Kyou Kara Ore Wa was originally a Japanese manga comic from the late 80s. In the mid-90s, it was made into a TV animation series. In 2018, it was adapted for TV. In 2020, a TV movie was released with the same cast.
Strangely set in a school background, Kyou Kara Ore Wa offers a lot of fighting and comedy. This was the first Japanese anime that I was genuinely interested in watching.
From today, I will be a delinquent
Like the beatniks, delinquents were a cultural trend in 80s Japan. At least, that is what the intro of the TV series says. The manga is therefore set in the 80s, my favorite decade. That means no mobile phones and the promise of pure entertainment.
The story is about three good guys and a hundred of bad guys. The first two good guys are Itou and Mitsuhashi from Nanyou high school. The third is Imai of Beni high school. The bad guys are all from Akehisa high school led by Satoshi and Sagara.
Itou plays the straight guy while Mitsuhashi plays the crooked one. The noble Imai is arguably the strongest. As he is not crooked like Mitsuhashi. This naivete and sense of fair play often gets exploited by his rivals (Mitsuhashi and Akehisa gang).
When a new academic year starts, new students come in. After a few days of fighting, a new pecking order emerges. Itou and Mitsuhashi join Nanyou as transfer students and quickly set up shop.
TV series
Itou and Mitsuhashi in the live action drama are almost exactly as in the manga.
Imai does not look like the manga Imai. This may seem disappointing at first. Rest assured that the live-action Imai is several times funnier and stronger than his anime counterpart.
The TV series is not a strict adaptation of the animation series, which closely adhered to the magazine comic.
Some characters are more developed, particularly Satoshi and Sagara.
A cowardly team of teachers has been introduced and they are extremely funny.
The girl leads are no slackers. They fight.
The TV drama series begin with a confrontation with a Yakuza gang and it ends with it. There is an extremely funny episode with no fighting in which Matsuhashi traps Imai in an abandoned building and forces the latter to eat banana peels among other things.
There is one special episode in which the noble Imai becomes a cool, calm and collected person. A jealous Mitsuhashi helps Imai get back to his dumb, unlucky and frustrated streak. There is no fighting. It was released with vignettes from previous 10 episodes and interviews with the actresses as a promotional episode for the movie.
Movie
There is a movie based on the characters in the TV drama series. The movie takes off after the TV drama had ended. Satoshi and Sagara have left Akehisa. A new gang of students from a neighbouring town attend classes in Akehisa as they had burned down their school. The new gang defeats Akehisa and spars with Nanyou. Unlike Akehisa, one of the new upstarts is not averse to using knives. Satoshi and Sagara return to even out the stakes. There is a massive fight with at least a hundred ‘students’ engaged in fighting.
Miscellany
The guy playing Mitsuhashi is Kento Kaku. He is very talented and can be extremely funny. I tried to see what else he has done. There is quite a bit. I saw three of them. They were all disappointing. Perhaps he was afraid of being typecast. There was one movie set in a taxi driver school in which he spoke very little. There was a supernatural drama series in which he appears as a ghost. No jokes. I saw half an episode. There was one drama where he sports an afro. It is so slow and the jokes so far apart that I lost all interest.
Female alternative
There seems to be an all-female complement called Majisuka Gakuen (Majisuka Girls High School) with main cast coming from from the idol group AKB48. It has less violence and will be attractive to bad girls everywhere. It also has less humour, which is again an attraction for girls because females usually have no sense of humour and prefer a lot of suffering and tears in their entertainment. The lead girl (in the first season) Maeda Atsuko is fighter but not a delinquent. She is a brooding good girl and seems to have a sad past. (I did not see it past the first two episodes.)
Recommended age rating: 18+