Recently, I’ve been watching Hibike! Euphonium, which is a brilliant show, by the way. It’s sort of cute girls doing cute things: not quite K-On, but more like Hanayamata, where there’s some drama going on. (Plus, there are boys, ugh.) Unlike Hanayamata, Hibike! Euphonium is amazingly well written, so it works on every level and I don’t even mind that there are boys (ugh) besmirching the screen by appearing alongside the cute girls.
Since Wakaba＊Girl’s episodes are only ten minutes long, I decided to check one out before I went on to my nightly dose of Hibike! Euphonium, since I was curious where it fit into the great picture of cute girls doing cute things. (Not that you could fit all those cute girls into a single picture, no matter how great it was.)
Since it wasn’t so bad after all, I decided to check out another.
There’s nothing groundbreaking about this series. It’s not going to displace Yuru Yuri from the big three any time soon. But it certainly doesn’t deserve all the hatred it’s getting in the reviews. It does what it sets out to do: it’s very cute, and fun, and lighthearted, and the episodes are only ten minutes long, so the stories have a certain efficiency to them, like a yon-koma manga. The show is based on a yon-koma manga, like all the best cute girls doing cute things. (Well, Yuru Yuri was a multi-koma. It needed to be; its sense of comedic timing was too far outside the four-panel paradigm.)
To be more precise, it’s based on a yon-koma manga by Yui Hara, author of Kiniro Mosaic. It’s not really fair to say so after two episodes, but so far, I like Wakaba＊Girl better than KinMoza. The main character, Wakaba, is a lot more fun and dynamic than the KinMoza characters were, and that alongside the short runtime that allows for more focused stories makes the series more enjoyable than the sometimes sluggish KinMoza. Wakaba isn’t exactly a unique character; she actually reminds me a lot of K-On’s Mugi, with a dash of Yui. She’s an energetic, upper-class ojousama, childishly naive, and bursting with enthusiasm for everyday events. She’s been waiting forever to get into high school so she could have all the great experiences she heard about, and eagerly joins a group of friends with the three girls sitting near her. (Wakaba must have been watching cute girls doing cute things shows, thinking that was what high school was like. She’s lucky that she lives in the world of a cute girls doing cute things show, where that is what high school is like.)
The other three girls haven’t done much so far. We have Moeko, a small and cute girl with big, fluffy orange hair. We have Mao, the crazy and somewhat masculine one, and Nao, who apparently used to be a sports girl but now loves BL (according the blurb). Even though they’ve just been supporting players to Wakaba so far, their little bits of back and forth have been fun enough that I don’t think they’ll have trouble carrying their weight.
The art has the same feel as Lucky Star; the characters are puni-puni and cute, and the backgrounds have a simplistic, pastel, picture book feel to them. The buildings and room furnishings, though they fit in with the overall feel, are drawn with a fair amount of detail. The overall effect is soft without being too simple, and cute while still somewhat realistic. (Contrast with Panyo Panyo Digi Carat, which goes for soft, cute, and picture book at the cost of realism, and K-On, which looks quite realistic.)
So, no, Wakaba＊Girl is not so bad. It’s not revolutionary, but so far it’s solid and very cute. It’s a humble series with few ambitions, and it achieves what it sets out to do. If you can’t stand that, don’t watch it, but it doesn’t deserve to be hated
I've watched most of the series at this point. I still feel it's pretty good. The characters are fun, the jokes work, the art is very cute, and the short runtime means each episode leaves on a high note. The one complaint I have is Moeko's voice. It sounds like Elmo. It's kind of annoying, and believe me, I have an extremely high tolerance for high-pitched anime girl voices.
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