K-ON!: Volume 2 Blu-ray delivers great video and decent audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
It's Yui Hirasawa's first year in high school, and she's eagerly searching for a club to join. At the same time, Ritsu Tainaka, a drummer, and her friend Mio Akiyama, a bassist, are desperately trying to save the school's light music club, which is about to be disbanded due to lack of members. They manage to recruit Tsumugi Kotobuki to play the keyboard, meaning they only need one more member to get the club running again. Yui joins, thinking it will be an easy experience for her to play the castanets, the only instrument she knows. However, the other members think their new addition is actually a guitar prodigy...
If you have kids in your local public school system, and if that public school system is anything like the one in Portland, Oregon, you are probably reeling from budgetary issues which have done everything from cut manifold teaching positions to significantly increasing class size. It's somewhat maddening to a person like myself, someone who makes his living both from writing and music, that the first classes cut always seem to be the Arts. That's certainly the case in many schools here, where old standbys like Band have become extracurricular activities and ones which require a hefty fee to be paid to even have your child participate in them. This kind of short sighted perspective which seems to think that a well rounded education needn't include the "finer" things like music or painting may come back to haunt us someday, and if for no other reason than that is celebrates the joy and camaraderie of making music, the weird little anime series K-On! gets my vote for "best subliminal message" ever in an anime. This sweet and sometimes bizarrely funny anime is being released in multiple volumes on single Blu-ray discs that each contain four episodes, as well as some relatively paltry supplemental material. Vol. 1 established the main characters, a gaggle of girls who want to reestablish their school's "Light Music Club," and took the girls through their first halting steps of learning various instruments and slowly getting to know each other. As was discussed in the review of that first volume, K-On! is not exactly the most complex anime ever released, but its very simplicity is extremely charming, and the series does very well within its limited scope. The best thing about K-On!, and something which repeatedly shows up in this second volume, is its odd but sometimes hilarious sense of humor, which spills out in both hyperbolic dialogue as well as some appealing visual approaches that give the entire series a somewhat surreal feeling at times. While nothing much ever happens in any given K-On! episode, and in fact over the course of the entire series so far, it's still a largely enjoyable ride and it of course posits a world where learning and playing music is an important part of being a fulfilled human being, something which deserves special accolades in this world where Arts education is increasingly becoming something rare and deemed unnecessary.
A good indication of K-On! wacky comedy comes in the first episode of this compilation, where the Light Music Club girls realize their club has not been officially recognized by the school due to them not filing the necessary paperwork (evidently bureaucracy is alive and well in the Japanese school system) and them also not procuring the needed faculty advisor. That leads to them approaching the school's music teacher, a reserved young woman named Ms. Yamanaka (though the original Japanese track typically identifies her only as "Sensei"). It turns out that Ms. Yamanaka was in the Light Music Club back in her own school days and is actually a proponent of death metal. When given a guitar (a Les Paul which she almost lasciviously strokes once it's in her hands) she morphs into everyone's worst idea of what a head banger is. The really funny bit in this episode, though, comes a bit earlier when Yamanaka realizes there's a photo of her from her childhood lodged in an album in the Light Music Club's room and she races to find it to prevent anyone from discovering her "dark secret" as a guitar shredder of pretty formidable propensities. Her dialogue as she runs down the hall darting all sorts of improbable obstacles in quite funny, something that sounds like it should come from a horror film as a Satan-possessed soul attempts to cover up its demonic symbiosis.
The show's inherent sweetness plays out through all four of this volume's episodes. Mio takes center stage, both literally and figuratively, as she's chosen to be the band's lead singer. But she also figures as the anchor for several episodes as various events cartwheel around her. This particular volume also contains a charming Christmas episode which manages to be heartfelt as well as just a little weird, in the best K-On! fashion, and there is a nice reference to the Japanese custom of visiting shrines at the dawn of the New Year to make one's fondest wishes.
While this is at its core a very sweet, mostly G-rated enterprise, parents of younger children may want to preview episodes for a few passing moments of what might be delicately termed as a sort of proto-fan service. In fact one of the show's theme songs celebrates the girls raising their skirts a couple of centimeters to guarantee their success on stage, and one episode has the comic subplot of Mio falling and exposing her underwear, causing her to become the object of a perhaps salacious attention from erstwhile fans. There's nothing actually shown explicitly and most of the humor derives from Mio's over exaggerated embarrassment, but that, along with elements like Ms. Yamanaka's (again comedic) transformation into something like a demon-possessed guitar goddess may require a bit of explanation to the very youngest viewers who will otherwise be enchanted by this series' gentleness and tuneful music.
The good news is even these very slightly questionable elements fly by at the speed of sound, and the basic show is as sweet natured as they come, with nice interplay between the four main characters, and in this set of episodes, their new faculty advisor. Each episode features some nice music and the episodes also have great verbal and visual humor that should delight younger audiences as well as adults with something of a goofy sensibility. This series may not be exciting in the traditional sense, but it's awfully good natured, and that helps it maintain a fairly consistent level of entertainment value.
I may have been a little unfair to the first volume of K-On!, or perhaps this second volume simply offered more colorful sequences, but while not really innovative or overly creative, this Blu-ray's AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1 looks really sharp and has nicely robust hues quite a bit of the time. The best elements are the "live performance" sequences, which almost look like they were culled from motion capture elements and which feature some bright colors and very sharp detail. There is still the tendency not to provide a wealth of facial detail at times and to sketch in backgrounds, but overall this is an appealing looking series that is well represented on this new Blu-ray.
As with the first volume of K-On! Bandai only provides two lossy tracks on this Blu-ray, the original Japanese track, and an English dub, both in Dolby Digital 2.0 mixes. While there's nothing really egregious to complain about in either of these tracks, and voice work is clear and consistent in both of them, as was mentioned in the review of the first volume of the series, a show emphasizing music the way this one does, the lack of a lossless track is fairly inexplicable. Both of these tracks are at the very least acceptable, but a lossless track would have certainly upped the musical elements at least, and every episode of K-On! has at least some musical elements. Mixes are virtually identical in both the English and Japanese dubs, and both feature very good to excellent voice work.
Maybe it just takes a little while to totally give in to K-On!'s inherent sweetness and goofiness, but I found myself quite a bit more captivated by this second volume than I was by the first volume of the series. The characters are enjoyable and distinctive, the humor is often quite winning, and the visual style, while fairly traditional, is colorful and nicely designed, albeit minimally at times. But best of all, this is a series about the joy of making music, and that element can't be underestimated. Anything that encourages kids (and dare I say parents and school administrators) to offer music education is a good thing, at least in my not so humble estimation. For that reason alone, K-On! is Recommended.
