Review for K-On! Season 2 Part 1

Introduction

Just over a year ago, it seemed so unlikely that we would ever see more K-On! in the UK. This was the next big thing to come out of Japan. A Kyo-Ani series that had rapidly become a fan favourite, and was very quickly transcending its niche. It was doing for the anime industry what Haruhi Suzumiya did for it a few years previously, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Unfortunately that piece went to Bandai Entertainment, where it all fell apart. In an industry that had left the single volume model behind, Bandai were forced to release it in single volumes. Three episode DVDs are bad, three episode Blu-ray discs are even worse, and when those Blu-rays are saddled with lossy Dolby Digital audio of a lower bitrate than the DVDs to prevent reverse-importation, you can see why anime fans would be reluctant to purchase.


Manga Entertainment muddled through with the single volumes in 2011 leading up to 2012, but quite understandably chose not to release the show on Blu-ray. The sense was at the time that K-On! hadn’t been the success that they had hoped for. Yet here comes 2013, and not only are we getting the sequel series K-On!!, but we’ll get the K-On! movie as well. The one disappointment is that the second series won’t be available here in HD, although the movie will be. It’s all made possible by Bandai stopping distribution, and Sentai picking up the rights instead. They followed the more amenable precedent of releasing the show in half season sets, and given that K-On!! goes for the full 26 episodes as opposed to K-On!’s 14, two half-season sets are much more attractive.


That new anime niche that K-On! established has rapidly picked up fans, and similar subsequent shows. Stories and complex narrative aren’t important, cute girls doing cute inconsequential things are. It’s about evoking sympathetic feelings in male viewers who should be old enough to know better. But it sells, and it sells like hot cakes. This season’s Tamako Market is another fine example of the genre, while Chuunibyo last year actually had the temerity to meld it with a storyline, and has picked up a second season as a result. This summer, Kyo-Ani will try and do the same for a female audience, with cute boys doing cute things in the swimming anime Free. But it was K-On! that was first. With the second season K-On!! (it’s all in the exclamation marks) we’ll get to see if it’s still the best as well.


Yui Hirasawa spaced her way through elementary and middle school, but once she got to high school, her friend Nodoka convinced her to at least try some sort of extra-curricular activity, lest she become a NEET. She chose the Light Music Club, inspired by some happy memories of playing the castanets in nursery school. She wasn’t quite ready for what membership entailed. She wound up lead guitarist in a rock band, Houkago Tea Time, on bass is the seriously minded, and seriously shy and easily spooked Mio Akiyama, while Mio's best friend, the brash and outgoing Ritsu Tainaka is the drummer. On keyboards is fellow surprise recruit and warm-hearted rich kid Tsumugi Kotobuki, and in the second year of high school, they got a new recruit in Azusa Nakano, also a keen guitarist. In Season 2 of K-On!!, the girls start their final year of high school, one last year in which to hit the big time, and one final year that promises big changes for the band, not least as four of their number will graduate. Of course none of that is really as important as tea, cakes, and having fun.


The first thirteen episodes of K-On!! Season 2 are presented across two discs by Manga Entertainment thus...

Disc 1
1. Seniors!
2. Clean-up!
3. Drummer!
4. Field Trip!
5. Staying Behind!
6. Rainy Season!
7. Tea Party!

Disc 2
8. Career!
9. Finals!
10. Teacher!
11. Hot!
12. Summerfest!
13. Late Summer Postcard!

Picture

K-On!! Season 2 gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, which gets a PAL conversion courtesy of our friends in Australia, Madman Entertainment. The animation is excellent, detailed and fluid, while the show is replete with bright, sunny colours, and very pleasant character designs. This is another high-end anime production, and it shows on the screen, with some very imaginative animation, and thoughtful character study. I noticed no problems with compression or judder, and the image looks fine, even when scaled up on a high definition display. Of course Blu-ray would have been preferable, with lower compression, better detail, and richer colours, but the DVD isn’t to be sniffed at.

Sound

You have the option here of DD 2.0 Stereo English and Japanese, along with the usual translated subtitles or a signs only track. The audio is fine, the show's splendid light pop music comes across with great effect, while the dialogue is clear throughout. As usual I opted for the original language track, but from what I sampled of the English dub, it's one that follows the original pretty closely in terms of character voices, style, and mood. Having witnessed a few Sentai rush jobs in recent months, Sentai do pretty well in terms of maintaining the quality of the dub, and indeed the Bang Zoom dub cast from the first season. The subtitles are timed accurately, and are free of error, but there is some overzealous translating going on here. In one scene in episode three in the Japanese version, Yui racks her meagre English vocabulary to describe Ritsu’s situation, trying out ‘spike’ and ‘strike’ before settling on ‘slump’. Sentai’s subtitles actually translate these English words to other English words, ‘gut’, ‘mutt’ and ‘rut’.


One problem here is with episode 11, where some serious distortion sets in the Japanese audio, as if the volume is maxed out, and then dialled back, so that high frequencies are lost, and the audio in general is muffled. Fortunately this is a problem that only presents itself where there is a lot going on in the audio, such as music, and the only places this distortion is distracting are the opening and closing credits. The English audio is unaffected.

Extras

Nothing too special here, just the usual presentation of static menus (with the season 1 opening theme), jacket pictures to look at in compatible players when the disc isn’t spinning, and on disc 2 the textless credit sequences.

Well, I say textless, but that’s only true if you watch them on a PC with VLC player or something similar installed, something that will ignore UPOPs, and allow you to switch off the player forced subtitles plastered all over the image while playing back. Textless, my foot!

Sentai usually put a translated English language credit scroll at the end of each episode, as they don’t bother re-versioning the original credits anymore. With Madman Entertainment, it’s a matter of pot luck as to whether they maintain these translated credits. K-On!! is one of the unlucky ones, and no translated credits here.

Conclusion

K-On!! season 2 is not quite as good as season 1 at this point, although to be fair that would be asking a lot. Season 1 got its balance between light music and cute girls doing inconsequential cute things just about right, helped in part by a very compressed timeframe. It squeezed two years of story and character development into 12 episodes, not counting the two bonus episodes. It was so it would be believable that novice Yui would become adept at playing guitar in the space of three episodes. That fast pace also allowed for a lot more emphasis on the music, with highlights being the festivals gigs and training camps that would allow for Houkago Tea Time to perform. With season 2, we have the girls’ final year at high school, so it’s half as much narrative time, and squeezed into twice as many episodes. You could say that the story has to be diluted by a factor of four. What this means in essence for the second series is that there is a significant shift in balance. We have a lot more of the cute girls doing inconsequential cute things, and a lot less in the way of actual music.


In fact, in this first half of the second series, other than the new theme tunes, there is just one new song from Houkago Tea Time, a new version of Fudapen played as a duet by Yui and Azu, and a song from Sawa-chan’s old band, Death Devil. Otherwise it’s just little snippets of music, the odd bar or two of songs ending or starting, songs muffled in the distance, or just odd bits of jamming. Whereas in the first season, you could look forward to a new song every three episodes or so, that isn’t the case here. You can understand the creative choice as when it comes to licensing music, rights, and distribution across various territories, having songs in shows can be problematic, and the more the songs, the greater the potential minefield. Even season 1 had to have one song replaced. You can understand why there is less actual music in season 2.


It is therefore left to the cute girls doing cute inconsequential things to carry the series, and thankfully in K-On!! season 2, that works just fine. Just as in the first season, it is easy to just put a disc in, play an episode, and lose yourself in the light-hearted warmth and fluffiness. Each episode is just so much fun, so cute, and so charming, that I find that I just don’t want to criticise the show. It would be like kicking a puppy. No matter that the show is utterly contrived, with no pretence towards realism of character or story, that it’s very obviously designed to fulfil an emotional vacuum in a specific otaku audience, no matter that its sweetness is refined to the point that it will cause mental tooth-decay. I’d rather take the cavities and be done with it, rather than say a bad word against it.


The extent of the show’s drama is simply that with Yui, Mio, Ritsu and Mugi entering their final year of school, there will inevitably come a point where the band members will go their separate ways, and also junior member Azusa has to come to terms with the fact that come next year, she’ll be the only member of the Light Music Club left. The older girls deal with the impending future by just ignoring it and having as much fun together as possible, leaving just a hint of disquiet from time to time, when Azusa is reminded of the future. That is also the extent of the show’s narrative arc.


Any more drama than that, and K-On!! fans would be writing letters of complaint. The real purpose of the show, what the episodes really comprise is the cute girls doing inconsequential cute things. Each episode will have a theme, some sort of narrative to it, around which the cuteness will be constructed, and a veritable explosion of warmth and goodwill will permeate through the television screen. The first episode is devoted to the start of the new year, and a futile attempt to recruit new club members. The second episode is about spring cleaning the club room, and an unexpected windfall. Ritsu gets tired of drumming for an episode and tries other instruments out. The girls go on a school field trip to Kyoto, and in the next episode we get to see what the girls who stayed behind did.


There’s an episode set in the rainy season, where Yui gets protective of her guitar, the girls throw a tea-party for Mio’s fan club, Yui and Ritsu have trouble trying to fill in their career guidance forms, there’s an episode of revising for exams, and episode of trying to persuade Sawa-chan to reunite with her old school band, an episode during the heat of summer, an episode at a music festival...


K-On!! is about cuteness, it’s about being charmed, it’s about losing oneself in an episode for twenty minutes, getting a little vicarious endorphin rush basking in the aura of a world where only nice things happen, and people always stay the same. If you ever find yourself looking back fondly on the past, and asking just why things can’t stay the same, then K-On!! is for you. If on the other hand you want characters to grow, you want story development, and you want a touch of reality and more than a hint of drama, then what are you doing reading a K-On!! review? Personally, I can’t get enough of this stuff, and there’s no better exponent of the art of the cute and inconsequential.