We Never Learn First Impressions

I want to be excited for this one. This anime, We Never Learn, is based on a manga that I am very fond of and a popular if odd fixture of recent Shonen Jump. The manga has strong characters, a loose, but compelling story, and some fun light-hearted comedy. It teaches an important life lesson about not feeling constrained by just doing what your good at. It also seems to be a reasonably popular manga in Shonen Jump, a well known and respected manga magazine. Sadly, the producers who picked up this series for adaptation clearly couldn’t care less about any of that, and the results are a narratively competent, but ultimately pointless feeling adaptation of a fun slice of life idea.

The story focuses on Yuiga Nariyuki, a dirt poor high school student who is attempting to gain consideration for a prestigious all expenses paid scholarship to a university offered by his school. The principal says that he will consider Nariyuki for the honor if he can accomplish one thing: raise the test scores of math and science genius Ogata Rizu and language arts genius Furuhashi Fumino. This seems pointless to Nariyuki until he realizes both students want to attend a university based on their skills in subjects that they are weak in rather than playing to their strengths. At first, Nariyuki suggests that both students should simply play to their strengths, but after he begins to understand how both girls think and also what their clear motivations for studying what they choose to study are, Nariyuki begins putting forth the effort to help both girls pass their weakest subjects. In episode 2, the two geniuses are joined by Takemoto Uruka, a swimming athlete who struggles in literally every subject at school and can no longer rely only on a sports scholarship to get into college.

As an aspiring educator, this story’s subject matter appeals to me. A running theme throughout the series is the idea that just because you are good at something does not mean it is necessarily what you want to do, and real educators should not stifle students hopes and dreams just because there is a much easier path laid out for them. This is why Nariyuki’s pure goal of helping the two succeed is lionized while one of the teachers at their school is poorly presented as she says, “I will not be party to helping with wasted effort.” That strong thematic through line informs the development of these characters, and I do ultimately like where it goes. Now the anime that adapts this story…could use more polish.

While I am not usually a big fan of this, I almost would have preferred if We Never Learn was presented as a series of shorts. There is no real plot to the series beyond a group of students studying and improving their grades, and the rest is romantic comedy shenanigans and slapstick filler. Hence why the first two episodes have already cover the first 5-6 chapters of the manga. Also it appears that the series has decided to downplay the education and study habit elements of the story for the sake of pacing and invested more time in romantic comedy shenanigans because obviously making your show more generic always helps you stand out more in the long run. All of this would be more acceptable if the series was well animated, but that is easily its weakest aspect.

I recently got into a debate with site editor Kora about Fruits Basket (2019), which I thought was well animated, but lacking a distinctive style or identity. I feel like I may have griped about that too much when I compare that to this, because We Never Learn looks more than a little cheap and lazily animated. It isn’t terrible, but there is nothing distinctive about it outside of exploiting the high school study hall setting for some classroom visualization gags and chalk outline versions of characters. I guess that is to be expected since the studio responsible, Arvo Animation, has literally only done one OVA and second unit work on one episode of another studio’s show before being given lead animation production on this. The end result is an anime that at best looks like every other cheap anime out these days, while at worst it constantly goes off model, poorly integrates CG to save money and animation time, and tries to cover up its lazy designs with limited backgrounds. It’s honestly more than a little depressing.