I think Mission: Yozakura Family is pretty much the definition of a mid-tier Weekly Shounen Jump property. Middle of the rankings (usually), middle of the ToC (usually), middling volume sales, middling reviews. Of course mid for WSJ is still pretty big for anybody else. As such it’s a surprise it took this long for Yozakura-san to get an anime – it places solidly in the top ten for most chapters of all WSJ series at the time of adaptation premiere.
Late or no, an anime we do have. Kind of a mid one, unsurprisingly (at Silver Link) though with a very solid director in Minato Mirai. I have a pretty mixed record with WSJ myself, and Yozakura-san Chi no Daisakusen is not a series that ever made much of an impression on me. And the premiere didn’t either, if I’m honest. Sometimes Jump manga are just too dumb to click with me, and this is one of those. The whole premise and cast are so utterly silly that it would have to be a lot more charming than in is (or embrace the absurdity more than it does) to keep me hooked.
In short, we have yet another kid orphaned by a traffic accident (seriously, you’d think Japan has the worst drivers on the planet). He’s become so terrified of abandonment in the wake of losing his family that he shuts everyone out apart from his childhood friend Mutsumi-san. As it happens Mutsumi is part of a spy family (not that spy family) and her incredibly creepy older brother is posing as the vice-principal in order to “protect” her. Once the decides to eliminate Taiyou (the kid) as a threat, all hell breaks loose and he winds up being saved by another one of her older siblings, who says the only way to save himself is to marry her (which in the Yozakura family you can do by the mere act of donning a special ring, conveniently enough.
None of this really worked for me. The cartoonish siblings, the spy tricks, the siscon older brother, the resolution. None of it it really interesting or funny – just a ridiculous conceit foisted on the audience in the interest of kickstarting a plot. Still, this series has shown enough to avoid the axe for 27 volumes and counting, and Weekly Jump action series are notoriously slow (and often misleading) starters. So I’ll treat this ep as the cold open and check out one more to see what the actual story is like, but I’m not expecting to have a whole lot of patience.
