Monday, May 04, 2009

Retrospective — Kasimasi ~ Girl meets Girl

Blast from the past time...

The past season having been thin on the ground, I've turned to rewatching some of the series that I watched years ago. With this one, a yuri rom-com, I had wondered whether the original fond recollections were just due to an uncritical consumption of anything animé at the time; and was actually pleasantly surprised at quite how well it held up the second time around.

The set-up is sketched in efficiently -- the necessary unlikely accident with a UFO rebuilds the not very manly boy, Hazumu, as a girl, to be found by his childhood friend, the tom-boy Tomari (blonde), and the girl he had just confessed to, the very feminine Yasuna (black hair). Wacky hi-jinks ensue as Hazumu learns how to conduct himself as girl, watched over by the girls, the inevitable spinster teacher, the alien whose spaceship crashed into him, a father revealed as a dirty old man, and his long suffering best mate (who still cannot handle the fact the other boy now, well, has curves in all the right -- or wrong -- places).

And then the sudden change of gears as the triangle of Hazumu, Yasuna and Tomari takes over, and for the last few episodes, everything is suddenly played straight. The contrast was as sudden and as shocking as I remembered -- though knowing how the dilemma would eventually resolve took some of the tension away.

Still, it held up remarkably well, for something seemingly so flimsy.

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