Manabi Straight

[Zati]

Promo by Ryoumi - XviD
Promo by Ryoumi - h264

The story takes place in 2035, 30 years later from now. Because of the number of children decreases, many schools are in peril of continuance.
A student transfers to such a lifeless school, “Saio private high school”. What kind of wind will this active student, Amamiya Manabi, bring to the school?

AnimeNfo

http://www.animenfo.com/animetitle,3..._utopea_m.html
http://anidb.info/perl-bin/animedb.p...anime&aid=4125
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/ency...me.php?id=6789
http://www.ufotable.com/manabi/index.html
http://www.starchild.co.jp/special/manabi/

[Zati]

A new fansub group called Azai just released the first episode.

Episode 1v2 (h264) - Azai

[RyougaZell]

And here I thought this series was gonna get ignored.
I'll try first ep tonight.

[Ryllharu]

Azai was a surprisingly good quality for a come out of nowhere group. I've been hearing some good things about this series so far, but since no subs were out, I passed it off as a lost cause. Some encoding issues with left over artifacts when the screen suddenly turns black, but good quality otherwise.

As for the episode itself, I liked it. Manabi is really enthusiastic about school and I was getting vibes reminiscent of other school-comedy shows I've liked. The only thing that was a little jarring was when Yui Horie started singing, and the "Manabi voice" disappeared. It came off a little awkward.

[shinta|hikari]

This show reminds me a lot of Ichigo Marchmallow. Cute kids spending day to day, and has the same kind of comedy too. Manabi is great, her explosiveness makes a good contrast to the relaxing vibe of the anime.

[RyougaZell]

I saw Ichigo Mashimaro's first 4 eps, and bored me to death.
Manabi Straight made me laugh several times, so in my book its definitely better. I hope this group continues releasing it.

[Kraco]

This show reminds me a lot of Ichigo Marchmallow. Cute kids spending day to day, and has the same kind of comedy too. Manabi is great, her explosiveness makes a good contrast to the relaxing vibe of the anime.

Hmm... If that's true, then I might have to have a look at this after all. I wasn't intending to originally.

[Kraco]

The OP and ED of this series had quite nice melodies. And the percussion only tracks are always somehow fitting to the scenes.

Anyway, the ever reliable Anonymous released the ova:

OVA - Anonymous

It was rather interesting and much better than ovas of some other series. Although that's not taking much considering series like this don't have such a solid story and thus it's easy to introduce extra eps that still seem to fit. But nevertheless, it was decent. And the traditional ova fanservice was very mild indeed, which is probably a good thing considering what manner of a series this is.