Cast of "Seton Gakuen" -- Gakuen Soukan Zoo（学園壮観Zoo）

Well, thanks to some YouTube happenstance, I was able to catch the final episode for "Murenase! Seton Gakuen"（群れなせ！シートン学園...Seton Academy: Join The Pack!）, and subtitled, too. For obvious reasons surrounding us right now, I will no longer be able to meet my anime buddy for those Sunday get-togethers for the foreseeable future, although we might be able to finagle a more virtual solution, if he's willing to accept my idea. But in any case, it was a nice heartwarming finale with the high likelihood of a second season considering what I saw at the end. Still, the ending credits scene while everyone in the Cooking Club was talking seemed a bit incomplete due to the insertion of a generic happy instrumental that I'd never heard before which made me wonder if the producing studio had been under some pressure to get something sorted out pretty quickly.

As stated in that article, my big favourite of the opening and ending themes was the latter in the form of the oh-so-adorable "Ohkami Blues"（オオカミブルース）by Hina Kino（木野日菜）. However, in recent weeks, the opening theme has started to grow on me as well, as all of the characters go gallivanting all throughout Seton Academy.

"Gakuen Soukan Zoo" (Academy Spectacle Zoo) has got a good chunk of the main cast including Kino singing a farcical circus march which sets the tone for the zaniness of each of the episodes. It not only has a didgeridoo and tribal drums at the start but everyone: Haruki Ishiya（石谷春貴）as the long-suffering Jin Kazama, Yume Miyamoto（宮本侑芽）as the other human Hitomi, Misaki Kuno（久野美咲）as the poo-loving koala Yukari, Konomi Kohara（小原好美）as the ever-dying sloth Miyubi, and Sora Tokui（徳井青空）as the cat Kurumi really got into their animal noises throughout the song.

As with "Ohkami Blues", "Gakuen Soukan Zoo" was created by Shin Furuya（古屋真）and Yosuke Yamashita（山下洋介）. It might be a little too speedy and uptempo to be the official school anthem at Seton, but heck, it makes for a good descriptor of what Season 1 has been about.

Hina Kino -- Ohkami Blues（オオカミブルース）

My second article for a song debuting in 2020 is once again an anison, joining in with the catchy "Easy Breezy" of "Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na!"（映像研には手を出すな！）. The anime for this one is "Murenase! Seton Gakuen"（群れなせ！シートン学園...Seton Academy: Join the Pack!）which seems to be continuing with the humans-and-animals-doing-stuff-together theme from last season's "Africa no Salaryman"（アフリカのサラリーマン）. However this time, we go from the corporate office to the school classroom as all of the members of the animal kingdom get together in one school which turns out to be a true blackboard jungle.

One of the main characters is a cute female wolf by the name of Ranka played by seiyuu Hina Kino（木野日菜）. That name sounded familiar and it turns out that she was also the voice for Hanako Honda, one of the loony trio from the hilarious "Asobi Asobase"（あそびあそばせ）from the summer of 2018. Folks including myself were worried and entertained mightily by the lengths that Kino stretched her voice to near-Herculean levels. Although I think she also has her fair share of howling in "Seton Gakuen", it doesn't seem like that she will need to hit the Sucrets as much as she probably did in "Asobi Asobase". Strangely enough, one of her buddies at the school, the sloth-like Miyubi is played by Konomi Kohara（小原好美）, also from "Asobi Asobase".

Kino also takes care of the ending theme, "Ohkami Blues" (Wolf Blues), which despite its intimidating title will have listeners cuddling up and meowing like kittens. She's adorably off-tune and it's sung as if it were meant to be something to be played to the junior kindergarten set just before nap time. Heck, even near the end, Kino starts giggling a bit.

Shin Furuya and Yosuke Yamashita（古屋真・山下洋介）took care of words and music respectively. Unfortunately, it seems to be just the ending credits sequence for the original version for now (ahh...look below). Hopefully, a full version will come out in the next number of weeks, and certainly I wouldn't mind getting my own copy.

Hina Kino, Rika Nagae & Konomi Kohara -- Three Piece（スリピス）/Inkya Impulse（インキャインパルス）

As my anime buddy was telling me last Sunday, this season especially seems to be chock-filled with some crazy comedy. Of the ones whose themes I've covered on the blog, there are "Back Street Girls" and "Grand Blue" with their catchy tunes. Then, I discovered this one that my friend has not shown to me at his place; I only found out through YouTube. But before I introduce this one, let me preface it by saying that over the years from time to time, there seems to have been this sub-genre of anime which involves high school girls getting involved in all sorts of nutty antics.

For example, there was "Love Lab"（恋愛ラボ）in 2013 centering on a group of girls who start up a club on how to handle the art of l'amour.

A bit earlier in 2011, there was "Nichijou"（日常）which kinda reached near-Kafkaesque levels of humour.

Now, in Summer 2018, I managed to come across "Asobi Asobase"（あそびあそばせ...Let Fun Have Fun）, a title that has popped up frequently on YouTube over the past several weeks. I finally gave in to my curiosity and took a gander at a few of the videos. Frankly, I had to wipe up the saliva spray off the screen since I was laughing out loud at some of the insanity. As I said in the article for the "Love Lab" ending theme, my anime buddy seems to enjoy comedy but only to a certain level; if it gets too crazy, he loses interest. The fact that I have openly threatened to dislodge several internal organs on watching scenes from "Asobi Asobase" probably means that he will never show this. His loss.

"Asobi Asobase" seems to have elements from both "Nichijou" and "Love Lab" with some fortified anarchy to boot. I did end up getting up a copy of "Love Lab" through Amazon last year, so I wouldn't mind getting "Asobi Asobase" as well in the next several months.

To be honest, I'm glad that I immediately stumbled onto the scenes rather than the opening credits since the latter has cleverly cloaked the show as a super-cute slice-of-life anime based on friendship and learning about life. The three main seiyuu playing the Japanese equivalent of The Three Stooges, Hina Kino（木野日菜）, Rika Nagae（長江里加）and Konomi Kohara（小原好美）sing the sugary-sweet opening theme "Three Piece". As one commenter pointed out, this could be one of the most misleading opening credits sequences in anime history.

Rei Tanaka（タナカ零）was responsible for words and music for "Three Piece". Man, listening to the full version makes things even catchier and calming for me. It's almost like an opening theme with trap ambitions. Yes, let's relax for 30 minutes of meaningful conversations and splendid scenery, and enj...WHAT THE HELL?!

Of course, by the time viewers reached the end of Episode 1, the joke was out so the ending credits no longer had to put up pretenses. Instead, everything ends with the same seiyuu headbanging to some death metal and some cool graphics. "Inkya Impulse" is the title with Genki Mizuno（ミズノゲンキ）and Shuhei Mutsuki（睦月周平）behind its spawning. Ikepy & KSKN also feature in the song as well although I have no idea who they are.

Now, this sounds more like what "Asobi Asobase" really is in tone. Rock on! (I'm actually providing the devil horns with my hand as I type this...not easy to do) Mosh pit not included.

I will finish off with the very first scene that I saw that had me tearing up in laughter as much as Olivia did in disgust...for far worse reasons. All I can say is that all three seiyuu must need those throat lozenges regularly considering all the screaming that they have to do from episode to episode.

P.S. Konomi Kohara who plays the relatively least crazy Kazumi is a seiyuu that I remember from last year going into this year as she portrayed the adorable Kukuri in the updated version of "Mahoujin Guru Guru"（魔法陣グルグル...Magical Circle Guru Guru）.