Review:
With a plethora of ‘cute’ this season, School Babysitters is something of an interesting find. While it certainly is going for the whole cute aesthetic with the overly chibi styled toddlers (who for some reason aren’t growing despite the older characters moving into a new school year) this show is kind of differentiating itself in more ways than just having a primarily male cast rather than the usual cute girls in middle-school.
It distinguished itself back in episode 1 when after overloading the viewer with sugary sweet moments it hit us hard with the emotional fall-out of Ryuichi and Kotaro dealing with the recent loss of their parents in a way that actually felt like real human drama rather than a cheap appear to our tear ducts. And after a couple of reasonably generic type episodes, we find ourselves with episode 4 where they finally address what Ryuichi is missing out on because of his commitment to the babysitting club (which wasn’t exactly his choice even if he doesn’t resent doing it).
It’s a nice moment, not overly dragged out, and serves the purpose of making our usually nice and happy protagonist feel like a very human character. These small moments cropping up every now and then in amongst the excessively sweet rest of the show make it just that little bit more interesting than if the show just engaged cute mode from start to finish.
I do want to come back to Kotaro and Ryuichi’s relationship later (probably in a feature) and the dream Ryuichi had while suffering a fever (what is it with cute shows and fever’s this week). Whichever way, this show is definitely staying on my watch list which given it is a slice of life/high school thing featuring toddlers in lead roles greatly surprises me and makes me wonder if I would have kept watching this in a stronger season. Yet, I don’t think I’m watching this from lack of options. I actually think I am enjoying this simple story because of how they handle those moments of real human drama.
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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