Written by Yoko Yonaiyama, directed by Takashi Sakuma for Studio Soigne. Based on the manga written by Hey, published in Japan by Akita Shoten in the magazine Champion Cross. Released in North America on the Crunchyroll Streaming Service.
I started to write a long, involved review of Kamiina Botan giving the basic plot and breaking down the relationships and then scrapped the whole thing. Yes, I loved the relationships, but that’s not why I got so obsessed with Kamiina Botan per se. Honestly, I think if the manga had been licensed and I’d gotten the first volume, I may not have continued on. This is a series that runs almost entirely on VIBE. The anime studio was handed a series that, let’s face it, is a cute college girls drinking cute things series. Instead of happy scenes of the girls building a house, or going camping, instead we get discussions of obscure art films, the joy of 80s and 90s vinyl LPs, and so. much. alcohol. And the anime studio took one look at this and said “You know what? Let’s turn this into an experimental cauldron. Instead of making sure everything is consistent, let’s let each storyboarder and episode director do whatever they want. The result is a rare yuri anime that elevates almost everything.
The basic pitch: a new first-year at a girls’ college dorm comes across her RA drinking alone, and looking happy about the booze but not much else. The new girl admits she’s never had alcohol before, and has a drink as well. It turns out that alcohol makes her extremely flirty and forward, and since she’s also outgoing and pretty, the RA starts to fall for her. This is terrible news for their sempai, who has an unrequited crush on the RA and has been trying to get her to have a drink together but to no avail. Halfway through the series, they get a new resident, a Taiwanese girl who sees all the yearning, unspoken feelings, and utter lack of any forward progress and just kicks it all down, which helps the girl and her RA to “stop being friends” (and become girlfriends), and also pushes the sempai to finally give up on the RA and find new love with someone who’s head over heels in love with her – the Taiwanese girl herself. Akane and Yaeka are also in it.
A lot of anime seems to fall under “no one knows about it, but if you get someone into it they’ll love it just as much as you”. This is not one of those series. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of Botan watchers… well, three. Either they immediately get it and fall deeper in love with the series with each new episode (expect Episode 3… more on that later), or they struggle to like any of the characters, particularly Ibuki, and find themselves getting more and more frustrated about why people keep praising this nothingburger of a series. There is also a third kind, which is “I want to love it but all the alcohol consumption upsets me”. I totally get that, but if that’s the case, I’m sorry. Part of the series shows how Ibuki goes from using alcohol as a crutch to try to forget her trauma to the power of love causing her to reinvent alcohol as her hyperspecific obsession, just as Kanade has films, Akane has music, and Chin-lan has Kanade.
I’m not very familiar with the unlicensed manga, but from what I can understand there wasn’t too much added or subtracted in terms of the plot or dialogue of each episode. One episode had a special section written to give Akane and Yaeka something to do, but the author then posted it as a chapter on the manga’s website, so in a sense it’s also an adaptation. The manga covers also, frankly, seem to want it to attract a far more male, hornier audience than I think the anime really deserves – the anime doesn’t really have all that much fanservice, even if we get several scenes of the girls bathing, whereas the manga covers really want to emphasize Botan’s “gigantic cans”, as one social media person put it. The anime takes us through the first four volumes, with the last couple episodes setting up Akane and Yaeka finally getting a plotline of their own… unfortunately, that will have to wait for a mythical second season, meaning their characters suffer far more than the others.
One thing I appreciated, possibly due to the girls being in college, and possibly as the author just wasn’t interested in that part of the story, is that none of the girls have a “wait, am I interested in g-girls?” moment. The girls all appear to not only be gay but know that all the others are gay, and all the relationship drama is very much “is she as interested in me as I am in her” without the “what if they find out I’m a lesbian?”… which, yes, can also be read as a copout, but maybe it felt more refreshing as they are written to be older. Speaking of which, the writing and the art direction are both incredibly vague and elliptical. Botan and Ibuki’s confession is “let’s stop being friends”. Chin-lan’s gorgeous plea to Kanade ends with “won’t you come out to the sea with me?” The final episode’s climax ends in mutually pierced ears as a metaphor for a first time. The metaphor is the issue – I did see some people complaining that without a kiss of explicit “we’re gay lovers!”, it didn’t quite count as much. To that, I say stuff and nonsense.
The cast can very easily be divided into three parts: the ones everyone loves to one degree or another (Botan, Kanade, and Chin-lan), the two forgotten underdogs (Akane and Yaeka, also the only ones who are clearly already a couple from the start), and Ibuki. Ibuki has a lot going against her. She’s the cause of the brief romantic rivalry that makes Kanade sad, and her rejection of Kanade, because it’s couched in the same vague style that the rest of the series is, is felt to be unclear and mean. Her past trauma (she was drinking at a mixer and could not stop hiccupping, leading to a senpai she admired calling her annoying) affects her deeply, to the point that it’s ruined her life before Botan shows up, and brings her to tears just remembering it. A lot of folks felt that this was not enough to justify her anguish, and I saw “get over it” quite a few times. To be fair, she does. With the help of Botan she becomes, by the end of the series, filled with joy and hope for the future.
Botan started out as everyone’s favorite, especially with her “I want to make that tongue of yours mine!” line, but as the series went on and Botan fell in love with Ibuki more, we started to see a transformation. Just as Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk, it turns out that when she’s relatively sober, she is as doubtful as every other person in love for the first time. Especially since, as she states incessantly in the last two episodes, her relationship with Ibuki revolves around alcohol. Botan misses what we’ve already seen with Ibuki, which is that alcohol is no longer her crutch but now her hobby, which means she gleefully wants to share it with the woman she loves, just like Kanade and films like Wild Strawberries. Botan, on the other hand, wants more. Since they’re “no longer friends”, why is everything the same? Her raw desire in the last episode is startling, though I also appreciated she knew when to stop and listen when Ibuki explained what was going on.
Kanade was everyone’s favorite from about Episode 2 onward, and especially with Episodes 4 and 5, mostly as she was a failure pile in a sadness bowl. A tall, beautiful older woman who smokes and deliberately styles herself as cool, in reality Kanade can’t work up the courage to confess to the girl she likes and watches every moment of Botan seducing Ibuki, cringing all the way. Botan, of course, gets this – she even helps Kanade to pull off the best confession possible, though it’s one Ibuki will obliquely reject. Fortunately for Kanade, she wins the entire anime by getting Chin-lan, everyone’s favorite from Episode 6 till the end. Dubbed the “yuri bomb”, Chin-lan was from Taiwan, and when she arrived she immediately figured out the relationships in the dorm and noticed that there was one woman not taken. She spent the rest of the series defying the anime itself. While everyone else avoided directness or used a metaphor, Chin-lan would say “I love you”. Multiple times. In many ways, her journey with Kanade is even more exciting than the main one.
As for Akane and Yaeka, as I noted, they seem to be a couple from the start. Akane’s a musician who really likes music, but wants to love it, wants to be obsessed with it – and that’s not something she thinks she can do at college. She hasn’t told Yaeka, who is a pint-sized grumpy girl who has more common sense than the other five, possibly as she knows what the response will be. Unfortunately, this is left open at the end of the series, and I think it’s the main plot of the next volume, leaving the two of them unexplored to a large degree, which is a big flaw of the series. Fortunately, they have their ending cards. The endings of this series become legendary, filling in the tragic gay backstories of the entire cast (except, very notably, for Botan, whose backstory remains unknown). We see Kanade’s smoking habit came from a previous crush on an older girl. We see Akane’s old band getting famous without her. We see Yaeka’s budding ballet career cut short. We see Ibuki’s high school yearning. And we see Chin-lan’s sister’s marriage to another women, which explains so much about Chin-lan’s motivation. They’re amazing.
Speaking of the anime, it was a bit startling when the second episode was in a different artistic style than the first, but that was nothing compared to episode 3. The entire episode was animated by one person – storyboards, key animation, inbetweening, everything. And its style was deliberately old-school and scratchy, reminding me very much of series like Hidamari Sketch. It fit with part of the episode, as Akane shows off her old-school LP collection to Botan, and they listed to Radiohead’s Kid A – well, no, they don’t, music rights, but they listen to BGM while we see the cover of Kid A. The analogness of the experience fits with the animation style. That said, I suspect this may have been one experiment too far – the rest of the series was more content to experiment with camera angles (5), musical score and songs (8), and SHAFT-style Monogatari Series homages (11) rather than make the girls look TOO different – though we saw Botan with dead cat eyes again, as well as Yaeka’s fanged exit on Akane’s arm.
One last thing about the anime and manga both – this series is Pretentious with a capital P, and if that bugs you, you should flee for your life. It’s the sort of show that needs annotations, from Akane’s record collection, to Kanade’s string of art school directors (her final romantic gesture in Episode 2 is a postcard book by Wim Wenders – again, the “I love you” in this series is not said out loud by anyone but Chin-lan, instead it’s made through “please immerse yourself in my hyperfixation”), to the endless alcohol brands consumed by the entire cast. Like Super Cub, I don’t think this was explicitly underwritten by any brewery or corporation, but I think they were, much like Super Cub, quite happy for the free publicity. The 10th episode’s hilarious after-credits scene features 100 Years of Solitude and Eric Dolphy, and both Chin-lan and Akane, respectively, are stunned that those aren’t common knowledge to everyone. Even Botan is giving everyone lectures on perfume brands.
I’m not sure this will ever get a Season 2 – I don’t think it quite has the needed manga material to cover it – and I will also be shocked if we see a Blu-Ray over in North America. For me, though, this entire spring season with Botan has been a delight. If you take the series too seriously, get too invested in the interiority of Ibuki and what she’s doing to herself, or Kanade’s cursed love life, I think it would be quite unwatchable. But I think just accepting this is how things go in this world, you open yourself up to some truly lovely dialogue, and some amazing animation experimentation. The fact that it happened on a yuri anime, a genre that far too often has an aura of “well, this is fine, I guess” low budget dullness to it, makes it even more compelling for me. The final shots of the ED of Episode 12 show Botan and Ibuki, still a couple and now seemingly running the dorm together, welcoming a very tall and very small pair to the dorm for the first time. I hope one day we see their own inevitable love story.