Katte ni Kaizou: comedy really is hit and miss…

He looks cool in the opening, but in reality…

Katsu Kaizou, a second year student at Torauma High School, is a cyborg. Attacked by mysterious people and left close to death, he was turned into a cyborg by the genius scientist, Saien Suzu, which saved his life. She brought with her her underling, Tsubouchi Chitan, along with whom Kaizou continues his fight.

Or, at least, this is what he imagines.

As one might surmise from such as opening, this series, based on a manga about a decade old, is built around crazy characters. Kaizou himself; Umi, the somewhat disturbing girl responsible for the accident that caused his delusions; the weird Chitan whom Kaizou treats as his underling; Suzu, the senior who plays along for kicks; and Yamada-san, the girl who hates her first name to the extent of forgetting it…

The opening animation is kind of cool, as you might expect from SHAFT. Pity the show just doesn’t hold my interest…

As a measure of how…uninterested I was in this series, I wrote all that after reading the wikipedia summary. And that opening is taken straight from the opening lines of the anime.

I’m not entirely sure why it didn’t appeal to me – well, except for some of the last episode – that ‘love and fear are two sides of the same coin’ series of skits was actually somewhat entertaining. Perhaps it was that it was full of gag humour, especially of the rather lewd type that I don’t like. Or perhaps it was the annoying habit that SHAFT decided on, to animate two and a half stories per OVA episode. Or maybe it was just that I don’t particularly care for any of the characters, for whatever reason.

Not even this in-joke could set me off…

If I compare Katte ni Kaizou to the comedies I really like, namely Working!! and Soremachi, I think the difference is that I am rather fond of the characters in the latter two. In contrast, the former is a bit like FLCL to me: full of WTF that other people find funny for some reason, but which simply doesn’t float my boat. But some people who find this really funny probably don’t like Working!!, or Soremachi. One man’s meat really is another’s poison.

Sorry, Kaizou, I tried.