School Rumble: Volume 6

Introduction

I appear to have dodged fate. This is the guy who bought the barebones disc of Se7en a month before the special edition was released, the guy who imported an anamorphic release of Dark City a week before the UK release of the Director's Cut was announced. MCM Expo has just passed, and if my kismet were firing on all cylinders, this would have been where Revelation would have announced an accelerated release schedule of all the outstanding Funimation discs on their catalogue. That didn't happen, and I feel a little justified in having imported them over the last few months. This is the last one, School Rumble Volume 6, although it does open a whole other can of worms.

School Rumble is a slapstick, laugh-packed comedy, something that the UK anime scene could always use more of in my opinion. What's more, it's not one of those 'teenaged boy, surrounded by a harem of girls, crossed purposes, compromising situations' comedies. It's the second year of high school for Tenma Tsukamoto, and it's time for her to confess her feelings to model student Oji Karasuma. Unfortunately he doesn't know she exists. Kenji Harima is a teenaged delinquent, known for his gangster tendencies, his aggressive attitude, and his motorcycle, who has up till now been a school dropout. That's until he fell for Tenma Tsukamoto. Now he's a full time school student, attitude and all, determined to make his feelings known to Tenma. Unfortunately she doesn't know he exists. The last post sounds.

This is the US Funimation release of volume 6 of School Rumble. The final four episodes of season 1 are presented on this disc, along with some extra goodies.

23. Woman's Battle! Men's Battle! After the Battle!
The cavalry battle was inconclusive, and the contest between class 2-C and 2-D will be resolved by the relay races. Only feelings are getting in the way again. Eri hurt her leg in the previous event, but when she goes to the infirmary, she recognises Tae, and reacts unexpectedly to her friendship with Harima, leaving her unprepared for the relay. It's down to Harima to uphold the class's honour in the men's event, but he's concerned about losing his beret and revealing his shame to the world. He feels shunned by the school at the after meet party, but then someone unexpected asks him for a dance, bald head and all.

24. Irritation. Indecision. Wandering
Now things are getting confusing. Suddenly the school is gossiping about Harima and Eri, resulting in Harima putting the prime suspects in varying degree of headlock. Eri's missing all this, as she's taking a day off school, trying to understand how she feels about Harima. Instead of tormenting him, she decides to do something nice for him, only to find that Yakumo has the same idea. Now it's Yakumo and Harima being touted as the big relationship. All of this is news to Harima, but more critical is the realisation, at last, that Tenma doesn't reciprocate his feelings. He's depressed, he needs to get away from it all, he doesn't need to board the fishing trawler from hell!

25. Boat, Train, Guitar
That's not the title. Unfortunately there are no ASCII codes for boat, train, or guitar. You'll just have to imagine the pictures. The perfect storm arrives to give Harima a message, that life on the ocean wave, or devoting his life to creating manga, is just a futile escape from reality, and that he has to deal with his feelings for Tenma. As soon as he gets back to land, he's thrilled to get a phone call from her. He's devastated when she asks for his help in buying Karasuma a present. Can he resist temptation? He decides that the only way to be forthright with his feelings is to finally complete the manga, but time's running out and a deadline approaches. He needs Yakumo's help.

26. School Rumble Forever!
Now things get really weird.

Picture

It's a 4:3 regular transfer, NTSC for the Region 1, with no immediate problems visible. Everything is clear and sharp, there are plenty of primary colours, and I noticed no compression, or even the aliasing that usually rears its head in the credit sequences. It's a fine transfer. The animation, as you would expect from a comedy, remains straightforward and simplistic, with pleasant character designs, and fairly non-descript artwork. It's all very energetic, and does more than enough to get the comedy across.

Sound

You get a choice of DD 2.0 English and Japanese, along with translated English subtitles and a signs only track. The show gets a catchy and quirky set of themes that are impossible to get out of your head once you hear them. The dialogue is clear, and the stereo sufficient for the show. Which language you choose depends on your usual preferences, but for what it's worth, I found the show much funnier in Japanese, the timing and the flow just seemed to work better.

Extras

School Rumble comes in an Amaray style case with a reversible sleeve. It also has, slipped inside with the usual advertising bumf, a set of Fan Service supplying, School Rumble fridge magnets. You'd never get those with VHS tapes.

Another something that we don't get with the UK release are multi-angle credit sequences, and depending which language you select, you'll see the credits in that language as well. You'll also find the usual jacket picture and textless credits.

The disc autoplays with a trailer for Tsubasa, and you'll find further trailers for Negima, The Slayers: Try, Peach Girl, Suzuka, The Clamp Double Feature, One Piece, School Rumble and the Z-Store.

For the final time, there are two interviews, the first lasting 9 minutes with Kenji Harima's voice actor, Hiroki Takahashi, and the second with Oji Karasuma's voice actor, Hiroki Konishi lasting 6 minutes. These are pretty standard EPK stuff, with questions about the show, and their characters repeated for both actors.

Conclusion

School Rumble has always been about the zanier, madcap side of romantic comedy, cloaking often quite moving character observations beneath a thick coating of the surreal, the slapstick and the downright bizarre. These four episodes on the final disc are no exception, indeed they simply up the absurdity as the series comes to a close. It's fair to say that I found this volume to be just as humorous as the rest, at the best of times. I must say though, that the closer it came to the end, the more the show seemed to go off the boil, although whether it was in actuality, or my own sense of disappointment at the series ending is up for question. As I have mentioned constantly in these reviews, anime comedies are a particular rarity in the UK, especially those which eschew the usual harem tropes and go for something different, and I've appreciated School Rumble more than most, even if it didn't in the end deliver the groundbreaking reinvention of the genre that I foolishly expected it to.

In fact, School Rumble has adopted a rather harem outlook for its character dynamics as the show came to a close, with gormless Harima, still intent on pursuing Tenma's heart, has somehow shifted from untrustworthy delinquent, to object of female affection in the school. While he gets nowhere with Tenma, his foe, and object of mutual ribbing Eri actually softens towards him, and is then conflicted when she sees that Harima is friendly with Yakumo. Yakumo is enigmatic at the best of times, but even she has developed something of a fascination with Harima, and then Tae has started working at the school, having harboured Harima during one of his early depressive streaks. To confuse matters more, Harima still lives with his guardian, cousin, and school Physics Teacher Itoko. The gag here is that 'itoko' is Japanese for cousin, so when Yakumo visits, and hears Harima introducing his cousin as 'my itoko', she thinks it's a possessive rather than a familial relationship. Of course the single-minded Harima is oblivious to all this.

The final episodes do return to his pursuit of Tenma, and Tenma's pursuit of Karasuma, which is where the show began, although it does get a little bittersweet, given the character development over the last six volumes. There's a surprisingly moving moment on a train, when Tenma falls asleep on Harima's shoulder, and he's charmingly conflicted about the whole thing, knowing that they've just been on a shopping trip to help Tenma impress Karasuma, while at the same time not wanting the moment to end.

But then things start to get really weird around the halfway mark, with Harima losing his motivation once more, and trying to escape to life on the ocean wave, which results in a blessedly short, but utterly unfunny trawler episode. It knocks the momentum of the comedy on the head, and even feels out of place given the light and fluffy tone of the rest of the series. The final episode is simultaneously entertaining and frustrating, a total non-ending that doesn't even feel relevant to the rest of the series. It's a flight into utter fantasy that has no effect on the overall story. It's on the same level as the conclusion of the Colbys; indeed aliens are involved, as is a bodyswap, and several dreams. Also, as the series comes to a close, there is build up to a school culture festival, as well as future shenanigans regarding Harima's manga career. It's quite clear that this isn't the conclusion of the show, although it's apparent from the interviews that the actors thought so at the time. Many shows would indeed have stopped at this juncture, pointing to the ongoing manga series for fans who wanted more, but School Rumble was actually popular enough to warrant further episodes. There are two OVA episodes following this first season, bridging the gap to a full 26-episode second season of School Rumble. The story concludes in a further two OVA episodes.

Funimation have released the first OVA episodes in the US, as well as the second season in its entirety. However, a UK release will be dependent on those remaining three volumes of Season 1 being released by Revelation first. Even if another company licenses the second season, just as Manga released the Negima OVAs, and will release the Negima Season 2 sets, after Revelation released season 1, there's little point in doing so until the first season of School Rumble is complete, especially with an ongoing narrative. Fortunately there is another option, although only for those who tolerate/enjoy the English dub (I don't). Funimation have all of Season 1, the OVAs and Season 2 available to stream from their web portal, all perfectly legal, and for the price of your broadband connection. Personally, I still prefer these shows on shiny plastic discs.