What’s this?
Tsubaki Kunoichi is the top student in her kunoichi school. She lives in a women’s town with the rule that she cannot have contact with men. However, she has a curiosity about men that she can’t reveal.
In the heart of Kunoichi Tsubaki is based on Soichiro YamamotoThe manga and broadcasts on Crunchyroll Saturdays.
How was the first episode?
Nicholas Dupree
Classification:
This one is a bit weird. If you couldn’t tell by the size of these characters’ foreheads, this is from the same mangaka as Teasing Master Takagi-san, and while it features a similar style of bland, goofy humor based on the uncomfortable pangs of early puberty, it has a much more complicated setup than your typical high school rom-com. Instead, you have this whole apparatus of an all-girls ninja-in-training village and multiple teams and a whole horde of anime girls throwing shuriken and using ninjutsu. It’s a much more complex setup for a similar effect, but it does add a bit of flavor to the whole thing.
It helps that the program looks great. I don’t know what magic Soichiro Yamamoto worked to get two different adaptations of his work superbly directed, but that style helps make what could otherwise be fairly standard anime ninja antics feel genuinely funny. These characters move with a lot of energy and spark, the short action sequences are solid, but the real treat is the wonderful environmental work during Tsubaki’s late-night jaunt into the woods. The daytime scenes are a bit more pedestrian, but they still work well to give this large group of kunoichi the energy you’d expect from children, even those training to be ninjas. The character designs, specifically the cast’s clothing, or lack thereof, are a bit of a red flag, but as of this episode, the direction hasn’t dove into anything sexual. The closest it gets is Tsubaki blushing at the thought of seeing a bbb-boy, but you’d have to stretch quite a bit to call that cheesecake.
As for the setting itself, it feels a bit contrived at first, but by the end of the episode we end up in the same kind of place as kids’ summer camp movies. You know, it’s a sleepover camp in the woods, and there are girls’ and boys’ camps on both sides of a big lake. They go on adventures trying to sneak out to see the other camp, and eventually there’s some serious competition in the End of summer. I can’t imagine these competing ninja schools(?) having a river raft race or a competitive pie-eating contest, but you never know. It all mostly ends up as fodder for jokes about kids who know nothing about kids spreading rumors and theories, including one girl who heard all too clearly about guys getting kicked in the balls and spends the entire rest of the episode telling her about it. to all her friends. about her looking cool. Tsubaki herself is nervous to hell and she’s thinking about boys again, and that’s about all the teasing with this premiere.
It’s not bad, but it definitely starts to run out for the time credits role, and the sooner the show can introduce more material to build its jokes on, the better. This creator has proven before that he can make charming low-key comedies, and there are certainly enough characters to make that easy. He just needs to introduce a stronger comedic hook or dig deeper into his surroundings to get there.
James Beckett
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Man I wanted to like it In the heart Kunoichi Tsubakisince I’m already a big fan of author Soichiro Yamamoto’s other series, Teasing Master Takagi-san. However, I definitely wasn’t inspired to get my hopes up when I saw the key art and trailers for this new series, which made it seem like it was the kind of complacency and fanservice-driven comedy that I usually don’t like very much. . And look, let’s get this out of the way: If you freak out when a show puts a lot of the camera’s focus on girls’ exposed bellies and feet, thenIn the heart Kunoichi Tsubaki it’s not going to be for you. The show is never gross enough to directly zoom in on any of the characters’ crotches or anything, but you’d have to be blind not to realize how much effort this series has put into putting together a literal town full of tween girls. in the most revealing ninja outfits she can handle without getting herself on an Adults Only schedule (or a government watch list, for that matter).
Even if you were to ignore the questionable designs and costume choices of the entire cast, not to mention all the shots that are specifically designed to highlight the girls’ toes and navels, the biggest problem with IIn the heart Kunoichi Tsubaki would stay: It’s just not very fun. The entire show revolves around precisely one joke, which is that Tsubaki and her fellow ninjas come from a lonely clan that has managed to live completely isolated from any man for years, to the point that all the children deal with the very concept of a “man” as some sort of hilarious cryptozoological joke. This is a trope that has been interpreted both directly and as comic fodder for literally a hundred years or more, from the pages of the sleaziest pulp stories to the most bootleg television sitcoms. It’s not an inherently horrible trope, mind you, but it’s been played out to the extent that you have to be really creative if you want to be successful.
In the heart Kunoichi Tsubaki it’s not really creative in anything it does, and were it not for the admittedly witty and entertaining production values, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the series for a bargain sex comedy. EAST that’s been buried in someone’s old VHS stash for the last thirty years. Each of the three main characters has exactly one character trait each, and none of them are much comedy: Tsubaki is the stellar ninja who has become so obsessed with the idea of meeting a boy that she can no longer do her job. . , Sazanka is the obsessive rascal who can’t keep her hands/feet/body away from Tsubaki, and Asagao is…I guess she’s the fool. I don’t know. The show is too busy making lazy double-entendre puns and repeating the same joke about Tsubaki’s overflowing horniness to bother to communicate anything else to its audience.
That’s the thing about this trailer: It could very well be that there’s a genuinely funny and endearing comedy hidden somewhere beneath all the lazy writing and questionable art decisions, but if that version of In the heart Kunoichi Tsubaki exists, this first episode certainly didn’t do a great job of hyping it up. I prefer Takagi-san, Many thanks. Consider this one of the biggest disappointments of the season.
Rebecca Silverman
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It’s entirely possible that In the heart of Kunoichi Tsubaki it’s trying to be kind of a light riff on that period of adolescence when some people become obsessed with whatever genre they’re drawn to. In fact, I suspect that’s the case – in a world where ninja schools are segregated by gender, the guiding principle of girls’ school seems to be that men are like ticks, something best avoided, and in this case , is often outside. . But because people are people, the insistence on how horrible men are has had the effect that every girl is completely obsessed with them, anything from “deliciously grossed out” to “fluttering feelings in the chest”. . While most girls fall into the former category, our eponymous heroine is firmly in the latter, but because her teacher is so contemptuous of men, she thinks liking him must mean there’s something wrong with her. Mischief ensues.
I’m not sure exactly what point this episode is trying to make or what mood it hopes to hit. We have a yuri-bait character in Sazanka, who is closer to Tsubaki than perhaps he should be, we have many designs of cute girls and young women in various states of undress (or rather, clothing that doesn’t cover much), and we have to Tsubaki, who is clearly attracted to men despite never having seen one. Presumably it’s all meant to be fun, but it doesn’t quite make it, in part because even when the story does have something funny, it’s quickly used as many times as possible in the moments after its introduction. Even if you’ve never seen a man before, you can surely use your imagination to think of something other than the oft-repeated “stinky, doesn’t bathe, big bodies but weak in the crotch” that is pretty much the main theme of this episode. There are more ways to describe the Loch Ness Monster, for God’s sake. It feels like someone thinks the concept (and that repeated statement) is a lot funnier than it really is.
On the other hand, this is a different approach to the CGCT genre, so if you’re interested in a variation on that theme, it might be worth checking out. The bobble aspect of the character designs aside, it doesn’t look horrible, and if the attempt to show how far the girls can jump ends up looking more like they’re flying on invisible brooms, well, at least I appreciate the effort. . But you really need to find more than one joke to hang your hat on, because this one gets old fast.