School Rumble Review (Anime)

School Rumble is a 54 episode anime series centered around unrequited love.  All of the characters love someone else, but that person is oblivious to this fact.  This leads to lots of weird scenarios where the characters try to show their love only to fail miserably, as well as lots of misunderstandings and love triangles and other goofy stuff.  It is a surprisingly realistic look at high school social life, and is one of the funnier and crazier anime series on the market currently.


Yes, this is a romantic comedy.  The title "School Rumble" makes you think it is about fighting or something.  It's not.  It is about cute girls and horndog boys chasing each other.  And it is surprisingly awesome.

The main characters are a short, dim-witted, goofy girl named Tenma Tsukamoto and a rough, tough, scary punk named Kenji Harima.  Harima loves Tenma, but Tenma loves a boy named Oji Karasuma.  The whole series focuses on Harmia chasing Tenma, Tenma chasing Karasuma, and all of the rest of the people in their class kind of getting caught in the crossfire which leads to their own little love stories.

My problems are like this - Tenma kind of sucks.  Other than having little pigtails that twitch when she's excited (which is seriously the cutest/hottest thing ever), she's unremarkable.  She's dumb as hell, her friends and her sister are all prettier, and she just isn't interesting.  This is compounded by the fact that her love interest, Karasuma, has zero personality at all and is completely lame.  It is hard to give a shit about that half of the story because those characters are so stupid.

What saves the story and overall show, however, are Harima and Tenma's sister Yakumo.  Harima is a bad ass with a heart of gold.  You want him to succeed.  Over the course of the series other girls show interest in him, but he only has eyes for Tenma.  It is kind of sad, really.  Because Tenma's sister, Yakumo, is 1000% better than Tenma in every way (pretty, smart, more mature despite being younger, etc.) and is crazy about Harima by the end.  But he's oblivious. 

The show is filled with scenarios like that.  Characters that would be perfect together never quite get there.  That is part of what makes the show fun and funny and interesting to watch, though.  The characters are frustrated.  The viewers are frustrated.  But it is always done in such a way that it is always funny and always realistic and believable. 

The show is also noteworthy due to a nice, clean art style and some catchy and memorable music.  The voice acting is great in English, as well.  One important note is that there are often times story-important scenes before the title sequence or after credits but before the "Next Episode" stuff, so you can't really skip through these sections of the DVD like you normally do with anime.  It isn't consistent, either, as pretty much every episode has these extra scenes slipped in somewhere, but rarely in the same place twice in a row.

The series can be bought in one 10 disc set that includes both seasons of the show as well as the OVA episodes, or you can buy them all separately.  I recommend the 10 disc set, personally.  It ranges in price from $40 to $55, so try to catch it on sale.  Buy it at Amazon here - School Rumble: The Complete Series (Seasons 1, 2 and OVA)

I give School Rumble a solid 8/10.  Or three little chibi Harimas, because he's awesome.