show can look good. I think the character designs are generally quite cute and the opening gives us some nice expressions and body language we never see in the rest of the show.

The music is similarly boring to listen to. I really don't remember any unique songs in the entire 2 cour runtime that made me think of anything.Only both opening songs are worth remembering in any capacity. The voice acting was passable for the most part though half of the cast seemed to phone-in their roles. Touyama Nao gets man-of-the-match for managing to not sound completely bored the entire time and actually trying to make the terrible script work. Poor Kitou Akari and Ishikawa Kaito should fire whoever got them their respective roles since there was nothing they could say that wasn't filled with cringe. Kitou Akari does a good performance for the most part and I could feel from the character that she was having some fun. But of course her character is completely butchered and she can't even get 5 seconds of great emotional acting. Poor Kouhara Konomi doesn't sound like she got any sort of direction at all. She's fine for the most part but she does get some of the worst lines in the anime aside from Ishikawa.

If I'll be honest I personally started this show because I wanted to see some of that mid-2000s' cheesiness. Maybe I could capture the free pre-censor-happy spirit from that time that is translated for the modern audience to enjoy and generally just have a good-hearted vibe. But instead I got egregious pandering, some of the worst waifu baiting from the modern era that all started with Nisekoi, a nonsensical tone, and a complete lack of direction on behalf of the author, writers, and directors who simply used this cheaply-made anime as an advert for an equally slow and insipid manga. And yes I checked a small part of the manga since I couldn't believe the lack of faith I felt from this project. Maybe the staff genuinely put their heart into adapting this work but were beset by common troubles leading to the poor quality. Maybe they just did it for the paycheck since SynergySP are a relatively small studio who had to collaborate with the larger but-still-obscure Shin Ei Animation. I heavily suspect that there was some break-down in communication that lead to such an awful product being produced. But I can't give a pass on the author on this one. I haven't read Yamada and the 7 witches but from what I've heard it's a pretty standard romcom harem as well but a generally well-respected one in the community. I have no idea if he watched Eromanga Sensei and thought that was the way to go but damn I hope this doesn't spread further.

So yeah this anime is pretty bad. I can't believe I found a worse harem romcom than fucking Rent A Girlfriend. That anime has far more despicable characters but it was at least somewhat interesting to watch what with seeing the main "character" self-destructing the entire time. Kakkou no Iinazuke offers far less. It's pandering to it's absolute zenith at the cost of any sort of positive writing. 24 episodes man. You could do way better.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far.