Aishiteruze Baby Episode 01: It’s like Skip Beat for Men

Aishiteruze Baby is one of those shows that is fun to watch, but also delivers that shoujo drama feel that is kind of like a soap opera but not really. As far as soap opera-ey stuff goes, the show Passions (the soap where Charity got stuck in a closet portal to HELL) is one of my all time favorites for ludicrousness, whereas Aishiteruze Baby is legitimately good.

Basically the plot is no crazier than Sailor Moon, how is the idea of a young man forced to look after a small child in order to make him gain responsibility any harder to accept than a standard Nick Hornby novel plot? It’s realistic, but it points out its own absurdity with lampshading the tropes of shoujo anime and soap operas.

Kippei is a playboy who flirts with tons of girls, making his life story ripe for a Nick Hornby-like transformation from his immature teen boyhood into the responsibility of manhood. Seriously, if you’ve read as much Nick Hornby as I have, you tend to recognise a “scoundrel with a heart of gold” plot when you see one.

Kippei’s own teacher beats up on Kippei for him being both an idiot and a cad/bounder. He’s not exactly bright, he’s actually pretty dumb, perhaps a metaphor for “looks does not always equal intelligence”. He’s an empty pretty boy, but he genuinely cares about what other people think of him, and he also cares about other people, that’s why this show is called Aishiteruze Baby (which means “I Love You, Baby” in Japanese) and not American Psycho.

In this episode the characters of Kippei, Yuzuyu, and Kippei’s family are introduced, as well as the several girls that Kippei flirts with. It is established that none of these girls view him as a serious relationship potential partner – which is kind of sad, when you think about what this show says about what being a man is like in general – but most of the silly and young ones want him, whereas the mature and level headed Kokoro (I think that’s her name) doesn’t want that kind of man.

The atmosphere, excuse the visual pun, shifts from light and happy to kind of depressing very quickly between each other, forward and back again. It’s kind of like the mood swings I get from my medication which is meant to keep my levels of anguish from getting worse than they already are, but soon enough I’m on a high of happy fluffiness where I’m thinking “YEAH! Take that world!” when the next day it comes crashing down to a morose seriousness again. Such is the nature of Schrodinger’s Comedy, it’s in-between ultra-serious and comedy and you don’t know what it’s like unless you see it for yourself.

Anyway, Kippei discovers to his horror that his sister has offloaded the duty of looking after a very young female child onto him, because not only is Yuzuyu a cute plot device, she’s actually the character that underpins Kippei’s growth into a man during the manga series. I haven’t finished reading the manga, but I can tell you, from here, you’re in the hands of a good storyteller. I think. The anime might turn out different.

Further along Kippei starts having to take responsibility for making Yuzu’s lunch, in the form of rice balls. The rice ball covers the plot of the next three episodes, because the series tries to address the content of each volume of the manga within three episodes. This episode I feel expressed the initial confusion and despair at being a young senior high schooler being lumped with semi-parental responsibilities, if you’re a dude, you would understand that Kippei doesn’t feel this way because he’s an asshole, but because of the fact he thinks of himself as really, really inexperienced with these matters.

In the end the plot of this episode can be summed up with:

Irresponsible high school pretty boy cad -> Becomes Man-Mummy to small child who is his cousin (according to implied information in this episode, this is Kippei’s mother’s sister’s child, unless Kippei’s mother’s sister is adopted, Yuzuyu could well be Kippei’s cousin) -> Adult responsibility balancing with high school stumbles of youth ensue.

I highly recommend this series for both men and women to watch because it takes a fresh angle on shoujo. Oh, and one more thing. It’s not a loli anime, you sick, sick people.

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This review is Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved, images property of their respective owners.