Go For It, Nakamura-kun!! – Episodes 1-2

What’s it about? On his first day of high school, Okuto Nakamura fell head-over-heels in love with his classmate, Aiki Hirose. Unfortunately, no matter how many plans he makes to get closer to the object of his affections, things never manage to go the way he’d imagined. How’s he supposed to win Hirose’s heart when he can barely say two words to the guy?

Thank you, anime gods, for this gift. There’s nothing like seeing an excellent manga get adapted by a talented creative team that completely understands the assignment.

Nakamura-kun is an exercise in nostalgia—or rather, in optimistic revision. Its visuals and comedic style owe a deep and immediately obvious debt to the works of Rumiko Takahashi, but its narrative isn’t beholden to those series’ outdated depictions of overt queerness. “What if I had a place in that old thing that really spoke to me” is an angle that softens my heart, and I’m equally over the moon at the decision to bedazzle this premiere with city pop sounds and soft lines, but pastiche isn’t enough without passion and skill—and both mangaka Syundei and anime director Aoi Umeki have that in spades.

There is so much variation already at play on what starts as a one joke premise: Nakamura comes up with a plan to do something cool in front of Hirose, it fails completely, but he charms Hirose anyway (not that Nakamura notices, in the pits of despair as he is).

Nakamura is one hell of a Tumblr teen, I say with a bucket of affection and experience. He runs practice conversations ad nauseum, takes notes from his favorite romance manga when it’s completely disconnected from how real relationships work, and agonizes over every mistake, including ones that nobody but him cares about. I’m cautious about labeling him as autistic-coded just because I relate to him, but it’s not hard at all to see the kid as some flavor of neurodivergent.

What’s more important is that this is a show squarely in the genre of Good Kids Doing Ridiculous Nonsense, a la Aharen-san, My Love Mix-Up!, and Tanaka-kun is Always Listless. It’s less full-on wacky than some of its forebearers (Azumanga Daioh and, indeed, Takahashi herself), with more of a chill hang-out focus, but it still got consistent laughs out of me in every scene—this might be the first two-episode drop during premiere season that I’ve thought of as a gift rather than an added trial. Umeki has so far kept it restrained on the experimental animation front, staying more with the homages to that 80s slapstick style, but there is a glorious exception in episode 2 that I both don’t want to spoil and that will hopefully mean good things down the line.

Because that is the lingering worry with this adaptation: it just doesn’t have a lot to work from. The original one-shot is only a few chapters long, and the follow-up book was a smattering of additional shenanigans rather than a continuation of the romance plot. It’s basically free real estate, which could be glorious or dire depending on who’s doing the work. The manga ends with Nakamura and Hirose on the first steps to friendship (or rather, Nakamura finally realizing they were already there), and I’m hoping the anime takes advantage of its extra time to explore that space rather than dragging out the time beforehand for 11 episodes.

As far as deeper themes, it’s playing with a deliberately light touch, but also a smart one. I’ve always liked that Nakamura vocally self-identifies as gay (at the end of episode 1, too, like it wants to get the normalized “I just happen to like this guy” setup down and then put emphasis on it), and episode 2 is deft at poking fun at the limitations of teen rom-com manga without spitting on the fun they can provide. It’s solidly a comfort watch with potential hidden depths at the moment, and one I’m happy to shout from the rooftops as worth your time.