Photo Kano

Madhouse Studios

Dir. Akitoshi Yokoyama (worked on lots, PK is first head director gig)

Mus. Mina Kubota (Aria franchise, Kaleido Star, A Letter to Momo)

When Kazuya Maeda received a digital single reflex lens camera from his father, he was just sure the hand-me-down would irrevocably change his life. And boy, was he right! With a fresh membership to his high school’s photography club and a newfound love for the art form, Maeda gets closer to his female classmates by taking photos of them.

Photo Kano, based on the PlayStation Portable dating sim of the same name, gives us one of those is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-harem-show shows in the vein of Amagami SS that manages to do some things right without stepping into too many narrative potholes along the way. Our hero, Maeda, spends each of the series’s 13 episodes with a different girl, developing their individual relationships from ground zero to a full-blown mutual confession of love within the half-hour run time. The constant rotation of characters and the breakneck progression of each relationship manages to keep things interesting. I can’t say I ever got bored, which surprises the hell out of me.

Narratively, I have a few bones to pick. The show certainly implies that this story takes place mostly over the course of one school year, but the lack of perceivable time passage like the changing of seasons makes me assume that the entire show takes place over just the first semester or so. Keeping this in mind, the fact that Maeda dates almost 10 girls in this time implies some things about the character that I don’t think the show intends to say. He acts likes a playboy, but he doesn’t “act” like a playboy if you know what I mean. The girls don’t ever acknowledge that he has been courting all of them simultaneously or at least back-to-back — again, the show isn’t clear on the timeline. We learn through some dialogue that he dates one of the characters for three months, so I don’t fucking know.

The same inconsistency issue goes for his decision to join the photography club as apposed to the rival photo club. While the photo club is dedicated to beautiful landscape photography, the club of Maeda’s choice shamelessly pursues surreptitiously acquired risqué photos of female classmates. But despite this, the show never paints Maeda as a creep — just a nice guy cypher for its target demo.

Photo Kano says some fairly despicable things about female body image issues and relationships in general, including but not limited to a female character swearing to change so a male character will like them better. I took issue with an episode where Maeda blackmails a girl into letting him take some photos of her in a bathing suit, but he ended up getting blackmailed with some of his misplaced porno mags later in the series so I think it more or less balanced itself out.

The audience knows the character has a little sister from very early in the series, but as the season draws to a close, you realize that you haven’t seen his adorable sibling in quite a while. Now, the weathered cynic like me knows that when you get into something like this, you have to be ready for some kind of disgusting incest storyline clearly written by and for someone with no siblings. Watching episode 12 of 13, I was naively hopeful that I had dodged a sister-kissing bullet with Photo Kano. I was wrong. Episode 13 not only goes to the all the trouble of justifying the taboo with an awkward she’s-actually-his-stepsister-flashback, but it firmly cements Maeda’s sibling as his final choice for a girlfriend or sexual parter or whatever humans do with each other.

It isn’t a bad looking show. I guess it can’t be when its core offering as a piece of entertainment art is aesthetically pleasing girls. That said, it doesn’t have to worry about animating complex action sequences. The character designs are certainly attractive, but they save a corner of the budget for some CGI flourishes that aren’t quite out-of-place enough to make me physically ill. The effects shots in question occur whenever Maeda is taking photos of one of his girlfriends. Maeda sees the perfect shot and breathlessly gasps, “Shutter Chance!” The camera then pans around the now three-dimensionally rendered anime girl moving in slow-motion. Without ever playing the game that provided the source material or doing any kind of time-consuming research, I could almost guarantee this “Shutter Chance” thing was lifted right out of the PSP game. I’m going to go ahead and give a blanket recommendation of this show to all the fans of the game based on that alone.

My favorite thing about the show was the music. It was mostly pretty generic. At it’s worst you could call it a bit Animal Crossing-y, but at it’s best it was occasionally really great and reminded me of some of the electronic elements found in the Final Fantasy X and XIII soundtracks and the music of Owl City.

It’s no surprise that this isn’t my kind of show, but when it’s all said and done what the show attempts to do it manages to do pretty well.

2.5 beach episodes out of 5.

[starrater]