English Dub Review: Maesetsu! Opening Act “Comedy!”;”Thrills!”
Overview (Spoilers Below):
Mafuyu, Fubuki, Rin, and Nayuta are all big comedy fans, but they have a long way to go before they’re going to be able to compete professionally with their competition. When Mafuyu’s younger sister Manatsu needs them to step in as an act in her high school’s cultural festival, the girls volunteer with gusto! Their opening air band routine kills, but when Mafuyu tries an old impression gag, the audience doesn’t come along for the ride.
The four of them have to decide if comedy is something they’re really into and want to pursue. There’s a big competition coming up, and the girls decide to play a smaller show with the four of them in order to get some practice. They find a venue at the Baron, a cafe they can turn into a comedy club for the night, and work hard to sell tickets and get the word out. Their acts go off well, but there’s still plenty to polish up before they can hit it big!
Our Take:
Funimation dropped the first two dubbed episodes of Maesetsu! Opening Act today, with the rest of the season coming early next year. The show originally came out way back in 2020, so it’s taken a while for these girls to get the full English dub makeover. What’s it all about and was it worth the wait?
It’s a bit more complicated than you might think! On the surface, it seems like a simple enough premise: a comedy about four girls who do comedy. But the truth is that this really isn’t a comedy, at least not if these first two episodes are anything to judge by. And that’s because of the fact that Maesetsu! Opening Act just isn’t very funny. Even though the show revolves around two pairs of comedians, they are young and just starting out. Couple that with the fact that many of the jokes seem to get a bit lost in translation and you’re left with a pretty standard slice of life that’s much like other recent shows of the same nature, like Yuru Camp or Anima Yell, where a group of friends are trying out a hobby.
What sets Maesetsu apart is that these aren’t just high schoolers in a school club. They’re all recent high school grads, and two of them are already in college. That puts the pressure on them a bit more when it comes to success, because they don’t really have time to afford to be playing around with something they aren’t super serious about. That’s not to say that the characters act any more mature than a typical slice of life set in high school, but the option is there should the writers want to go deeper.
The first episode does the ground work of introducing the cast, focusing mainly on the first pair: Mafuyu and Fubuki. Mafuyu is the standard anime protagonist, full of energy but a very silly energy. Fubuki is the down-to-earth member of the ground who wears glasses. They met three years ago and eventually became the clowns of their high school classroom. But they haven’t really progressed much since then, and Mafuyu is still trying the same unfunny bits that her ex-teacher remembers fondly.
In the second episode, we get to learn more about Rin and Nayuta. They also met in high school, when a teacher was asking about different activities for the class. They were the only two who voted for comedy. Together, they formed RDeco and began to hone their craft. But while Rin was serious about it, going so far as to enroll in a school for comedy, Nayuta wasn’t so sure. They went on a bit of a hiatus before eventually regrouping with renewed vigor. Long story short, they have a lot of history, and their part of the comedy night is definitely funnier than Tokonatsu’s. It revolves around a bank robbery gone wrong, where the teller talks the robber into opening an installment savings account instead. It was enough to put a smile on my face, which was the closest I came to laughing throughout the two eps.
In terms of the production quality, things are pretty good. The animation isn’t anything to write home about, but the character designs are cute and memorable enough. (As long as you can ignore the fact that these supposed high school graduates look like middle schoolers.) The pacing is slow so far, and despite devoting a lot of time to talking about comedy, the jokes, when they do happen, aren’t very funny. It’s hard to know for sure if this is the fault of the original script, the dub translation, or a combination of the two. Looking beyond the script, the rest of the dub is excellent. It’s harder to get a pitch-perfect cast when you have four main characters, but NYAV Post did a great job here. Mafuyu is given the right amount of youthful energy by Madeline Dorroh, Jackie Lastra sells the character of Fubuki nicely, Remi Joseph sounds completely natural as Rin, and Xanthe Huynh turns in a solid performance as Nayuta.
Overall, after these first two episodes, this is kind of a tough one to recommend at this point. It’s definitely not funny, but it’s also not really that interred in exploring the girls’ lives outside of their comedic aspirations so far. If the series gives more development to the characters themselves instead of just their comedy acts, I can see it turning into a fun enough watch for slice of life fans, but that’s about as far as I’ll go right now—it may be all about comedy, but it’s certainly not very funny.
