[Categories: Anime Reviews]
Kashimashi episode 1-9: Life, love and gender confusion!
Many anime dramas and comedies involve some sort of love triangle - the genre seems to thrive on awkward situations, disasterous dates and star-crossed lovers embracing under sakura blossom trees. So, what does Kashimashi have to offer in addition to the well-worn cliches? A full, instantanous sex change, anyone?
Hazumu is a shy high schooler who is in love with his classmate Yasuna. After confessing his feelings and suffering from the rejection that ensues he takes time walking in the hills surrounding the town to clear his head. Suddenly an alien spaceship crashes into the earth at the precise point where Hazumu is standing, resulting in the aliens reviving him, using their superior technology to restore his health and apologising profusely. As you do. The only trouble is, they inadvertantly change Hazumu into a girl. Perfectly healthy and unchanged in every other way, but a girl nonetheless. Now Hazumu has to cope with a very sudden change in pretty much every aspect of his everyday life, plus the possibility that Yasuna is now interested in him…
Admittedly the premise is daft to the point of being hilarious and there are the token fan service gags and other bits of humour that wear thin pretty quickly but once the story gets into its stride the story is quite sweet and interesting. Hazumu starts experiencing adolescence from a female’s point of view, which adds a ’slice of life’ element; of course female viewers might be able to understand the difficulties he (or rather now, she) is experiencing better than I did!
Throughout Hazumu’s troubles her lifelong friend Tomari is always there to help, and the triangle is complete once Tomari realises that she loves Hazumu, even after the change. After that seemingly everyone starts taking a liking to Hazumu but the emphasis is on how things progress between Hazumu, Tomari and Yasuna.
One annoying aspect of Kashimashi that it shares with a lot of rom-coms is a number of unnecessary fan service elements and slapstick comedy that more often than not miss the mark and add little to the central romantic theme. With these niggles aside, the show is still enjoyable if not outstanding and at least it isn’t predictable at this stage. While the artwork is very ‘cute’ with pinks and pretty flowers everywhere (think CLAMP, yet cuter still) it is supposedly a shounen series - I find that a little odd, having to force myself to put up with the saccharine visuals and music in order to enjoy the drama of the story itself.
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