This is the perfect example of what the word "trolling" actually means, and it's given us the best premiere yet this winter.
I'll be honest; before today I wasn't even aware Kotoura-san existed. It's after I saw it popping up on other blogs that I wondered why I hadn't heard of it before, and then I remembered that I passed it over when I was doing research for the season and brushed it off without a second thought. There's so many comedies airing this winter, and the summary for this one didn't particularly stand out, so imagine my surprise when I tried the episode out and was blown away.
Had I not known beforehand that this was supposed to be funny, the first ten minutes of the premiere could have fooled me, and I'm sure they fooled plenty of people, which was the point. From the first scene we have a depressing atmosphere as a lone girl walks to school with deadened eyes, and we're immediately flashed back to witness her
life story. We're introduced to our protagonist from the moment of her birth,
Haruka Kotoura (
Hisako Kanemoto), a happy little girl with the strange ability to read other people's minds. It starts out small, guessing what's for breakfast or what her
jan-ken-pon opponent will choose, and as a child she easily blurts out whatever she hears, wondering why it is that people say one thing but think another. As she gets older, things get complicated. Her friends at school don't like the fact that she can tell when they're lying, and to cover their lies up they point the blame at her. Before long, Haruka's mother gets concerned phone calls from the school that Haruka may just be a compulsive liar, and it
drives her insane looking for a cure to her daughter's problem.
I have never before cried in the first episode of any series, and
Kotoura-san has robbed me of that small bit of pride. The problem escalates as Haruka's father, never a family man, is distanced even further, and the naive Haruka accidentally reveals that both her parents are having affairs. She's ultimately
abandoned to her grandfather, her mother cursing the child's very existence. Afterwards she is unable to make any friends, and she lives a life of perpetual loneliness, always shunned because she invades the privacy of other's minds. It's clear that little Haruka is broken, destroyed, and the happy little girl who she was is gone. Yet when she transfers and meets
Yoshihisa Manabe, an honest and weird boy in her class, her gloominess is symbolically
shattered and the color floods back into her world.
Call it a cheap trick, a hook, or whatever else you will, but what this episode tried did the job and the fact that Kotoura-san even managed to pull it off as well as it did proves that the series holds potential to be far more than just another comedy. The simple artistry of that moment as the darkness breaks away is trolling (and good directing) at it's finest, and it's only once the color is back that the opening starts to roll. Let what comes come, this was one of the best premieres for an anime in recent memory and it accomplished what it set out to do wonderfully; it hooked us all and made us care in less than twenty minutes, setting itself up for the much needed lightheartedness that the second half presents.
Even with the lights back on, Haruka is still a tormented individual, and Manabe is exactly what she needs to overcome her demons. His
perverted and honest nature allow him to accept her regardless of how much she may intrude into his thoughts, and he's a genuinely kind person who really finds her to be interesting and cool. Sure, he's convenient, and the depressing circumstances leading to their meeting is forced, but it doesn't matter because by this point we already care for Haruka, and we want to see her happy (which, considering the fact that her mother appears in the opening and ending, will probably be difficult to achieve). In any case,
Kotoura-san's premiere was stellar, and it's hard not to hope for more in the coming weeks.
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