This Art Club Has a Problem Review - And So Does This Anime

No. No, no, no, nonononono, no. I refuse. Absolutely not. The cycle must end. No!

For those just tuning in to my karmic wrestling match with the things I review, tradition mandates that whenever I review an anime movie I give a very good grade to, I must always chase it with an abominably bad series to even the scales. Sometimes it’s bad like a poorly stitched together sweater, in that I can find plenty of threads to pick at as I sadistically watch the whole project unravel in front of me; other times it’s like a fifteen-year-old pair of heavily used underpants - boring, stinky, and usually not worth my time examining.

Point is, it’s time to do some laundry. And I’m starting out by not reviewing something this week that’s terrible. No, thank you. The Boy and the Beast left me in way too good of a mood for me to squelch it less than a week later watching something I despise. So now the question is, what do I review this week? Well, looking back to my previous laps around this track, most of my chasers have been something along the lines of “dark, gritty reboot of a franchise way past its time.”

Easy solution: let’s not do that.

This week, we’re looking at a slice-of-life comedy from last summer with a moniker that sounds suspiciously like another slice-of-life comedy from last summer you were probably watching instead of this one. Yep, here we go again, with KonoSuba totally steamrolling almost every other comedy show unfortunate to occupy the same season as it. And today’s victim goes by the shorthand name Konobi, known in its long form as Kono Bijutsubu ni wa Mondai ga Aru!, or as I’ll be referring to it from now on, This Art Club Has a Problem!

Feel is at the helm for this series, and if you’re familiar with them, it was probably for My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU TOO, and some in-between animation for Honey and Clover and GitS: Stand Alone Complex. Yeah, Trigger these guys are not, but they have an okay track record, especially in the middle/high school comedy/drama department, so I was reservedly confident I’d get a decent product with Art Club.

And that I did. With a few major caveats admittedly, but Art Club made me laugh quite a bit and if a comedy show manages that, then it’s done its job in my opinion.

The art club in question has four major characters, all with their unique aesthetic tastes and motivations for joining in on the fun. Our principal member is Mizuki Usami (Ari Ozawa, Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun, Monster Musume, and Bastard Magical Instructor from this season), an enthusiastic, passionate member of the club, and the only one who seems to be taking it the least bit seriously. Her comrade, Subaru Uchimaki (Yusuke Kobayashi, who appropriately enough also voiced the main character of Re:Zero), is a very skilled artist who specializes in drawing only 2D waifus and literally nothing else.

I wouldn’t be shocked if this show’s art director just had a few ecchi drawings lying around he wanted to show off.

The other two members are Colette (Sumire Uesaka, Girls und Panzer, Nobunagun, and Overlord), a first-year, technically not a transfer student but close enough to where she may as well be one, and the club president (Kentarou Tone, Osomatsu-san and March Comes in Like a Lion), who is the least motivated member out of everyone and spends most of his screentime on the club sofa.

The first item in the queue for these shows is almost always the comedy quality (the “colity,” if you will), and Art Club, like I mentioned previously, has its moments. Each episode is chopped up into two or three segments a la Sakamoto desu ga? or Daily Lives, with each segment having its own mini-arc with the main cast. And…I kinda have mixed feelings about this structure on the whole. The primary issue I have is that Art Club might be spreading itself a little thin with its settings, and consequently it doesn’t seem all that aware when it hits something good.

When Art Club is actually in the club room and everyone is drawing and having fun with their art, I feel like those are the sequences where this show really stands out, and those are the segments that really had me laughing. The first part of Episode 2 is arguably one of the best segments in this series, where the president and Subaru need to cover up their ruining of Mizuki’s art competition project. I was laughing nonstop during that entire sketch (forgive the pun). It was creative, it was using its premise to its fullest extent, and I really wish the series stuck with it all the way through.

What it’ll do instead, rather frequently, is drag us outside of the room on mostly uninteresting and tonally strange detours with the main cast, and that’s when things start to go wrong for Art Club. I had a similar gripe with Gabriel Dropout not doing all that much with its premise, but it made up for it by maintaining its pace and varying locations enough to where the characters always have something new and exciting to do. Art Club, meanwhile, will sometimes entirely forget that it’s a comedy show, and instead devotes time to Mizuki’s one-way crush on Subaru. When the show uses it as a comedic vehicle, as it’s aware enough to consistently do, it works. But when it actually tries developing the relationship in a grounded, dramatic manner that contradicts the tone the other 50% of the show is trying to set, you can feel the gears grind to a halt as the audience impatiently waits to get back to its comedy show.

At best the show will make you feel apathetic, and at worst it gets straight down uncomfortable. While I think the first part of Episode 2 is definitely the series high point, it’s slightly ruined by a segment where Subaru is portrayed, rather straight-facedly, as a legitimate pedophile, even though nothing later in the show goes to reinforce or tie off or kill that thread where it stands. It’s just…there, as an incredibly creepy and not all that funny way to tie off an episode.

There’s something forced about the show’s bits whenever it ventures outside of the club room, and that’s where the show will probably lose its audience. It needed to focus more on its premise as opposed to letting its characters run free and do what they will. I’m not interested in a lost-and-found scavenger hunt, nor am I interested in tracking a kid side character whose single defining trait is that she’s kinda cute in the OP. I am interested in what the club is painting and what its members have to say about the works in progress.

As for the actual characters, their designs are decent if forgettable, and their personalities are good but again do nothing to make them stand out apart from their one or two quirks. And sure, you could make the argument the point of the not-comedy bits is to flesh out our cast and give them some depth, but the stilted writing and hurried “plot” development don’t really give off that idea.

The opening episode’s second sketch features Subaru coming close to completing his perfect work, at which point he plans to leave the art club. The bit has Mizuki trying to convince Subaru to stay, culminating in her (spoilers, I suppose) falling to tears as she comes close to admitting she’s crushing on him.

This is the kind of plotline that should be kept for the series finale, not for fifteen minutes after we’ve been introduced to these characters and don’t have a feel for what their relationship is like. How are we supposed to associate with these developments? Why should we care in the first place? And, probably worst of all, we know there’s eleven more episodes of this, and Subaru is one of the main characters, so it’s not hard to put two and two together and know that there are absolutely zero stakes here as far as Subaru’s departure is concerned.

He’s not going to leave one episode into the series! Why are you trying to act like he is, Art Club?

This series would have benefited grossly had they done away with all of the dramatic moments and just focused on our team of four doing their art. Art Club can be a clever, witty, intellectually amusing show when it wants to be, and I really wanted to enjoy this series more than I did. There’s a ton of lowbrow ironic humor sprinkled into the show’s dialogue, indicating hints of self-awareness at times. I already mentioned the president being the least interested in the club’s happenings, but I always smirk a little bit whenever Subaru mentions he’s only into what he calls 2D girls, even though he’s in a 2D anime himself.

But unfortunately, those seem to be the only times the show gives us any semblance that it knows what it’s doing. It feels like Art Club was trying to keep a few too many balls in the air and ended up smacking itself in the face with them. It’s good when it wants to be, and the parts that are good are nicely executed and cleverly written. Everything else, however, from the meaningless sidequests that go nowhere to the unnecessary high school drama that pads the runtime to the awkward attempts to patch those over with jokes that could potentially cross some lines with viewers, don’t have a place here.

While the show isn’t completely bad, and I’m proud to say I’ve successfully lifted my curse, it does leave me with a small sense of disappointment and lingering thoughts on what Art Club could have been if they just doubled down on the actual art clubbing.

That’s activities inside of the art club, of course. You probably shouldn’t take blunt force to a work of actual art, unless you suspect that portrait’s eyes are following you.

THE VERDICT: C
Next time: Memes