Kashimashi

Alternate Titles: Kashimashi ~Girl Meets Girl~

Original Japanese Release Date: January 1st, 2006

Episode Length/Run-time: 12 Episodes

Summary:
Hazumu confesses his love to Yasuna, a girl he has known for a long time.  Unfortunately, she rejects him and in his dejected state he goes off to be by himself and walks up to Mt. Kashimayama where an alien spaceship crashes into him, killing him.  The aliens revive him and all is well except there is one problem.  They revive him as a girl!  Thus begins Hazumu’s new, drama filled life as a girl.

Review:

Kashimashi is a weird series.  It’s basically a love triangle between three girls.  If at this point you aren’t interested, I won’t blame you.  Still, I gave this show a 2.5 because there were scenes in the show that I enjoyed, but most of my comments here won’t be all that positive.

The most annoying thing about this show is the indecisiveness of the girls involved.  I think Hazumu changes her/his mind about whether he wants Yasuna or Tomari about four times throughout the course of the series.  Tomari changes her mind a couple times as well which is equally annoying.  First she likes Hazumu, then she wants to just be friends, then she wants her again.  That is pretty much the theme for the show overall.  I suppose its the kind of drama that some people will really like, but I found it tedious.  Yasuna, on the other hand is a strange case.  She initially rejects Hazumu as a boy, but then wants him as soon as he becomes a girl.  There are some spoilerish reasons for this beyond her just being a lesbian.

The shows ending also has some Deux ex Machina type themes going on.  After working through the entirety of the show, which wasn’t my favorite, I really wasn’t too happy to see this happen.  I never want to see a thrown away ending but I feel like the director just got into some plot elements that he didn’t know how to resolve.

The series also tosses away it’s veil of being a serious drama once they introduce the aliens into the mix.  The aliens come to Earth to watch and to study Hazumu and the rest of mankind but they are just so goofy.  And of course, as well, they couldn’t resist but enlist the male alien as a teacher at Hazumu’s school.

All in all, I can see how some people might enjoy or even identify with Kashimashi but I really just didn’t think it was well executed.  The plot was clumsy, the characters were at times unbelievable and certainly annoying and the ending sloppily done.  Perhaps viewers of the female variety can get something out of this series that I just couldn’t.

[starrater]