As a romantic comedy anime,A Couple of Cuckoosface lots of strong competitors in this Spring 2022 season. Well-known titles likeKomi Can’t Communicateand newcomers likeShikimori’s Not Just A Cutiehave become fan favorites for the genre, and are still going strong with each new episode.
That being said, the first episode ofA Couple of Cuckooswas actually quite good. It managed to do its job as an entry point for the viewers while introducing the characters and establishing the premise properly. So the question now shifts to whether the series keep this momentum going.
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Previously on A Couple of Cuckoos
In the first episode, fans are introduced to Nagi and Erika, teenagers who were switched at birth. When both of them grow into high schoolers, their parents decide that the best course of action is for them to simply get married to each other.
That way, both can be the children of their biological parents and the parents who raised them at the same time. There were some chaotic moments throughout the episode, but in the end, both Nagi and Erika seemed at least willing to give the confusing relationship a try.
I Won’t Marry You
In the second episode, Erika decides to visit Nagi’s house. Since she is a daughter of ridiculously wealthy parents, she is not familiar with the middle-class way of life. So there arecountless hilarious moments resulting from Erika’s confusionand misunderstandings of how various things are supposed to work. It all ends up with Erika saying she doesn’t want to marry Nagi.
After that, she also wishes to meet Nagi’s parents, who are her biological parents. So they visit their restaurant and have some simple meals. Nagi spends the whole dinner worrying about whether a high-class girl like Erika would enjoy such an unsophisticated meal. In truth, all she wants to do is to spend some time with her biological parents.
Minor Character Development
The best thing about this episode is the character development, particularly for Nagi, Erika, and Nagi’s parents. This episode shows the fact that despite being relatively calm throughout the first episode, Nagi also has a flustered and over-thinking side to him.
For Erika, this episode further emphasizes the fact that she is a highly impulsive girl, proven by the fact that she does not hesitate to invite herself to Nagi’s house and his parent’s restaurant despite having only met them once before. Other than that, it is also surprisingly hard for Erika to talk about her actual intentions. It may be justher being a tsundere, or it might also be who she is as a character, but that is another side of her that we get to see in this episode.
Last but not least is Nagi’s parents. The first episode painted them aseasy-going parentswho always go with the flow. Here, they turned out to be much more thoughtful people who genuinely care and understand their children. And that feeling is still true even to Erika, the daughter that they haven’t seen since birth.
Unnecessarily Slow Pacing
When a manga is adapted into an anime, the first episode is usually a faithful adaptation of the first chapter. Because more often than not, the first chapter of a new manga series has at least double the number of pages compared to any other chapter. This means there is enough story material in that first chapter alone for an entire first episode of an anime. The subsequent episodes are usually the condensed version of around two or more chapters per episode.
However, the second episode ofA couple of Cuckooswas adapted strictly from the second chapter of the manga. This means a material that only requires around 5 minutes to read has now been stretched into around 23 minutes worth of anime. That is why everything feels so slow and dragged from start to finish.
It is honestly quite an odd thing to do because there areplenty of materials from the original mangato cover, so there shouldn’t be any need to hold the character’s expression any longer than needed and extend the length and amount of inner monologues just to fill up the time. And yet they did it anyway.
There are some interesting character developments happening to some of the most important characters in this second episode ofA Couple of Cuckoos. However, the execution left a lot to be desired, especially considering there’s not really that much stuff going on in this episode. That being said, the overall story itself is still quite interesting to follow, so let’s hope the third episode will at least be better executed than this one.
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