Going into this series, I knew it was going to be ecchi (a Japanasized rendering of the term edgy, presumably) and I was expecting some pretty crazy stuff, but I was certainly not prepared for this. In the earliest episodes, I was about ready to hide my head and cry in shame. Later in the series, attempts were made to actually add some plot and some provoking thoughts about how we remember people and how people have multiple dimensions, but even so, Princess Mononoke, this definitely ain't.
At first blush, Tona-gura is an anime for otakus. Produced by Domu Studios based on a short-running manga penned by Hidetaka Kakei, it is an anime that is flush with shots of the female character's underwear and contrived scenes of potential perversion, though it stops short of becoming pornographic. The premise for the show is that the main character, a high school student named Kazuki, had this childhood friend that she kind of had a crush on but when they were still little he moved away. However, it has happened that the boy, Yuuji, and his little sister, Marie are moving back into their old house next door. So when they come back, is it a happy reunion between two long lost lovers? Hell no. Yuuji is a total pervert, much to Kazuki's dismay, and Marie has developed into a military grade marksman with airsoft rifles, hidden in her stuffed toys, in order to fend him off.
As if to make things even worse, Hatsune, Kazuki's older sister is even more of a pervert than Yuuji on some counts, and in spite of her claims to the contrary, she could even be considered evil. She goes out of her way to create situations where Yuuji and Kazuki are pushed together, often to disasterous results, which she seems to enjoy. One of the most common tropes throughout the series is that she'll unlock the sliding door to the veranda outside Kazuki's room so that Yuuji can sneak into the bed with her and then she'll hide in the closet to observe the outcome which is often quite violent. Enough so that it is always censored by a tranquil view of the outside of the house. That happens a lot early on. About halfway through I could almost count down the seconds to when it would happen. (Violence ensues in 5, 4, 3...) Another one of the earlier prolonged gags involved her creating a situation where Kazuki was actually forced to try to tempt Yuuji to act like a pervert so that she could justifiably make him leave. (Because apparently the ongoing situation was not perverted enough for Hatsune to let Kazuki make that decision.)
After about two episodes of this however, the writers eventually seemed to have decided that perverted jokes and fan service were not enough to save this series, and so they decided to add more to the story by introducing a few characters from the local school, and a little more plot. However, even this does not improve things much as many of the plot twists aren't even carried out very well. For instance there's a two-episode arc in the middle of the series where Kazuki tries to break up with Yuuji and fails. Never mind that her unmitigated hatred for his behavior would have already been a deal breaker in any normal situation, the fact is that unless you count her childhood crush as entering into a relationship, that whole dating thing never actually materialized which it made the whole breakup thing very hard to buy into. It's pretty hard to get off the bus if you never got on to begin with, and further, if you never got on and you still can't get off anyway, you've got even bigger problems.
This does not mean there aren't situations in the show that aren't legitimately funny or plot relevant or that there aren't other positive attributes. Like for instance when it is explained why neither family's parents are around, there's a telephone conversation about how they all crashed in the Amazon that really had me in stitches. The opening theme is pretty catchy even if the first shot is of Kazuki's skirt getting blown up by the wind. The artwork itself is colorful and the animation isn't that bad. There's also a blonde half-american girl that follows Marie around who's pretty amusing and even a few times where you halfway want to root for Kazuki and Yuuji as a pairing, for the sake of their history and the chemistry they have when Yuuji actually seems to have gained the ability to be serious. This is especially true in the last real plot arc, in which Kazuki's best friend, Chihaya is visited by her handsome and much better behaved cousin. He and Kasuki get along real well, making Yuuji jealous. But that positive circumstance of wanting it to work never lasts. It's almost like the writers felt they had to apologize to the otakus for every legitimate plot point and clean joke they put in by immediately going back to the perverted boyfriend gags.
On the one hand the series does make some interesting points about how one tends to only remember the nice things about a person, in the form of revealing that Yuuji was just as much of a pervert then as he is now, and it does point out some of his more positive attributes. But there's always something totally ridiculous on the other to ruin the moment and turn it into a lecher-fest. Even to the end of the series, when Kazuki decides to allow him to continue to be a pervert, there are aspects of the story that are totally impossible to buy. As a woman, I find it inconceivable that any woman would find Yuuji's behavior towards her acceptable, and yet all of the other characters in the series besides Kazuki seem to see it as a graduated form of schoolyard pigtail-pulling, and therefore benign. In fact some of them, like Hatsune, and Chihaya even encourage him to behave that way. Tell me, when is it benign for someone to sneak into your room and try to get in the bed with you without your permission? When is it benign for someone to try to grope you and try looking up your skirt at every opportunity? With that kind of behavior being a common occurance, I don't blame Kazuki for being angry and see her accepting it in the end as more wishful thinking on the part of the writer, who has unfortunately doomed both of them to what I can only assume will be a lifetime of misery. Perhaps if the writer had instead provided Yuuji with an alternative way to show his affection or given him the opportunity to mature a little bit I would have been more willing to accept it, but no. Even for a comedy series, that's pretty cold.
At the end of it all, this may just be an otaku's lament for that childhood sweetheart who scorned his lust. It isn't something you'd watch with your family, and probably not even with some of your more uptight friends. There are a few almost good moments, but I wouldn't search to the ends of the earth for this title, and that's the tiger's two cents.
The images utilized in this review are all from Tona-Gura!
