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The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide
The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague

How would you rate episode 1 of
The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague ?
Community score: 3.7



What is this?

Himuro is a descendant of yuki-onnas living in modern times and a newbie office worker. When he gets emotionally overwhelmed, he ends up causing blizzards or starts building snowmen and igloos. Whenever his secret romantic feelings for his unique yet kind coworker Fuyutsuki intensify, he sometimes ends up freezing those around him. Then, there's Fuyutsuki. Everyone always sees her as the cool type, but Fuyutsuki is actually also pretty curious about her mysterious coworker, Himuro.

The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague is based on Miyuki Tonogaya's manga and streams on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.


How was the first episode?

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

The first episode of The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague really throws you into the deep end setting-wise—and I mean that in the best possible way. It starts by looking like it's going to be an average slice-of-life work show, and suddenly we see a man with his feet frozen in a block of ice. Is this literal? Is this metaphorical? Is his coworker so calm and collected that the supernatural doesn't bother her? Not explaining what is going on right away is a great hook—an easy way to make us pay attention. Even when we learn the truth, we're not sure how normal being a yokai descendant is. And once we find out it is relatively normal, we're primed to go into the back half of the episode.

This first episode is about establishing one thing: being a supernatural creature has some downsides. Himuro, as someone of Yuki-Onna blood, can't touch flowers or living things without worrying that he'll freeze them since he can't control his emotional state (and thus his snow-based powers). Being too excited or too happy can do everything from creating small (yet hard) flying snowmen or summoning a mini-blizzard around him. It's got to be hard trying to form close emotional bonds with others when doing so will make them physically uncomfortable, at the very least.

Of course, his condition is the perfect excuse to show us a lot of friendly people doing nice things for each other. Whether it's Fuyutsuki collecting cats' whiskers so Himuro can touch them for the first time or Himuro helping his sick coworker get his work done so he can head home early, it's a lot of wholesome stuff that makes the cast more than a bit endearing.

But while this first episode was a solid amount of lighthearted fun with a cute love story at its core, I'm not sure this series can keep my interest in the long run. Though, I will say the cliffhanger has me interested. Why can't Himuro go to Okinawa? Is it to do with the airplane? Or can he not go to tropical places because of his relation to snow? We'll have to see if the need to know draws me back next week.


Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

As I try to piece together my feelings on this premiere, it's hard not to damn it with faint praise. Because I liked this premiere just fine. There's a subdued charm to its very slow, quiet comedy, and while the characters are straightforward, they're perfectly enjoyable in this formulaic workplace rom-com package. The character designs are nice and work well with the modest animation, and there are some cute little touches, like our titular Ice Guy spawning teeny little snowmen when he's excited, which made me smile. I got a sensible chuckle or two out of some of the lines here, and there's not really anything objectionable or incompetent with the whole deal.

At the same time, I can't say anything about this episode that I haven't seen done better elsewhere. There are plenty of sharper comedies, even ones with quiet or deadpan delivery like Aharen-san wa Hakarenai. There are workplace rom-coms with far stronger hooks and more fleshed-out characters. There are a thousand "night parades of yokai" comedies that do way more interesting stuff with their supernatural elements. I've seen comedy series built around One Joke that make that joke funny with much more frequency and escalation than Himuro's blushing blizzard shtick. So I guess it's not that Ice Guy is necessarily bad at anything it's doing, so much as it's not very exceptional either.

But as I said, I did enjoy the time I spent with this premiere. If you're looking for a quiet bit of fluff that stars adults instead of teenagers, this one should do just fine. The comedy never gets super loud or obnoxious, with even the less stoic supporting cast keeping the volume at medium when they react to Himuro's ice powers, so if you're in the mood for something low-stakes and relaxing to unwind with, I think this is a fine option.


James Beckett
Rating:

Most of my issues with The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague come from my personal preferences regarding rom-com anime rather than any significant flaws with the show itself. Specifically, the show is just a little too—ahem—“chill” for my tastes. I'm a sucker for a good romance, but I need just a little more pep and energy in my sappy cartoon love stories, and Ice Guy is going for the more laid-back approach. I imagine this series will be right up their alley for folks who love that sort of iyashikei pace and tone. Not so much for me, though.

Ice Guy has many things going for it, and I could see the show resonating with me a lot more once it has time to breathe and flesh out its cast and world. For one, I love that old trope of regular, everyday humans living alongside magical beings and suchlike, and I think the series will only get more interesting and likable as it adds more and more of these kinds of characters into the mix (the fox-girl and Bhudda-boss that we meet in this premiere are pretty fun). Also, Himuro is often an adorable little dork, and I like the comic energy we get from his internalized little freak-outs over cute cats and homemade gifts from Fuyutsuki.

Unfortunately, Fuyutsuki herself is probably where the premiere hit the biggest speed bump for me. She's not a bad character or anything, but as a romantic lead, she strikes me as a bit too stoic and even-tempered, even if that's her whole deal as a foil for Himuro. Her interactions with the titular Ice Guy are sweet but repetitive: Fuyutsuki says or does something nice for Himuro, Himuro has a little—ahem—“meltdown,” and then we move on to the next scene. Neither the humor nor the romance of the story has any sense of buildup; it instead feels like a bunch of gags from a daily comic strip that have been strung together across a full-length episode.

That said, the show advertises itself as a cute, low-stakes, supernaturally themed romantic comedy, and that's exactly what it delivers. I may or may not give it another episode or two to win me over, but I'm sure lots of you will be on board with this whole setup immediately. Check it out of you want to kick this season off with some especially cozy, low-key vibes.


Caitlin Moore
Rating:

Without looking it up, I knew in my heart that The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague was based on a pixiv comic. There's an unmistakeable rhythm to its writing and humor style, like a gag comic but more focused on creating cute moments between the main characters than jokes. It's set in a workplace, with a main couple and a secondary couple. We're not here to break the mold, and whether or not that's a good thing is up to you.

For me? It's kind of… *waggles hand* eh. The structure works for me a bit better when the characters are a bit larger than life, with broad personality types that are easy enough to latch onto but enough nuance that they're more than just archetypes – Wotakoi is, to me, the gold standard thus far. The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague is considerably more (father, forgive me, for I have punned) chill. Fuyutsuki and Himuro are both very deadpan, with Himuro mostly showing emotion via the appearance of ice around him and Fuyutsuki pretty much not showing any emotion at all. They have a lot of pleasant conversations in flat, subdued tones of voice, and the humor emerges from the incongruity between how they talk to one another and how they react once the other has walked away. The first couple times Himuro scrunched up his face and blushed while ice blew around him because Fuyutsuki did something nice for him, it was cute, but by the end of the episode, I had cooled on it (I am so so sorry).

It's not bad, but I need a little acid to my comedies to balance out the sweetness and keep it from becoming cloying, and Pretty Fly for an Ice Guy just didn't manage to stay on the right side of the line. There is something there with how Himuro's ice powers flaring up from excitement keep him from getting close to things he likes, but he explains it so calmly and with such a lack of emotion that I can't see this aspect being mined for anything but Fuyutsuki finding nice things to do for him. I would be so sad if I couldn't be around cats, but Himuro states this without even the slightest flurry to show his frustration. Nor was there any kind of visual dynamism to make up for the plodding script, as it was almost entirely midshots of adults standing still with their mouths moving and, once per sketch, CG snow effects. Okay, the little snowmen that popped up around Himuro at times were pretty adorable, but that's just the briefest of sight gags.

The best source of comedy in the episode was Fuyutsuki's cats doing cat things, like ignoring the cute TV-shaped scratching post she got in favor of the bag it came in, or jumping out of that same scratching post the moment she takes out her phone to document it. Even those gags are as old as the concepts of cat ownership, paper bags, and cameras, but they got a chuckle out of me anyway because hey, cats gonna cat. There's a reason they're the most popular thing on the internet.


Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I feel really mean rating this so low because there's really not a whole lot that's wrong with it. It's cute. It's sweet. It's... kind of boring. I really do mean that in an almost positive way; not a whole lot happens in this episode, but what does is the sort of sugary sweet day-to-day antics that warm the cockles of your heart. I guess maybe that makes me even more of an ice guy than our eponymous lead.

The premise is remarkably simple: some people are descended from various mythological beings, like snow women and fox spirits. It's apparently common enough that when people meet, they tend to exchange heritages, one of the lowkey funniest scenes in this episode is when four new coworkers meet and two of them end up just saying that they are descendants of humans. Those who are not simply descendants of humans have supernatural abilities of one stripe or another, with the ice guy of the title breaking out into flurries or materializing adorable little snowmen whenever he is emotional. When he confesses to Fuyutsuki that his ice powers keep him from enjoying some things that he likes, such as cats and flowers, she goes out of her way to try and help him as best she can. Again, this is all very sweet, but not exactly exciting, or often even particularly interesting. Also, am I the only one who is vaguely creeped out by her presenting him a box full of cat whiskers?

This first episode, we are told at the end, covers roughly a month. While not much happens that is remarkable over the average month, that doesn't offer this episode of whole lot of coherency; instead it is merely a series of vignettes all centered around the budding relationship between Fuyutsuki and Himuro, which mostly consists of him saying something to her about something he can't do, her attempting to help, and then him freaking out about how cute she is. It's wholesome and sweet and I think I checked every five minutes how much longer was left in the episode. Hopefully the manga is eventually licensed, because I suspect this is one of those stories that will work better reading it rather than at the forest pace of an adaptation.


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