The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota

Kashiwada and Oota are classmates at a junior high school. Kashiwada is a girl who never shows emotions on her face. Oota is always thinking of pranks to surprise Kashiwada, but he always fails. They appear to be opposite types of people, but they genuinely care for each other.

Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota is based on the manga series by Fuyu Azuma. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Wow, this show is so…nothing. Pairing together two characters that are at such opposite extremes of each other can definitely be fun and it's a story set up that has been done hundreds of times throughout the past couple of decades. I can definitely enjoy those shows on some level as long as the comedic timing hits or brings just one creative element to the table. Otherwise you risk having a show that just drags out the same joke over and over again without much opportunity for creativity. Unfortunately, the latter is exactly what this show does.

Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota only really has one joke which is in the title. You have a girl who's not that good at expressing herself and you have a boy who is too loud and expressive to fault. The two are curious about each other but express themselves in extremely different ways. I do like the fact that Kashiwada isn't an emotionless brick; she does express herself, just in very subtle ways that the rest of the cast can't pick up on. That's kind of fun in its own way and she's actually quite forward when you just ask her direct questions, like how she basically confessed to Oota in this first episode. However, I don't like anything about Oota as a character because I think the show went too far in the opposite direction with him. He's loud, abrasive, annoying and his actions really do border on the line of bullying when you sit down and think about it. He's basically invading Kashiwada's personal space, constantly throwing things in her face and if it wasn't for the fact that she likes him then I feel like this would be a very different type of show.

So I'm just watching a really misguided boy bully his obvious crush, which isn't an interesting premise, and it's made even less interesting by the presentation. Was I the only one who thought that all of the background characters looked deranged in some ways? Something about the way a lot of the characters have their eyes drawn makes them feel unsettled and once again we have another show so aggressively washed out that everyone looks like ghosts. The music is the only thing that sort of made me laugh during this premiere because of how aggressively cartoonish it was. Call me simple, but once you bring the bongos out, I can't help but chuckle. Outside of that, though, I don't think there's really much here that warrants a twenty minute episode runtime. Maybe if this was a short series it would be easier to digest, form but in its current form, I feel like a lot more needs to be done to keep me engaged.