Review for Mayo Chiki! Complete Collection

Introduction

I remember being excited about the advent of Mayo Chiki! in the UK, but for the life of me I can’t remember why. I know that it was one of the first titles that MVM announced last year, once they resumed licensing anime in quantity after a brief dry spell, but it was also one of those titles that get held up due to pesky delays. The pesky delay in this case was the initial assumption that Mayo Chiki! would have an English dub. That turned out to be a false assumption, and waiting to see if Sentai in the US would eventually dub it pushed its release back by about 6 months. It has now travelled the usual path to get here, US release, followed by Australian release and PAL conversion courtesy of Madman Entertainment, and eventually this UK release that I am reviewing now. Just to reiterate, there is no English dub to this release, and I think it might be the first subtitle only release from MVM since the Urusei Yatsura movies. Seeing the way the anime industry is going, it won’t be the last.


Many reasons are posited for Japan’s falling birth rate, but it could it be as simple as gynophobia. Kinjiro Sakamachi certainly has it, an intense fear of women. Coming from a family of strong women it might be understandable. His mother is a champion wrestler, who practiced her moves on her son when he was growing up. His younger sister Kureha has taken up the baton, believing that wrestling skills are essential for her school’s arts and crafts club, and consequently the proximity of females causes Jiro to panic, and to actually be touched by one causes a reflexive nosebleed. You’d expect someone such as Jiro to have a long, lonely and distant life, free of any women...


Except he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in school, and discovered Subaru Konoe’s secret, butler to Kanade Suzutsuki. Kanade Suzutsuki is the rich daughter of the school’s director, and Subaru Konoe is the oddity of a butler serving her in all aspects of life, including school. Naturally such an elegant young boy is the object of affection for most of the school’s female student body. Only Jiro has learned that Subaru isn’t a boy at all, he is a she, the only child of a long line of butlers serving Kanade’s family, and she’s determined to continue the family tradition, despite her gender. So now Jiro has to keep her secret in school, and in return Kanade promises to cure Jiro’s gynophobia. One problem is that Kanade is a full on sadist. The other problem is that through necessity, Jiro is spending more and more time with the butler Subaru, and people are beginning to get the wrong idea about them.


All thirteen episodes of Mayo Chiki! are presented across two discs by MVM.

Disc 1
1. End of the Earth
2. I’ve Fallen in Love!
3. On a Bed, Of Course
4. Don’t Stare at Me So Much
5. Go Out With Me
6. Let’s Start A War
7. Let’s Elope

Disc 2
8. It’s My First Time
9. I’m Going To Go On A Trip
10. Thank You For The Food
11. Nyu!
12. The Indecisive Butler, & I, The Chicken
13. Please Massage Them!

Picture

Mayo Chiki! gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer on these dual layer discs from MVM. The series was localised for the English market by Sentai Filmworks in the US, and these PAL discs were subsequently created by Australia’s Madman Entertainment, so naturally there is a 4% speed up to the show. The image is clear and sharp throughout, with bold colours, and absent any significant signs of compression. It’s a very pleasant transfer of a fairly well-animated show. It’s energetic and fluid for most of the action sequences, but some of the more static talking sequences do get a little freeze-framey at times. The backgrounds are colourful and detailed while the characters stay on model, and take a page from the current KyoAni style in terms of cuteness.

Sound

Mayo Chiki! gets a DD 2.0 Japanese track, with optional English subtitles. There is no dub for this release, and it’s a head-scratcher as to why. The show certainly is good enough, and more importantly mainstream enough to warrant a dub, and it surely can’t be the roadblock of the ‘chicken’ wordplay only working with Japanese naming conventions and not Western. Jiro is scared of women. In Japanese convention where surnames come first, his name is Sakamachi Kinjiro. That is Sakama-chi Kin-Jiro. Sakama Chicken Jiro. That is harder to get to work with Western convention, but it isn’t impossible. The Japanese track itself is without any major issue, clear and audible throughout, with a nice bit of stereo separation to proceedings. Action sequences have the necessary impact, and the show’s music is pleasant, drives the pace of the story well, without really being memorable. I only noticed pitch correction around the end of episode 9, otherwise it is pretty discreet. Disc 1’s layer change could be a beat earlier though.


The subtitles are in a small, thin yellow font which isn’t the best for smaller television sizes, but will be fine on modern flat panel displays. There is the odd typo, and sourced no doubt from Sentai and the land of WWE, it’s weird to see a wrestling move wrongly interpreted, Boston Club instead of Boston Crab.

Extras

Mayo Chiki!’s episodes are presented on two discs with static menus, and jacket pictures to look at when the discs are at rest in compatible players.

The only extras are on disc 2, and amount to the textless credits and trailers for Rosario and Vampire, Ga-Rei Zero, and Majikoi Oh! Samurai Girls.

Conclusion

I laughed! No seriously, that’s a big deal for me. I very rarely laugh at comedies anymore. I’m more for the smirk, the snort, or when the situation warrants it, the appreciative chuckle. It’s made all the worse when I have to review a comedy, as I have pen and pad at hand, and I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for technical issues on the disc, as well as actually watching the show. But Mayo Chiki! actually had me forgetting all that, it pulled me into the story, got me engrossed in the characters, and it actually elicited some belly laughs from me, some downright guffawing ensued. The past few months have been surprisingly kind when it comes to anime comedies, and after a dearth of funny stuff we have been treated to shows like The World God Only Knows and Baka & Test. Add Mayo Chiki! to the list, as it too hits all the right notes in getting the viewer to laugh. Add to that, it is a rare ecchi comedy, a little bit of naughtiness and sauciness to titillate without crossing the line into downright raunchiness. We’re talking Love Hina territory here, actually it’s what you’d get if you crossed Love Hina with Hayate the Combat Butler, and it’s great stuff.


In many ways it is a conventional harem comedy, and all harem comedies require a hapless, undeserving and pummel-zone teen male. In Kinjiro Sakamachi, you have the epitome of the archetype, having grown up literally as a punch-bag to the women in his family, his pro-wrestling mother, and his kid sister who would like to follow in their mother’s footsteps. The traditional male lead weakness around women is amplified to such a degree that it manifests as a phobia for Jiro, and unlike the traditional nosebleeds that you see in such anime, his are more a Pavlovian response, a pre-emptive haemorrhage before his tormentors can get their kicks in. That other girls mistake it for arousal and assume he’s a pervert is no fault of his own.


His isolation from the fairer sex ends when he discovers Subaru Konoe’s secret. Subaru is butler to Kanade Suzutsuki, the daughter of the school director, and serves her as such, even during school hours. But the truth is that Subaru is actually a girl, and Jiro finds this out in the worst way possible. When he regains consciousness in the school infirmary, chained to the bed, next to Kanade, it isn’t the start to a Saw movie, but it’s almost as bad. Kanade is a sadist, but she also wants Subaru to remain her butler. The deal with her father is that it is only possible as long as Subaru keeps her identity a secret. In exchange for continuing the pretence, Kanade offers to cure Jiro of his gynophobia, and given how playfully sadistic she is, it isn’t long before events become more complicated, not helped by Subaru spending more time with Jiro to ensure that he doesn’t blab.


Most of the girls in the school have a butler fetish, and now that Subaru’s spending more time with Jiro, their antagonism towards him intensifies. If that isn’t bad enough, avoiding girls may have raised suspicions before, but being glued at the hip to Subaru for most of the time simply confirms to his friends that Jiro is gay. Of course this being something of a harem set-up it isn’t long before more girls join in the action. With Subaru spending more time with Jiro, it isn’t long before Jiro’s sister Kureha falls in love with the elegant butler. Then as one of Kanade’s desensitisation exercises, Jiro and Subaru going on a date together, a loner student named Usami Masamune witnesses Subaru in a dress, and gets the wrong end of the stick, namely that Jiro is forcing the butler to cross-dress as a girl, and she uses that as blackmail material to get Jiro to go on a date with her as well.


Then there’s Nakuru Narumi, one of the butler fanatics from school, but from a faction that actually approves of Jiro’s ‘relationship’ with Subaru, only she goes so far as to use it as inspiration for her own boys’ love fan-fic. And so the mayhem continues, with Kanade coming up with more and more humiliating ways to cure Jiro, usually using Subaru. He has to prevent Subaru’s secret being revealed during the school’s annual medicals, Subaru gets thrown out of the mansion and becomes Jiro’s butler instead, they have a cross-dressing cafe for the school festival, they go to the beach where Subaru’s cousin ‘Punyuru’ makes an appearance, they all get work in a maid cafe, Kanade gets hiccups that make her cute, it’s all silly and entertaining fun.


All through the series, Jiro’s relationship with Subaru develops, as he begins to overcome his phobia, despite Kanade’s cures, and slowly Subaru’s affection for him grows as well. Things get ever so slightly serious for the conclusion of the story, as they should in a show like this, all of which boils down to Jiro reaffirming his feelings for Subaru, and moving things on a notch; not enough to end the story, but just enough for the viewer to get a sense of satisfaction and hope that the creators get around to making another series.


Mayo Chiki! isn’t perfect. It is hampered a little by its shorter run, and one or two characters that you might have suspected to play a bigger part quickly fade into the background. Jiro’s friend Kurose is quickly forgotten after the first episode, only to occasionally pop up again from time to time. The same goes for the rest of the mansion staff, other than Subaru’s father. They get enough of an introduction to imply that they have roles in the story, but those roles never really materialise. Of the main characters, Kureha is fun, voiced by Kana Hanazawa’s distinctive lilt, a sweet cute psychopath of a girl, who looks forward to school trips to the mountain so that she can go and wrestle a bear. Usami too gets some nice development as the series progresses, and she makes a nice alternate foil to Jiro, when Kanade is taking a break from being sadistic. It’s Nakuru Narumi that loses out in the character development stakes, and her busty, cat-ear wearing presence is never really fleshed out until the bonus episode tacked onto the main twelve episode run.


Also, despite its short run, and potential wealth of comedy material, there is a sense that the show is running out of steam by the end. Certainly while the drama and main storyline picks up for the conclusion, the sharpness of the humour is beginning to tail off just a tad, while the Thank You For The Food episode, pulls away from the Subaru Jiro relationship altogether to look at Kureha for an episode. It’s her birthday and everyone has something planned for her. It’s a fun, inconsequential and fleeting episode and it’s pretty much textbook definition of filler.


I could continue to nitpick, but when it comes down to it, Mayo Chiki! is funny. It’s not intellectually funny, it’s not the sort of funny where you recognise the wit and contemplate its humour, rather it is kneejerk, funny-bone tickling funny, the best kind. It makes you laugh before you even realise it. Don’t let the absence of a dub put you off, you’ll kick yourself if you miss out on its ribald sauciness, a genre of anime comedy that has been undersubscribed these past few years.