Recorder and Randsell
(All episodes watched):
One LOL joke and one modest laugh in exchange for three minutes or so of my time isn't a bad deal by any means. That was what happened when I first watched R&R, and the experience remained pretty typical throughout the two-season series of shorts. It was too soon to be certain, of course, but after watching episode one I felt that this show just might just be going somewhere. I got the feeling somehow that this story was going to be fleshed out and the characters would have some personality before too long. Actually, it turns out that I totally missed the basic premise of this show, because it is never made clear: the guy who seems to be 20-something years old is in fact an elementary school student. A child's mind in a man's body, apparently; his sister has the opposite problem, namely she's at least a teenager yet looks like an elementary school age child. Again, there is no explanation; maybe brother and sister Atsushi and Atsumi made a wish to switch ages and somehow it was granted. They could at least attribute it to 'magic' or something--no explanation at all makes it difficult to tell what's funny and what isn't. At this point, it would be very, very easy to use the age-switching business as a cheap stunt to justify lolicon perversion. Giving a viewer a boner takes about 1% of the effort needed to make him laugh. Fortunately, R&R didn't take that sleazy shortcut. While there are plenty of incidents in which Atsushi is mistaken for some sort of suspicious person accosting children, it's just that the innocent remarks made by a small boy tend to be misconstrued because he looks like a grown man. Other than the OP sequence, there is virtually no fanservice or pantsu and this really is a funny show--double entendre sort of jokes which took some wit to write. The jokes are kind of naughty at times but the characters themselves are pure and innocent. Somehow I can't help liking this naive guy. The teenage girl who gets a crush on the guy without knowing his secret was fun--I wish that had been developed more. R&R understood what remains a secret to many makers of anime comedy: if you make the viewers laugh, you have nothing to regret. I always looked forward to Recorder.
Last updated Friday, July 20 2012. Created Friday, January 13 2012.
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Stretch
