English Dub Review: Pretty Boy Detective Club “The Pretty Boy on D. Hill (Part 1)”

Overview:

The student council vice president Wana Naganawa is involved in a hit and run. She was going to run for president but has to drop out now. The detective club thinks this might have been on purpose so they are on the case! The plan is to have Mayumi run for president to try to find the culprit.

Our Take:

I ended up being way more interested in this show than I thought I would be. My favorite anime series is Monogatari which is written by Nisio Isin who happens to write this as well. This show is also animated by studio Shaft who animate that series as well. I am actually surprised I wasn’t following this show from the beginning. There were certain parts of the episode where I thought to myself “This reminds me of Monogatari” now I know why.

I thought the background in the club room for the pretty boys was absolutely beautiful. It creates an interesting contrast to the normal and boring classrooms that are presented later. This show does suffer from the typical main character syndrome. If you saw Mayumi in class with her peers, you would know she was the main character just by how unique her design is. Having said that the character designs are really unique and interesting… for the main characters at least.

I really enjoyed the voice acting for this, which is good cause there is a lot of monologuing. Suzie Yeung voices Mayumi and I wasn’t really surprised when I read that. Suzie has gotten a lot of lead roles and I had a feeling it was her when watching this. Mayumi is an interesting character and Suzie gets across her “Sherlockian” deductions really well.

I was worried about jumping into the tenth episode of something but this show does mini-arcs and I was able to pick it up pretty quick. There were still some things I was fuzzy on and definitely can see myself watching all of this. I love Isin’s writing and it shines here. It was only one episode and I could pick up on that.

This was just the first part of an arc so it does end on a cliffhanger. I am definitely coming back to this one even though I don’t think I’ll be covering it beyond this episode. It was really interesting and whenever Shaft and Nisio Isin come together it’s something that shouldn’t be missed.