3D Kanojo Real Girl First Impressions

“Do you think even someone like me will fall in love? I don’t know what to do.”

Preconceptions can be useful when writing reviews. They allow you to get a grasp on how you will lay out your points and present your impressions ahead of time. Of course, the important thing is to ensure you don’t hold on to those impressions too rigidly when confronted with the actual product. Even in those instances where a title exceeds or falls short of expectations, that gap in the quality can be used to highlight the qualities that led to the discrepancy. I bring this up, because I feel I walked into 3D Kanojo Real Girl without a sufficient idea of what to expect. I suppose if I were to have taken a guess, I would have assumed it would be something in between the tone and presentation of Kimi ni Todoke and Toradora. However, having now seen the first episode, I’m having difficulty determining whether that expectation was accurate. In the end, all I can say with certainty is that, with a bizarre combination of comedic character tropes and strong melodrama, Real Girl is a mess, but maybe not a complete failure.

My comparison to Toradora was a bit off-the-cuff, but 3D Kanojo Real Girl actually has some humorous, if surface level, similarities with that title. Our main characters are Hikaru “Tsuttsun” Tsutsui, a blue/black haired high school student who wears his hair down over his eyes, and Iroha Igarashi, a long haired beauty who can also be flippant and blunt. Admittedly, that’s roughly where the similarities end, since Tsuttsun is an antisocial otaku and Iroha lacks Taiga’s tsundere personality. The episode kicks off with the two both arriving late to school and being assigned to clean the pool. Character-wise, I can’t say I’m a particularly big fan of either lead. Hikaru is a bit too self-pitying, though not necessarily to an unrealistic extent for a teenager, while Iroha’s devil may care attitude may put her a little close to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl category. They work for their assigned purposes, but as characters they currently feel shallow. Their interactions can feel ridiculous as well. As I alluded before, the show isn’t subtle with its drama. Hikaru stands up for Iroha at two different points in the episode and, in both instances, it turns into an uncomfortable mess. The series appears unable to balance its comedic and dramatic sensibilities, and the result is a pretty irritating tonal clash. The secondary characters fare worse, though, with most of them being blisteringly cliched stereotypes. The only other character of note in this first episode would be Hikaru’s friend, a short effeminate otaku who wears cat ears to school. That’s all that needs to be said there.

From a design standpoint, the show continues the trend of falling somewhere in between Kimi ni Todoke and Toradora. The backgrounds often have the soft pastel quality that calls to mind Kimi ni Todoke’s shoujo sensibilities, but the character designs have a crisper edge to them that more closely resembles Toradora. The OP for the series is forgettable. There is nothing great about it, but nothing grating either. Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed the ED much more. The visuals are nothing special. It’s mainly limited animation showing Hikaru attempting to catch a star for Iroha, but I actually enjoyed the music to a decent degree. Again, it’s nothing spectacular, but given I’d forgotten everything about the OP by the time I got to the end of the episode, it was a pleasant surprise. The voice acting is fine, but I did find myself moderately annoyed by Hikaru’s friend, but I suspect that has less to do with the performance, and more the combination of the design and writing for his character. In the end, Real Girl isn’t a terrible romcom, but it can’t seem to get the ‘rom’ to mesh with the ‘com,’ and it just feels a bit lackluster.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• Technically, the title for this anime can be 3D Kanojo, Real Girl or 3D Kanojo Real Girl, and I’ve seen it referred to as all three. That being said, the last one is a bit redundant.
• Apparently, both Hikaru and Iroha go by the hospital on their days off from school, but no explanation is given for either in this first episode.
• Kissing someone when they have a cold doesn’t seem romantic to me… Am I off-base here? It felt like an odd move.
• The episode did get one good laugh out of me when Iroha confronted the female bullies messing with Hikaru. It didn’t justify the presence of those one-dimensional characters, but it was amusing.
• I do find that I’m in the mood for a good romance series, but I don’t think this one is up to the task. Still, at least they don’t appear to be siblings. I’m looking at you citrus! Wait, the manga Evergreen had that plot reveal as well, didn’t it? And that was from the creator of… Man, it’s just 6-Degrees of Toradora in this article!
• During last minute editing, I did a hell of a double-take when I saw the name of the production studio. It’s Hoods Entertainment, the same studio that brought us Drifters and Märchen Mädchen! Can’t say I expected that, though I did find myself thinking back to the latter title several times when writing this.