Perabu! A Capella Love!?

ぺらぶ！ A cappella love！？

Company: Frontierworks
Based on:  Original
Released: 2011.06.22
Official Site: http://perabu.jp/index.html



Perabu!! A Capella Love!? is the story of 5 high school students who are suddenly told that from now on they are the school a capella club (or for schort, perabu). Oh, and that they have a performance in front of the entire school in exactly one month.

The person behind all of this is the rather eccentric music teacher Sakikabara Ryuunosuke (CV: Ono Daisuke) for reasons you'll hear at the end of the CD. Our five victems are of course all completely not interested in a capella and completely different types of people (although they at least seem to be familiar with each other).

Inoue Yoshiya (CV: Kimura Ryouhei) is the moodmaking of the gang. He is always in high tension and tends to make up words (for example he keeps using 'perabu' as a verb). Katagiri Hayato (CV: Hosoya Yoshimasa) makes the impression of being a delinquent, but is actually a great cook and overall housewife. Learned all of these things for the sake of his beloved little sister. Arisaka Keiichirou (CV: Maeno Tomoaki) always acts very serious, but actually loves cats and has his own cat-blog. Mitsunaga Chihiro (CV: Kakihara Tetsuya) is your standard much-too-popular-with-the-girls narcissist. And finally Tokieda Ayumu (CV: KENN) is always either sleeping or eating, and looking cute while doing so.

Story-wise this follows the pattern of a random group of unwilling people is thrown together to do something, problems must be overcome, and they succeed. Usually there is a "friendship bonds are formed" step somewhere in between, but these 5 were already pretty close. Perabu relies on the quircky personalities of its characters to make the story interesting. However this works only half of the time. While their quircks did make you laugh, it still feels like the 'story' is too simple.

However it gets bonus points for actually including the a capella song they were practicing. The last track consists of the song + everyone stating that they've come to like a capella and want to continue (surprise surprise)


Conclusion:
Perabu! certainly isn't a bad drama. It is actually pretty funny and the quirky characters are very lovable. Yet it feels like it could have been so much more. Despite the funny take on things the plot is just too thin, literally almost everything is predictable from the start. Hopefully they'll improve this a little for the next entry in the series.