Overcoming language barrier is one of the funnier free shows life has to offer, and I am glad to see it faithfully commercialized for a television audience in Tari Tari.

The scriptwriters overextended themselves in reproducing the average Japanese high school student’s English knowledge to include all its grammatical irregularities. I found it so humorous I repeated the episode multiple times just to hear Wakana say, “I don’t money!” in such a serious tone.

I don’t money!

This series is cute and adorable, and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. I would highly recommend it to anyone who does not feel bad laughing at a one-armed clown.

I have to admit saying positive things about anime is a foreign concept for me, so I’ll keep things short from hereon.

But if you want the negatives, I’ll lay it bare for all to see here.

The concept, while altogether strange, is nothing amazing. One girl wants to sing in the choir but is forced to take a bench warmer’s position due to a mishap from the year before, which supposedly stained the school’s prestigious name. So like many other teenage heroines before her, she does the only sensible thing and starts up a club of her own. Her attempt at blackmailing members into joining fails horribly by the third episode and she ends up wagering members on a game of badminton with the sole member of the badminton club. Sounds like a great generic slice of life story based in a Japanese school, doesn’t it?

To move onto the structure of the anime, I have to say the architecture feels a bit flimsy. Each episode begins with a flashback sequence of each of the main characters’ childhoods. They do not seem relevant to the story at the moment, and reveal nothing in the way of character development. It comes off as a bit pretentious, like a dying dog’s cry for attention. If this is P.A. Work’s attempt at setting themselves apart, they failed miserably.

The characters are all horribly deformed aberrations of their real high school counterparts. Everyone is full of positive upbeat energy, and seem to take all of life’s hardships in strides rather than tip-toes. I’m not a very big fan of angst, but this happy-go-sunshine-froot-loop universe tends to aggravate me more than a typical melodrama would.

Tari Tari is very fast-paced with two or three major events occurring within the first twelve minutes of every episode, which is a common problem with P.A.Works anime. I feel this is their method of compensating for lacking the qualities that make an anime legendary rather than a distant memory. I can understand the youthful vigor that they are trying to portray with the pacing, but I feel as if it is taking away from their anime somehow.

Overall, I believe this to be a good anime, but unfortunately that’s all it is.