This Week in Anime

Is In the Heart of Kunoichi Tsubaki as Good as Takagi-san?

Steve
Oh that's the guy with the dad, right?

Drat, I always get those mixed up. And unfortunately, I couldn't quite squeeze all those episodes in over the weekend, so I'm afraid your Boruto dreams are Borudone. But I have a spectacular compromise! We can play a game instead! Here, I'll make the first move.

Well, congrats, you've RUINED our game. But In the Heart of Kunoichi Tsubaki is also about ninjas and all that other stuff you wrote, so I GUESS we can talk about that instead or whatever.

As a quick aside, kudos to the translator for taking an inscrutable joke about kanji radicals and turning it into a parsable English pun. The joke is nowhere near good enough to warrant that, but I salute you. Back to that matter at hand, Tsubaki's curiosity, while normal, is complicated a tad by the fact that she lives in a gender-segregated ninja training camp and has had literally no bro contact in her entire life. And the same goes for her kunoichi classmates, who have grown up inured with all kinds of misleading slander about the opposite sex.

...okay some of it is true.

Yeah, it's like Soichiro Yamamoto felt like he had to shoehorn romance in somewhere, given the success of Takagi-san, so we get this rosy framing around Tsubaki getting all flustered about the barest concept of men. And I mean, I get it, I want to see Alex Garland's new film too. But settle down girl, it hasn't even been out a week. You gotta let those crowds thin out a bit.

And it's not like the show is wanting for material! Tsubaki's ninja school is divided into 12 teams based on the zodiac, and each of those teams has at least three members, so that's at least 36 uniquely designed silly anime girls with foreheads you could land a 737 on.

She just like me fr ;___;

And then you've got some of them walking around with a giant wooden club, just for fun. I'm upset, too, that we haven't gotten a story about them yet, as they are clearly the rowdiest team of the bunch. All I've got is this still from the OP. Tragic.

Predictably, with a cast that big, pretty much everyone is defined by a singular character trait which is then exaggerated during sketches for the sake of comedy. The same, of course, applies to Tsubaki's teammates Sazanka and Asagao, who are, respectively, Gay and Hungry.

As a shark tooth aficionado myself, I give Sazanka a serrated stamp of approval.

Man, when Morbius in the movie Morbius said "It's Morb no Jutsu Time!"...chills.

It's thankless work holding one of the school's scant few neurons, but someone has to do it. Like, it can't be Asagao. She's got no room up there. It's just all rice grains rattling around in her brainpan.

The Tower of Babel rice bowl is a perennially good gag. Will never tire of it.

I wanna eat the big cartoon bone meat soooo bad. I wanna gnaw at with my teeth and stretch it out like a big piece of taffy until a tiny morsel snaps off and goes down my gullet. The universe won't let me have this, and it's frankly fucked up. Also they do literally do that hamburger trap with her and it works. Best character.

Being Tsubaki is tsuffering. But I mean most of the show is about ninja girls causing and solving problems. Mostly causing tho.

Even the classmates that do solve problems tend to do it in exclusively insufferable ways. Need to teach your partners about the importance of teamwork? Let's get the creepiest twins in existence to help with that.

And then you've got times where helping IS the problem, like when Ajisai decides she's done being babied.

Spoilers: she is not done being babied.

Kunoichi Tsubaki is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but I did get a kick out of that chapter. There's some solid comedic timing and faces in there. As well as a great moral lesson (being spoiled is good).

It's a very well put-together anime. You can tell from the screenshots that it looks great, and it even throws in some quick yet nicely choreographed action scenes from time to time. Plus, look at this. Now that is the face of someone who wants their potatoes back. Exquisite character acting.

Can't forget the cloning! Don't talk to me or my five other mes ever again.

All my Naruto knowledge is secondhand, so I can't say I have much nostalgia for ninja nonsense myself, but I did also find this stuff to be the best part of the show. Whenever it starts to broach the whole mystery men thing it just gets mired and a lot less amusing.

What are you talking about, clearly it's working perfectly. I mean, separating boys and girls, it's foolproof at stopping romance. What else could possibly hap—

We're also proposing less heteronormative weirdness out of deference to the hardworking translators out there who have no recourse but to throw their hands up sometime.

This arc also very nearly kills Tsubaki, so we have to keep her best interests in mind too.

tfw when you're one with the multiverse and it's all different words for penis.

It's okay, Tsubaki, just keep your chinchin up. I mean chin up.

Yeah, that would have been downright silly. What else is Rindou going to do, magically transport the food into her mouth?

Oh right, she probably could.

If you ask me, if a ninja does literally anything other than use a puff of smoke to substitute their body with a stout wooden log in order to evade capture, it's fake and wrong.

Various ninja crimes aside, In the Heart of Kunoichi Tsubaki makes for an overall pleasant watch. Not knee-slapping, and not as iconic as Takagi-san's innovations in girlfriend terrorism, but there's some tasty fluff in here.