Tonari no Seki-kun Episode 4
What They Say:
Class is in session at a certain high school. While the teacher isn’t looking, a boy named Seki-kun is playing games by himself on his desk, while the girl who sits next to him, Yokoi-san, observes (or interferes or participates). Each time, Seki-kun’s games reach unimaginable levels… And this time the game is…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After a good game of shogi, dominoes and other tomfoolery, you do have to wonder when Seki will run out of things to do in class to distract himself. Based on friends I had at school years ago, there’s an endless supply of things he’ll find to do in order to amuse and delight as time goes on. He’s still largely stuck in gameplay at the moment, but it’s watching how Yokoi handles interpreting what he’s doing.
Such is the case as he pulls out two wooden bowls with go pieces in it and starts slapping them down on his desk where he’s drawn the board once again. Not that he’s actually playing, mind you, but with an utterly seriously look, he’s making a couple of characters and having them do things across the board. Which Yokoi obviously can’t help but to get caught up in. The whole thing just gets out of control quickly as the two characters he created goes at it and there are a few amusing twists along the way, but as we’ve seen before, the real gag lands on watching the way Yokoi reacts to it and does her own narration of events as it plays out. It’s quite amusing since the same things keep happening to her and she keeps getting into trouble over it.
In Summary:
Seki-kun is all about taking a premise, working the structure of it neatly into a polished form and executing. That leaves the show with a predictable series of events as we’ve seen in the first four episodes. And could be the death knell of any number of series to be sure. But with this series, and its short run time, it’s just perfection personified as once a week we spend a few minutes with the two characters and see the struggles Yokoi goes through while Seki does his thing. Working with go pieces to tell a story this week is quite a lot of fun, particularly with Yokoi’s narration, and there’s not a dull moment in the episode, even when you know where it’s going to go from the first frame.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.