If you are unfamiliar with this series see my reviews of the previous series, Minami-ke and Minami-ke Okawari for in depth knowledge. The franchise revolves around three orphaned sisters who continue on in a blissful way. Each sister is eccentric in her own way and they gather their friends around them to help fill the void of family they may feel. The idea of what happened to their parents or what their feelings for about their absence is never mentioned though. Okaeri carries on where Okawari left off about a year or so in the future. Nothing new has happened and the characters go through their day to day slice of life antics and bizarre logic problems. The series ends with no real completion and everyone continues along their blissful pathways.
This was both a good series and a bad one. I liked it above Okawari for the fact that they once again returned to the episodic vignette style of the original series. The character designs however stuck more closely with those done in the second series with the addition of prominent hairs framing the cheeks on almost every single character that looked like some kind of mandible…it was actually quite distracting. While the story telling style went back to my favored method they unfortunately ran out of interesting material to use it on. It took me a long time to get through the series just because it was pretty boring for most of it. They seemed to focus a lot on Toma and her older brothers as well as more antics with Mako/Makoto and his cross dressing habits. Yet it was still pretty dry. To my disappointment Hosaka’s screen time was reduced as was his sweating chest. But all in all the writing seemed to lack the pizzazz that it had in the other series’. While there were gems of humor within it, it also dragged on and on and on. The stories around the sisters were barely entertaining which is really what the show should be all about. I have not read any of the manga so I am unsure if it suffers from the same leprosy but I do know the creator, Koharu Sakuraba (also of Today in Class 5-2) that at least his continual anime projects seem to be loosing some of their flare. Where originally Minami-ke was funny and fresh, with odd ball humor it has now turned into a repetitious exercise in time wasting futility. They don’t really tread on old territory too much but it still seems stale non-the-less. Honestly, you can skip through a lot of this series, unless you feel like you need to spend more time with the sisters. It really didn’t get any better then the original show. There are two shorts that were released this year (2009) too, hopefully they are more entertaining.
So, if you liked the rest of the series and feel you just can’t live without seeing all of the characters again, doing new and this time uninteresting things then watch this 3rd and hopefully final installment of this slice of life comedy. If not, then you don’t really need to watch it, move on to something else and explore the world a bit more.
UPDATE: None of the Minami-ke titles have been licensed of released in North America. There was also a fourth and final TV series subtitled Tadaima which aired in early 2013. Stay tuned for the eventual review of this series.
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