The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Murai in Love

Murai is an unassuming high school boy who confesses his love for the teacher Tanaka, a woman who is a fan of otome games for girls. When Tanaka curtly refuses Murai's advances, Murai returns the next day a changed man: new hair, new style, all emulating Tanaka's favorite character from an otome game. Now Murai sets out on his quest to be Tanaka's dream man.

Murai in Love is based on the manga series by Junta Shima. The anime series is streaming on Hulu/Disney+ on Wednesdays.

*takes a deep breath*

Let's get all the standard stuff out of the way. Teacher/student romance is inherently unethical in real life, but fiction is fiction. It also makes me personally uncomfortable, which inevitably affects how I respond to it. Comedy is subjective and cultural. It requires suspension of disbelief that a human could look like an otome game character, though I suppose in-world otome games could be less abstracted. Blah blah blah, et cetera, et cetera. Got it? Good.

Now that we've gotten all that out of the way, we can talk about my biggest issue with Murai in Love: that it is piss ugly. It has the same sort of motion comics-style animation that rendered the anime of Way of the Househusband unwatchable. The frame will be almost completely static other than the characters moving their mouths; otherwise, their whole bodies move at once, holding a static pose while they tumble through space like a paper cutout. Except, if they were actually paper cutouts, it would be a lot more impressive because then it would be something like stop-motion, or the famed popsicle-stick episode of His and Her Circumstances. I took a quick glance at some manga pages, and frankly, Junta Shima does a better job conveying motion through still images than the animation team does with actual motion.

The insistence on the most limited animation possible robs the show of much of its comic potential. Without any character acting, the blank-faced, deadpan Murai is a comedy black hole. In a presumed attempt at creating comedy through incongruity, Tanaka is constantly screaming on the inside about how much he looks like Hitose. I have chosen to leave my discomfort with the premise at the door as much as I can, but I get the impression that it's supposed to be funny that Tanaka, a member of the supposedly respectable professional class of teachers, is a total otaku in her off time. But guess what! Most teachers, even if they're not huge nerds like the three of us who work on preview guide, are weirdos. But it's not relatable enough to feel like it's funny because it's true.

The episode picked up a bit at the end with the introduction of the Nishifuji twins, a cosplayer and a fan artist who are both super into Murai. They bring some energy beyond just internal screaming and, along with it, the first gags that made me chuckle.

Maybe I'm in a bad mood. That's always possible; things have been rough lately. But it's also possible that Murai in Love just isn't my style of comedy, which is an even bigger possibility because I have to admit that I found this episode unrelentingly obnoxious. That largely comes down to the visual style – presentation and animation are choppy and cheap-feeling, while the animation is downright ugly. Ugly can absolutely work, but I don't think it does here, largely because a chunk of the premise is the fact that Murai remakes his image to look like his teacher Tanaka's favorite otome game character. (Or he just remakes his image to be the opposite of what she said she hates, which is long, black hair. The fact that he looks like her fave is completely accidental.) I don't know how many otome games you've played, but “ugly” isn't typically part of the job description for the characters, unless it's a deliberate spoof on the genre…and even then, the pigeons or the KFC colonel or whomever still err on the side of hot.

So that's part of the problem. The rest of it comes from the obnoxious characters and storyline. There's no reason given as to why Murai is in love with Tanaka, and the rapidity with which she crumbles in the face of his new look is a touch off-putting. I'll admit to being no fan of student/teacher romances, but I can appreciate the fantasy when it's done well in one way or another, serious or comedic, and this just doesn't work on either front. (Granted, it's not trying for serious. At all.) It doesn't help that Tanaka spends much of her time shrieking, a vocal style I tend to dislike. I found the pieces of the episode that dealt with Murai's classmates to be much more entertaining, possibly because, like them, I wasn't sure what Murai's crush was all about.

I think this could work for you if you like deliberately zany comedies that move at a quick, disjointed pace. I doubt the visuals will win anyone over, but there are some moments that could foretell a smoother style of weirdness as the series finds its footing. But it didn't work for me, no matter how much I appreciated Tanaka talking with the figment of her crush and Murai at the same time.

Okay, as I write this, I only just finished dogging on another recent premiere for being so hard to watch on account of looking like garbage, but Murai in Love is the exception that proves the rule, in that it genuinely does have such shockingly incompetent and embarrassing visuals that it ends up circling back around into giving the show a unique sense of…I mean, I don't think I could say it has “style” without instantly and permanently losing my Anime Critic License, but it has something. Whether or not that “Something” makes Murai in Love worth watching is a matter of personal taste, to say the least.

A bit of cursory Googling tells me that Junta Shima's original manga doesn't look like this, either, which has me suspect that the Murai in Love anime is the result of an underfunded and understaffed crew who realized that there was no way to ever make their show look any good, and so instead decided to make their show look audaciously terrible. It doesn't approach standard-bearers of shit-post brilliance like Pop Team Epic, mind you, but c'mon. They had to have done this on purpose. Just…just look at it! I refuse to believe that Murai in Love could see the light of day in this form by accident.

And you know what? When you combine the show's memorably terrible visuals with a genuinely charming and energetic performance by Yōko Hikasa as our leading disaster of a main character, you have a comedy that is damn near funny, at times. That it never quite managed to make me laugh or even crack a smile is, uh, not a great sign, but…dammit, I just can't bring myself to hate something that is so earnestly pathetic, you know? Could I ever recommend it to any normal human being without immediately being called out as a weirdo with terrible taste? No, of course not. But for once, the weird “age-gap romance with a teacher!” thing isn't the main problem I have to contend with, because it's impossible to be offended by the romantic misadventures of a couple of barely animated Post-it Notes masquerading as people. Thank God for small favors, eh?