境界のRINNE ep 01
Kyoukai no RINNE – 01

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

MAMIYA Sakura is a high school girl who can see the supernatural, including ghosts. She discovers her missing classmate, ROKUDOU Rinne, is actually a shinigami who is dirt poor and tries to solve supernatural problems for a living. When one of their classmates has a phone that gets mysterious calls, Rinne and Sakura investigate, leading them to find a ghost who died while trying to meet their homeroom teacher when he was a student. Their teacher has the ghost’s old gym uniform which allows the spirit to go to the afterlife. Rinne then sends a ghost chihuahua and ghost student who has a crush on Sakura to the afterlife.

Thoughts/Review:

I read and reviewed the first nine volumes of the Kyoukai no RINNE manga series, but I ended up dropping it because it was so underwhelming. However, for some odd reason, I thought I’d at least look at the first episode and see what was up.

I gave the manga to my nieces and nephews, the oldest of which really enjoyed it. However, that means that I don’t have the source manga to take a gander at to make comparisons. Oh well.

I will say that while I recognized these stories, which I’m fairly certain was a meshing of two or three different manga chapters, I actually found this episode amusing. I don’t know if it was because this was animated, or because of how the seiyuu did the voice acting. However, this surprised me since I hadn’t been that enamored with the manga.

One moment of humor that stood out for me was the “Megane” high school male ghost with some of Ataru’s personality from Urusei Yatsura.

Also, although I know that Takahashi-sensei has long used characters with starry eyes (Tobimaro and Asuka in Urusei Yatsura, for example), seeing Rinne’s and Sakura’s homeroom teacher with starry eyes made me think of SHOKUHOU Misaki from A Certain Scientific Railgun.

As a setup for the main characters of Rinne and Sakura, the episode works quite well. We understand Rinne and his job as well as Sakura and her role in this.

I’m not sure how I’m going to handle this series for future episodes. Base on the positive reaction I had to this episode, I do want to watch more. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get around to watching episode 2, which I see is already out and ready to roll.