Tenjho Tenge seems to have been produced in some kind of anime clean room, where all traces of real-world consequences and common sense were scrupulously excluded from the final product. In plain English: this is one of the most blissfully stupid shows you’ll ever see. No law of human behavior, logic, consequence or physics is respected for more than a few seconds at a time. When it is, it doesn’t really matter much, since the real reason for the show’s existence is to give us splendidly-endowed women and hunky-looking men whaling the tar out of each other over and over again.
Sure, people will say, but is there anything wrong with that? No, probably not, and I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I didn’t enjoy watching Tenjho Tenge and its copious chests. That said, I’m trying to approach these things like a critic and not only a fan, and I have a hard time saying yes to this when I’ve also been stumping for Kaze no Yojimbo and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (now in a second season that’s as good as the first) and Paranoia Agent and Berserk and Kino’s Journey — in short, other shows that in my mind are far more worth the effort to track down and watch, and often don’t get the audience they deserve.
When Souichiro and Bob (he's not the blond one) head to a new school, the last thing
they expect is to get fighting lessons from the butt-kicking Natsume Sisters.
Tenjho Tenge deals with two high school students, skilled in fighting, who come to a new school and plan on using their expertise to wipe the walls with the competition. Immediately the two of them run afoul of the elder and younger Natsume Sisters, Maya and Aya respectively, who have a great deal of skill all their own and haven been waging a war against other factions within the school’s walls. The first day at least one major and extremely bloody fight breaks out, with people being thrown out of windows and across campus, and somehow no one ever thinks to phone the police or even write a sternly-worded letter to anyone’s parents. (As in most anime, any parents that do exist here are as remote as the gods themselves.)
Not long after the first few messy battles, Maya and Aya take the two newcomers, Souichiro and Bob (yes, Bob), under their wings and help them prepare their sometimes-supernatural fighting skills for the upcoming war. From whence stems all this animosity between rival gangs, pray tell? The show spends more than half of its entire running time in a long, disjointed and not-very-edifying series of flashbacks (and flash-forwards, and flash-sideways, and flashbacks-within-flashbacks) filling us in on that. In fact, it spends so much time filling us in on details and motivations and backstory that somehow it forgets that all of this stuff should be actually interesting of its own accord. By the time it remembers to return to the present and finish telling the story, we feel like the exhausted tourists who signed up for one country and got six instead.
The levels of fanservice in the show border on the surreal (although never dull)...
Maya, the older of the two sisters, is an intriguing character: she can use her power to scrunch her body down until she resembles a six-year-old (ostensibly to keep legions of boys from hitting on her). She seems to do this as some kind of Charles Atlas-esque stamina-honing technique, and I feared that she would get so good at it that she would scrunch herself down to the size of an ovum and vanish entirely from the story. She of all the characters has the most coherent and accessible motivations, but they’re not in a story that really does them justice.
Like many anime before it, Tenjho Tenge is an adaptation of a manga, and this one has been produced by an artist with one of the best Japanese pen names ever: Ôgure Ito, anglicized as “Oh! great” — much as mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo derived his name from a Nipponization of Edgar Allan Poe. As you might expect from someone who pays as much attention to girls’ bodies as he does, Gureito actually got his start in the world of hentai manga. His art was and is outstanding — too good for him to remain ghettoized in porn, and soon he graduated into the mainstream to do the lush character designs for anime (Himiko-den) and to produce Tenjho Tenge itself.
...which in turn makes the incredibly arch and convoluted plot all the more confounding.
O!.G!. may be a gureito artist, but he’s a lousy storyteller. Aside from the show getting stranded for most of its running time in flashbacks, the rest of the show’s plot is terribly aimless and uninvolving. He also indulges in a thoroughly annoying trope that seems peculiar to anime — one where a character abruptly has a change of motivation that supposedly ties into some deep personal ambition on their part. This is usually seen in the form of the bad guy who spares a hero with the words: “I won’t kill you — an opponent like you only comes along once in a lifetime!” Sure.
I watched Tenjho Tenge more or less back to back with another series that looked great and was less filling: Burst Angel. That show at least had some inkling about the real-world consequences of what was going on — i.e., you can’t blow up half the city without a S.W.A.T. team showing up — but was so starved for real ideas about its characters that at one point it threw two of them back in time just to see what would happen and then never referred to that incident again. Tenjho Tenge is never quite that desperate, but only because the plot is so crowded with happenstance that a time travel episode would have barely stood out.
Tenjho Tenge's at least gorgeous to look at, which
makes it a good bet for distracted viewing and little else.
There are a few things about the show that make it worth the time if you’re not terribly picky. One is the marvelous art and character designs, which I’ve already mentioned. The other is that the show never succumbs to something I’ve seen other fanservice productions fall prey to: it’s not mean-spirited. I forgive a show a lot if its attitude is sprightly and it doesn’t seem to be operating more out of cynicism than anything else. So, yes, it's all kind of fun to watch, in a 3/4ths-of-your-brain-turned-off sort of way — but if you go that far down, you might as well turn off the rest and take a nap.
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I like the show so much. I wonder if they are going to make a another season of it soon.
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So many people complain about the flashbacks. I loved the backstory. It is true that it got in the way of developing the first characters you see, but it was an interesting way of getting one introduced to ALL the main characters and then going back to a time when some of them were just not in the picture.
This is necessary since a part of the storyline is this idea that things might have been different had Souichiro been there before.
Now, it is true that the rest of the story may not pan out to be worth all that prep time, but I find the complaint a bit bizarre coming from people who usually also say in the same breath that the story is brainless.
It is a story of relationships.
Anyhow, I love it but it appears it may be doomed, as I see very few positive reviews of it.
[The idea in the abstract isn't a bad one, but the way it's executed means that great swaths of the story are on hold for inordinate periods of time. And yes, when the rest of the story turns out to be a little thin to support that much setup, it's disappointing -- especially when there are other stories that are at least as good, or better, out there. --ed.]
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