Watching 'Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War'

Kaguya-Sama: Love is War is the 2019 anime adaptation of the currently ongoing manga of the same name. The manga started its run in Young Jump in 2015, and is written and illustrated by Aka Akasaka. The anime was produced by A-1 Pictures, the studio behind Sword Art Online, Erased, and Blue Exorcist to name a few of their works. The series was directed by Shinichi Omata, who also directed Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu. Kaguya-Sama: Love is War ran for twelve episodes in the winter season of anime in 2019.

The concept of the anime is quite simple, both the president and the vice-president of the student council both have feelings for each other. However, due to their perceptions on relationship power dynamics, they try to get the other to confess their love to them, rather than confessing themselves. While there is an overarching narrative, it serves little to no purpose at all when considering the show as a whole. Instead each episode is a collection of either two or three sketches.

This is an incredibly colourful anime, and the moments when the colours are muted, or in monochrome are used effectively to get the desired message across. As a result of the anime being restricted to a few indoor locations, and even fewer outdoor locations, the environment has a fair amount of detail to them. In addition there are often only four recurring characters throughout the show as opposed to a large cast of characters, as is often usually the case when it comes to an anime. Each character has his or her own unique design, which helps them all stand out from each other, and are all incredibly expressive when they need to be.

While the original music is not something that would be memorable beyond the anime, the opening is stellar, mixing a catchy song with impressive visuals to create a fantastic sequence, which I ended up watching every week. The highlight of the openings, and the endings came in episode three of the show when the studio animated an entire dance segment for Fujiwara, as she sings the ending in one continuous unbroken shot, which was quite impressive to watch.

While there is a fair amount of character development involved where, as the show carries on, we learn more and more about them, and the lives that they lead, there is little to no character progression. The characters do not learn anything, they do not grow, in fact they end the show in the exact same place where they started, both literally and figuratively.

The greatest detriment to the show is the fact that they blast through sketches at a rapid pace. Ordinarily this would be a positive as it would help the narrative move along smoothly, however as a result of the lack of progression of the characters, the humor that is used, while incredibly effective at the start, becomes less so with each progressive episode, as more and more of the jokes land flat, and you start to accumulate a sense of annoyance as the characters are still not getting anywhere meaningful in their relationships.

Kaguya-Sama starts off with a bang that elicited some of the biggest laughs I have had with an anime in a while, only to teeter off towards the end with a quiet whimper, as opposed to the bang that they started with. This is not only the case with the narrative, characters, and the humor, but also with the visuals. The start of the show had some impressive visuals that utilized the animation medium to the utmost, and by the end it felt as if that visual identity had been lost along the way.

Kaguya-Sama went from the anime that I was most looking forward to in the week to the one I was least looking forward to by the end of the series run. Despite the fact that it has a strong first half with a lot of comedy, this is one I cannot recommend you to watch and finish. The most I can recommend of the show is watching it from episodes one to four, as the rest of the series does not compare. The show is available to watch on Crunchyroll.