The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

High School! Kimengumi

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This is the story of five students who make up a crazy and unique group (the gang of the funny faces) and, in an incredible twist of luck, they befriend the cutest girl in school. Of course, they will enter into competition with many groups in their school, where teachers are tricky and sometimes clueless, where they can still defy the laws of nature to win sports tournaments, and where they can still be childish. Anything could happen in this high school.

High School! Kimengumi is based on Motoei Shinzawa's High School! Kimengumi (High School! Funny-Face Club) manga. The anime series is streaming on Amazon Prime on Thursdays.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:

High School! Kimengumi is a series with a lot of history, almost none of which was accessible to English speakers until very recently. In a 2006 survey of Japanese celebrities, it even ranked in the top 100 favorite anime of all time. A whole generation has passed since then, but it still demonstrates that there's a whole boatload of context to the show that most of us aren't going to get. Even setting that aside, there's the fact that humor and what's considered funny is culturally-determined, and the very Japanese gags and timing may hit for the original audience, but for the rest of the world, they can be puzzling and even alienating.

By now, you may have realized that High School! Kimengumi did not work for me one bit. I don't think I laughed once in the whole episode. The pacing didn't slow down in the entire 23 minutes, without ever taking a moment to breathe. The constant hail of jokes and gags overwhelmed me, assaulting my eyes and brain with a neverending stream of sight gags, wordplay, funny faces, and Tomokazu Seki screeching in his shrillest comedy voice. My poor brain, worn down from a full day of watching mid anime, could barely comprehend what was happening in front of me. If you asked me to describe what was happening and why for the bulk of the episode, I couldn't tell you. Not for lack of attention, but it was simply Too Much.

Part of the issue is that it seemed designed for people at least passingly familiar with the rogue's gallery. Characters flashed by, popping in and out of the episode with little in the way of introductions. While the Kimengumi, literally the Funny Face Group, had distinctive features, the others became increasingly difficult to distinguish. One was… rainbows? And some girls? I think there was a basketball team. There were also, of course, the two normal girls who serve as the audience stand-ins.

There is something appealing about a group of weird-looking students who have decided that since they'll never fit into normal society, they're just going to embrace their misfit status together. It may set them in opposition to the normies around them, and it definitely flies in the face of avoiding being nuisances to the people around them, but they've got each other and that's a lot. If there had been more time to think about that between the gags, I may have liked High School! Kimengumi more. However, with pacing like a fever dream and the most cacophonous performance of Seki's career, it's unlikely to find much of an audience in the US, even with all the Mad Max references.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Slapstick lovers, your show is here! I first encountered High School! Kimengumi as Kimengumi Le Collège fou fou fou, and I think I read about five volumes of the manga. Mostly, I remember it being absolutely insane, and this first episode of the anime reboot bears that out. This is 1980s slapstick barely updated for 2026, and apart from a sign indicating the year 2025, there aren't really any signs of modernization: girls' uniform skirts are long, the bad girls' skirts are even longer, and there's nary a smartphone to be seen. Keeping it very 80s may in fact be part of the humor – this is rooted in a time and place it's not acknowledging, and that's actually a little bit funny.

What's most striking about this is how utterly insane it is, and how dearly devoted to maintaining that insanity it remains. There's never a dull moment here, whether it's the Kimengumi boys running around like ninnies or the Kimengumi boys riding a weird bike or the Kimengumi boys coming out of Yui's desk like snakes…are you picking up on a theme here? Of course, they're not the only boys in this school, which is just chock full of little cliques, as most middle schools are. Apart from the funny face boys, there's also a handsome boys' group, a bad boys' group, a sports boys' group, and, of course, a bad girls' group. All of the other students are just sort of there, watching the lunacy unfold.

But not Yui! She's serious when she introduces herself as someone who wants to make memories, and she immediately zeroes in on the Kimengumi as the group to help make it happen. That's actually my favorite part of the episode – Yui in any other series would be aghast at their antics and possibly pursued romantically by group leader Rei against her wishes. But here, she's all in – she finds them interesting and funny, and she wants to be a part of it. She even ropes her new friend Chie in, and I would bet that they all have more fun than anyone else in their class.

Not that we get to see it, because midway through a chase scene, the gang suddenly starts streaming past manga panels showing their last year in middle school. I have to admit that this got a chuckle out of me for sheer absurdity and chutzpah; what better way to get through that pesky time without a time skip? After all, the show isn't called Middle School Kimengumi.

This is one of those shows that won't tickle everyone. It's dated and leans into that, although the boy who occasionally presents more femme isn't made fun of for it; he's just part of the gang, and his bringing his makeup bag isn't treated any differently than Rei bringing his transforming Bentobot. It's frenetic and goofy, and I admire the way it doesn't want to be anything else.

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James Beckett
Rating:
I'm all for the trend in reviving classic '80s and '90s anime and the bubblegum retro aesthetic that the youth so clearly long for. I had never even heard of High School! Kimengumi before checking out this 21st-century revival of the property, but the OP convinced me that it would be, if nothing else, fun to literally watch unfold on screen with my eyeballs. As for everything else, well…this is a classic '80s comedy, which means that we're dealing with some of the most volatile and unpredictable material known to man: Jokes from another time period and a completely different culture that have been adapted into a brand new language that was never even a consideration for the jokes' original creators.

Comedy is the genre that reliably ages the worst, no matter what culture or language you're operating in. Hell, it's common to watch a comedy that you already think you love several years after originally falling for it, only to find that the gags have aged like poorly stored soft cheese that has been left out in the sun for several days too long. Now, apply that principle to an audience with no nostalgia for the material whatsoever, and then factor in the added complication that many comedic tropes do not transfer well beyond the language and culture of origin. Obviously, I'm not saying comedy from Japan is doomed to fail. I've laughed my butt off over hundreds of episodes of Gintama by this point, and Asobi Asobase remains one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my entire life. My anime of 2025 was Apocalypse Hotel, which is destined to become a cult classic in the coming years. Still, you can probably tell that this big, long windup was meant to brace you all for something unfortunate…

High School! Kimengumi didn't make me laugh. Not once. I didn't even do that “breathe heavy out of your nose and maybe crack half a smile” thing that happens when you scroll past a vaguely amusing thing on social media. It wasn't on account of confusion or anything, either. For all of the allusions and cultural references that I'm sure flew over my head, I caught plenty of references to Mad Max, Super Sentai, Friday the 13th, and so on. I even understand the appeal of the series' whole premise, which is that cutie-pie normal girls Chie and Yui get caught up in the cartoonishly absurd antics of several deeply strange goofballs. They've all got funny faces, and they are incapable of being serious about anything at any time, but the girls can't help but stay circling the orbit of their chaos. It's cozy, it's sweet, and it captures the mad camaraderie that can form when you trap a bunch of hormonal weirdos in a building for twelve years straight and tell them all to make friends.

Yet, regardless of how much I can intellectually understand why this series became popular enough back in its day to warrant a remake forty years down the line, that doesn't change the fact that I simply don't find any of its jokes to be funny. That one fact is enough to kill my enthusiasm for the series entirely. Ah, well. Maybe it's enough that it got the job done for Japanese kids back in 1985. Maybe you just had to be there.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Somewhere out there is a person who just spent the last 22 minutes laughing their butts off at this anime. Sadly, I am not that person. Now, to be clear, I don't fault our hypothetical viewer for this. Humor is, by its very nature, subjective. However, despite the nonstop onslaught of jokes in this episode, I didn't laugh once. Heck, I smiled a mere two times.

The first was when Rei used a split-screen transition (basically moving from one manga panel to another) to escape his friends. The second followed a few seconds later with (what I interpreted as) a Madoka Magica reference—something I never expected to see in a remake of a 1980s anime.

Speaking of which, perhaps the other reason the anime didn't connect with me is that I've never seen the 1985 original nor read the manga it was based on. I have absolutely no nostalgia for these characters or their random antics.

So, without humor or nostalgia, what does this anime offer to a viewer like me? Not much. I enjoyed the idea that Yui actually wanted to hang out with the Kimengumi rather than being a put-upon romantic foil, simply caught up in their antics.

I also liked the idea that the Kimengumi basically have superpowers—like, when we see them turn into a ball or become chibi, pop out of Yui's desk, or blow up the gym, all of this really happens. It's not a visual metaphor. They are really doing things that break the rules of reality, and the rest of the extended cast has just come to think of it as, if not “normal” then at least “normal for them.”

All in all, don't take this 2.5-star rating as a condemnation but rather as a simple statement that it didn't work for me. Feel free to give it a try and see if it does for you.

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