corkboard

I didn't think anything could be worse than the Nozoki Ana anime adaptation. It turns out, I was right. This spin-off story succeeds precisely to the extent that it never tries to take seriously its source material.  The characters are deliberately shallow, the story is transported into the familiar (cliched) world of clumsy, sexually naive high school students, and the blackmail/exhibition that are the central feature of the manga are glimpsed at the start of each episode but then basically disappear.

That's not to say this is a good anime. It's not.  But it is digestible at only three episodes, and it never aspires to be more than it is.  Which is bubblegum fare.  By the final episode, I could even see past all the comical breast sound effects and the caricatured art to actually care what happened in the melodramatic climax.

If you're stuck sick at home (like I was) or just can't be bothered to watch something that will force you to engage too deeply, you won't hate yourself for watching through this. At least not for too long.