koepp.jerald - 2015-07-10 02:21:40

I found this series overall enjoyable but I do wish there was more romance instead of dialog in this one.

ratke.sasha - 2015-01-02 08:41:25

[Note: This is a rewrite of a previous review in an attempt to simplify or cut back excessive material. It is also old.]

This is porn.

Don’t get me wrong, lots of anime out there come close to that word as well, but My Sister Is Among Them (or Nakaimo for short) is a perfect example of when a show crosses the boundary between art and an exploitation.

Riding off of the success of things like Oreimo (Also making no attempt to hide it, due to the show sign being light neon green text with a white border), Nakaimo follows a young man whose father happens to be a higher-up in an important company, and he also happens to have passed away. At the funeral, his son hears a voice claiming to belong to his little sister, even though he has none. The voice tells him to find her after the funeral and that she wants to marry him. Their conversation is cut short due to circumstances, and few years later, the young man transfers to a school where various girls claim to be his little sister. So it’s up to him to find out which one is telling the truth and which ones are just trying to get into his pants.

I’ll get the production values out of the way quickly since there’s no point in exploring aspects that the staff obviously didn’t even care about. The bits of music in the show are nothing special, and the animation isn’t exactly horrible but it’s still nowhere near decent. So production’s not riding so hot already, though unfortunately that’s the least of our problems.

This show is designed, constructed, manufactured, and sold as an ecchi show, meaning you’re going to get the same stereotypical aspects of one. The cardboard viewer-projection main character in the middle of a slew of cliched girls who don’t exist without their mad desire to be the lead’s love toy. The expected content and situations are as contrived as you could imagine, with girls competing to act like the best type of little sister for the guy, or when someone’s dress spontaneously comes undone so she can press up against the boy to hide herself, or when a guy-turns-out-to-be-girl lounges around completely naked in slower scenes while the camera slowly explored her various positions. An entire episode is dedicated to getting every girl onscreen into a cat-maid waitress outfit. Many times out of nowhere, girls undo their clothes at the drop of a pin in an effort to force themselves onto the protagonist. We can go from one scene with sexualized gym uniforms while two girls argue about how much they want to have sex with the boy whilst pressing their racks against him, to a girl sprawling completely naked on his apartment bed presenting her perfectly focused and fully rendered tits and nips. It’s guaranteed that you will see every girl in the show in a two minute bathtub scene dedicated to topless nudity for your viewing pleasure, partnered with a sad monologue about their cup sizes and an occasional squishy sound effect.

The script does not hesitate whatsoever in putting characters (or I could just call them what they’re made to be and say various sizes of walking breasts) into as many situations as possible to flaunt their bodies and blush and squirm and reveal their hidden pervertedness. Cinematography focuses purely on sexual aspects with commonplace ecchi shots to display eroticism in the easiest way. The result is five hours of unrelenting effort to shove sexy girls doing sexy stuff in sexy ways so their audience can get hard. Plain and simple exploitation, sometimes with explicit content, appealing to the lowest common denominator: a dick. Sounds like porn to me.

If you do happen to be a fan of ecchi, you may see nothing wrong with this. Infact, I may have actually given you the perfect description of the show you should watch next. If that happens to the case, you might want to abandon the review right about now.

It should be evident from the sardonic overtone in those last few paragraphs that ecchi is not my favorite genre, and it may or may not be the case that its very existence as a genre of anime appalls me. I can handle most accounts of plain and simple fanservice in stuff like Gurren Lagann or Evangelion, but a subcategory of shows dedicated to the effort of selling sexy women for the gaze of the horny adolescent watching is just ridiculous to me (and I do say sexy women because I cannot find one show that was excessively hell bent on exploitation of males in comparison to the hundreds of shows that effortlessly showcase females to extreme levels). It’s a sexist, pointless, easy cashgrab genre that rides on escapism and unhealthy pleasure fantasies to continually produce the same shows over and over again, and by now it’s just an annoyance to me. It’s not hard to turn on a bunch of teenage guys, it’s not hard to animate a pair of bouncing boobs and pantyshots, and it’s certainly not hard to dress up a bunch of girls in scenarios and outfits for fetish catering. It serves the safe crowd, shows what they want to see exploited, provides them with a temporary delusion to satisfy whatever they’re craving. Remind you of anything? Like…the porn industry?

Now of course there are always exceptions to the rule, and I can think of a couple anime under the “ecchi” tag that had a bunch of other merits besides being a simple turn-on. Despite the overwhelming fanservice, High School Of The Dead offers a fast-paced, entertaining action story and at least some definitive characters with actual personalities. It also put a lot of effort into the music and the animation alongside the ecchi aspects, all thanks to a competent directing job from Tetsuro Araki. Both Panty And Stocking and Kill La Kill focused more on aspects of absurdity and creative visuals way before they tried to tease the audience with their eroticism, which mostly ended up being too sketchy or simple to be effective for an audience that wanted it. And again, great attention is brought to the script and the music, so obviously there’s a much wider effort put into these shows than just pandering to the easy crowd that wants pure lewd material.

Nakaimo is the type of show for that. While the mystery of which girl is really the sister does actually develop in an interesting way in that all of the girls are just trying their best by using different methods, manipulation, or secret plans to convince the boy that they’re the real one.  But by the end of the show I couldn’t see it as anything more than a means to get material out of the entire cast of boobs- erm, characters. It’s just an excuse to objectify the cast and exploit whatever they had for the audience, instead of attempting to write a genuine plot. The massive infodump at the very end of episode 12, spelling everything out even though not a lot adds up, should make it perfectly evident that the anime was focused elsewhere.

Overall, I thought Nakaimo was tasteless and disgusting. Even though an actual story was present, the complete lack of care taken into the way it unfolded didn’t impress me in the slightest. The most I can give this show is that the animation isn’t horrible, and that’s kinda sad, isn’t it? In the end I hate it plain and simple, and I’d easily tell anyone not to bother with it.

I give this anime a score of 2.4/10 (1 star), and a Highly Unrecommended rating.

kemmer.justine - 2014-10-17 17:59:44

I had forgotten about the horror that was Nakaimo. I can't tell you here how bad it was, just watch it for yourself.

eduardo.corkery - 2013-05-22 09:19:55

WHO IS IMOUTO may indeed by an absolute joy of a schoolyard complex mystery cartoon, full of depth and complexity and tits, but what I really enjoy about the show is how well it reflects the cultural values I hold dearly.Cultural Value 1: Strong belief in purity before marriage.Our main character, like any growing young man with urges that are totally natural but should be prayed out of you every Sunday, fantasises about being together with these ladies. However, WHO IS IMOUTO values the sanctity of marriage above all else. He doesn’t try to make a move on any of the ladies to devalue them in the eyes of the Lord, nor do his delusions suggest he wishes to. Instead, the End Game is to get married. It’s then, and only then, do they get into bed and get down to making 16 babies to carry on the strong family tradition.Cultural Value 2: Women who understand their role in raising a familyI could not imagine a cast of girls with a greater education and upbringing than the ones on display in WHO IS IMOUTO. Each of their goals in life is to be the perfect wife. The girl with the spirally pigtails may indeed take part in swimming, but this is clearly to perfect her body for childbearing, rather than going to compete in that multicultural scumhouse the Olympics. The girls in the café are learning how to cook for their husbands. They may treat their customers as brothers, but this is their method of bringing up the importance of family and their ability to provide for it. There’s even a girl whose desire to help childbearing is so great she is already trying to read up about it and practice. Such devotion to strong family values brings a tear to my eye.Cultural Value 3: Anti-faggotI was worried in an earlier episode when it appeared that WHO IS IMOUTO would fall foul of the faggot loving world we live in today when another male character tried to make a move on the main character. I was stroking my shotgun in a totally non-Freudian way in preparation for such a horrible deed. Imagine my relief though when it turned out they were a girl all along. The other characters in the show were equally worried, but took a more pro-active approach and have started to cure him. That totally works by the way. I went on one of those gay curing camps once, where we undertook activities like mutual masturbation sessions and The Curing Dungeon where the Gay was beaten out of us by a man in a black mask and speedos. I can assure you that I most definitely do not have the Gay anymore.Cultural Value 4: Strong Family ValuesMost importantly of all are WHO IS IMOUTO’s strong family values. The whole incest angle is just a metaphor for the importance of maintaining our cultural values in today’s society. IMOUTO is the importance of keeping our values within the family, much in the same way the main character has to keep his father’s business, and with it maintaining the family traditions that have been passed down through our forefathers. We must cast aside our sexual deviances and embrace IMOUTO. We must cast aside our sins and come together under IMOUTO.WHOISIMOUTO?http://thecartdriver.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/imouto.jpgIMOUTOISGOD