Tona-Gura

Tona-Gura (となグラ!) is a 13 episode romantic comedy based on the manga of the same name by Kakei Hidetaka.  The series originally aired in the Summer of 2006.

    After 10 years apart, Kazuki's childhood crush/neighbor Yuji and his family moves back into his childhood house, much to Kazuki’s delight. Kazuki has kept her love focused on Yuji all these years, pumping up his image as the perfect boy and her knight in shinning armor, but her dreams are crushed when he returns as the king of perverts. Now Kazuki, abhorred with her long lost love’s seemingly new personality, must try and come to terms with him or lose him forever.

    Tthis is a pretty standard romantic comedy series, with lots of ecchi joke and your typical miscommunication and misunderstanding between the main characters with all the supporting characters doing everything they can to make the main ones come to their senses. The one thing that really got me into this series was Yuji’s younger sister, Marie, who is incredibly quirky. The stoic and mature Marie brings it upon herself to control her brother’s perverted ways, by force. Clad in British style sailor outfits she is armed to the teeth in high tech pellet weapons, ready at a moments notice to dispense high RPM plastic fueled punishment on her brother for groping, thinking about groping, peeping and anything else that is deemed perverted. For the most part this reoccurring joke is actually pretty entertaining, especially at the end of one episode where one side character uses this revenge as a form of entertainment. With Marie near by she continues to flash Yuji, who is then cut down by a barrage of pellets from his sister, perched in a tree outside of the school.

    Aside from this the series is a standard one, but I found the characters to be very likable and near the end I was definitely rooting for them to get together. They go through their typical ups and downs, all stemming from misunderstandings and what not. The designs are typical but the art quality is above average for a TV series. The music is forgettable standard fare but by the end of the series I was sad to see the characters go.  In the world of male geared romantic comedies you need to come up with some sort of gimmick to stand out among the crowd. In all honesty that gimmick is what kept me watching Tona-Gura in the beginning.

    If you like the romantic comedies this is a nice, in the mold, light hearted one filled with a lot of light hearted ecchi humor and some bizarre characters, including a Japan-o-phile foreign classmate and the main characters carefree adventure seeking parents, who are absent for most of the series on a bizarre adventure. It’s not the best out there, but if you are in a pinch and need a quick romance fix this can hit the spot.

    The series was, surprisingly, never picked up for distribution outside of Japan.