Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun

Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun:  C+

はいはい、もう一同　明けまして　おめでとうございます！

Wow, I can't believe I've been doing this for almost two years now.  The time really flies.

Anyway, Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun is a shoujo series with a lot of unrealized potential.  Mizutani Shizuku is a rather uptight studybug, diligently intending to be successful, get good grades and generally be a cog in the machine.  Yoshida Haru is a boy with some fascinating and undescribed psychosocial damage.  When she's asked to take Haru, a truant, the printouts that have been building up, Shizuku unwittingly becomes friends with him, and, quickly, the object of his affection, which, much to her horror, she finds herself reciprocating.  But due to their own indiosyncracies and the general complexity of being a fifteen year old, things don't go smoothly for the couple.

The cast is solid and interesting, the situations are entertaining, and the writing is pretty decent.

But it doesn't go anywhere.  There is a modest amount of growth in characters, but nothing amazing, or even particularly noticeable.  And we end after 13 episodes with the couple still trying to find a way to make things work that makes them both happy, despite both being clear that they like each other.  It makes for a competent story, but it leaves you with a sense of unfulfillment; what have we come this far for?  What were we watching this to see?  Where's the payoff?

I'd like to be more forgiving, since the manga is still being published and so maybe the anime was just trying to remain faithful.  Maybe the series isn't about getting anywhere, maybe it's about the journey and how things bump into each other.  But the meaninglessness of it just grates at me, meaninglessness is something I really don't like in my stories.

One thing I will praise the series for is the portrayal of Haru.  He's a 15 year old boy who is kind of confused about life, but is very honest, and that comes across very well, especially around the fact that he is as horny as most fifteen year old boys are.  Though he never does anything about it, his lack of an internal censor makes him stand out to me in anime as being a teenage boy without being a pervert , a maniac or completely above his own hormones.

If you'd like to watch an interesting and clever shoujo series, Tonari is definitely pretty good shoujo.  But if you're either bored by series without action or supernatural occurrences, or if you simply can't stand empty endings that don't resolve anything, this series will drive you mad.