Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches

Episode 2

Dumb comedy is easy thing to find, whether you're looking at anime or just about any other medium. Every once in a while though, it's possible to come across a much rarer breed: a clever comedy that plays dumb. Their setups often sound the same, and they typically pursue the same kind of broad humor, but they somehow manage to make it all work better than most of the competition. After two episodes, it's starting to look like Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches might be one of the good ones.

With the Supernatural Studies Club up and running, it briefly looks as though Yamada and Shiraishi will have an easier time switching bodies on school grounds. Their only problem is that the club immediately gains a new member who's actually interested in studying the supernatural. When the new girl inevitably walks in on a kissing scene, she quite reasonably assumes that the club is completely bogus and sets out to expose their secret. Yamada switches bodies with her in an attempt to clear things up, but he ends up opening the door to a fresh set of problems in the process.

Much like in the first episode, the series seems to be in a hurry to work through its less original material. There's a routine early on where Ito keeps walking into the room right as Yamada and Shiraishi are about to kiss, and the show sprints through it instead of dragging the joke out. The pace calms down more once Ito starts telling anyone who will listen that Yamada and Shiraishi are an item. Yamada's reaction to the situation is a bit unexpected; rather than flipping out over someone spreading rumors about him, his concern seems to be that Shiraishi's reputation will suffer from being associated with him. For a guy who's supposedly the dumb delinquent of the series, Yamada seems genuinely invested in doing right by the people around him. Well, either that or he just has a crush on Shiraishi.

There also ends up being more to Ito than initially meets the eye. The girl's got problems of her own, and her habit of lying in search of attention gets a more thoughtful treatment than most comedies would bother to give it. Rather than dismissing her as a dumb girl doing dumb girl stuff, the other characters seem to understand where she's coming from. With the possible exception of Miyamura, everyone in the Supernatural Studies Club has some amount of trouble fitting in, and Yamada in particular seems eager to give Ito a place to belong. It's not unusual for an anime comedy to gather a group of misfits into a school club, but there's an atmosphere of mutual understanding in this series that I find very refreshing.

Of course, it helps that this episode is also fun to watch. The body-switching continues to be entertaining, and I like how it's not played up as some kind of cure-all. Yamada seems to do himself more harm than good every time he tries to take advantage of his power, and the secondhand images of Ito practicing action poses in Yamada's body are a riot. The voice acting continues to keep up reasonably well with all the character changes, and some of the results are very funny. Call me a sucker for comedic gimmicks, but I can't help but laugh at the idea of the voice actors having to play other characters doing a lousy job of imitating their actual characters while in their bodies. The novelty may wear out eventually, but it's working like a charm for now.

Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches may be a dumb comedy at heart, but it has the brain of a much smarter series. Putting extra thought and care into the characters may not make the jokes funnier, but it gives the show a stronger foundation to stand on if the humor ever falls flat. In a season that contains more than a few solid romantic comedies, this one looks perfectly capable of holding its own.

Rating: B+

Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Paul Jensen is a freelance writer and editor. You can follow more of his anime-related ramblings on Twitter.