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Romantic comedies are a popular anime genre, but few do either comedy or romance better than School Rumble. The series consists of two seasons, an OVA, and two episodes from an unreleased third season, and it’s based on a successful manga series that ran over 345 chapters. The story revolves around two oblivious and star-crossed protagonists, Tenma Tsukamato and Kenji Harima, and their increasingly complex love triangles.
At the outset of the show, we’re introduced to young Tenma, who is infatuated by a classmate, Oji Karasuma. Unfortunately, Karasuma is both eccentric and naïve, and all of Tenma’s efforts to attract his attention tend to fail. Meanwhile, Harima is a class rebel and bad boy who is incapable of acting on his affection for Tenma. Add in a colorful cast of classmates, all of whom seem to harbor strong – and occasionally very mixed – feelings toward each other, and you have a recipe for a deliciously convoluted screwball comedy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AQhrLGXspI
The greatest strength in School Rumble is its characters. Harima in particular is impossible not to love: Ostensibly a tough guy, he’s quickly revealed to be an affable screw-up with good intentions whose actions always backfire spectacularly. Other notables include high-intensity, socially inept martial artist Haruhi Hanai; the exotic and affluent Eri Sawichka; super-humanly strong but utterly naïve female wrestler Karen Ichigo; and fourth-wall-breaking, scheming lesbian Akira Takano.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPcPuFPqKNg
Aside from its engaging characters, School Rumble creates situations that are genuinely hilarious. Where other romantic comedies fall back on crude sexual innuendo, School Rumble often reaches for the more unexpected jokes. In places, the storyline is strained well past the point of total absurdity, but it’s so fun that you don’t mind going there. It’s also an anime surprisingly and refreshingly devoid of most fan service. That little nudity there is in the show is almost always played for laughs, and the story relies instead on the "will they or won’t they" tension that makes romance so engaging.
In terms of the animation itself, there isn't much here to write home about and the art is starting to show its age a little bit, even if the scenarios are fairly timeless. That said, the characterization is strong and memorable, borrowing a few stylistic conventions from animation schools in the US and blending them seamlessly with traditional elements. The subtle comedy within the art also matches the quirky script beat for beat, making a lot of the scenes such as those above stick in the mind quite vividly.
To be sure, School Rumble relies on a number of well-worn tropes, like the bad boy with a heart of gold, the friend zone, and conflict created by misunderstandings. Overall, every conflict in the story could be solved if characters could simply communicate with each other. But the characters are so well-made that their communication failures grow organically from their personalities, and even the most absurd situations are fully earned through stellar writing.
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