mokudekiru

I finished watching Nobuta wo Produce a couple days into 2008, and let me tell you it was great. Released in fall of 2005, at first this appeared to be another typical high school drama (though, I’ve never actually run into an unremarkable high school drama… they’re all special in their own way).

The story:
There’s a new transfer student in school, a girl named Nobuko (Horikita Maki), who is quiet, awkward, kind of morose, and all-around creepy — greasy looking hair covers her face, she shuffles around, and avoids everyone. The most popular kid in school, Shuuji (Kamenashi Kazuya), has a calm, cool, and collected exterior, but on the inside is extremely bored with his life. Akira (played by Yamapi) is a crazy kid who decides to bother Shuuji until Shuuji accepts him as a friend. Akira and Shuuji decide their project is to make Nobuko into a popular girl, such as in Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and She’s All That. There were many similarities in these stories — they try changing her appearance, manner of speaking, etc. to make her “popular”. However, there were several significant differences from these classic western makeover stories:

1) Nobuko never becomes beautiful. She cuts her hair, tries changing her clothes (but ultimately sticks with her original clothes), she never stops stuttering, and never acts kawaii. There was no scene where she spends a day shopping, going to hair salons, getting makeup, and comes out looking fabulous. She tries all of those things at times, but in the end the look that suits her the best is what she’s comfortable in.

2) Nobuko never ends up with Shuuji. You know from the first second of the show that she is going to fall in love with him, and after about 3 or 4 seconds that Akira is going to fall for Nobuko, but all of these relationships are left entirely in the potential form. The characters’ feelings for one another drive them to act the way they do, so the direction of the plot results from these feelings, but there is no final love story that wraps up the whole show. In fact, Shuuji and Akira end up being separated from Nobuko — we see the depth of friendship between the three of them, but the fact that Nobuko doesn’t need them anymore is a measure of their success in teaching her to have confidence.

3) Nobuko is able to achieve true popularity without changing herself. The other kids grow to like her, even in her quirkiness. Nothing is superficial about her popularity, so she never has an existential crisis about, “look what I sacrificed to gain popularity,” since she has not really changed herself at all.

4) Way more cute pigs. “Nobuta” is a nickname for Nobuko, and “buta” = “pig”, so almost everything in the show is pig themed. In a couple of episodes, the trio decides to make a bunch of little keyholders in the shape of these cute pink pigs, which catch on at school and become a huge fad. Shuuji’s mom brings back little pig paperweights or something from a trip as omiyage, and these pigs become the symbol of the trio’s friendship.

5) It was kind of surreal. Luck, spirits, superstition, and dreams play a major role in some episodes. Examples: there are these kids at school who help out the trio in the culture festival, who turn out to be ghosts of former students — everyone just seems to accept this as normal. At one point, four of the characters have the exact same dream at the same time, so they all rush to school (the location of the dream) and make sure everything is okay, but some remnants of their dream seem to be lingering in the real world — weird stuff, that again, everyone seems to accept.

6) Akira’s manner of speaking is ridiculous. You probably have to know Japanese in order to understand this, but he ends almost every sentence he utters with なんだっちゃ for emphasis, which is… well it sounds really stupid. If there were an english equivalent, it would perhaps be ending every sentence with, “zors” or something. Yamapi is really ridiculous.

7) The theme song to Nobuta, “Seishun Amigo” is pretty catchy too. I sang it last week at karaoke ^_^

Anyway here are some stills:

Akira (Yamapi) and Shuuji (Kamenashi). I really do think Kamenashi looks like a death god — if he showed up in the middle of the night I would probably die of fright. But by day, he’s just a classic KAT-TUN prettyboy.

Nobuko in her natural posture. The guys want her to cut her hair, and she points to a store with extremely ugly clothes, and says, “Could you wear those clothes?” “I wouldn’t be caught dead in those…” “That’s what cutting my hair would be like.” So the guys wear the clothes, and convince Nobuko to cut her hair.

Cutting this creepy doll’s hair for practice (yes, at a salon). Yamapi also looks stupid!

And, bonus bento shot:

At the beginning, Shuuji is dating this girl, Mariko (Toda Erika). She makes bento for him every day, brings it to school (or cooks it there) and the two of them eat in one of the cooking schools at room. Oh bento….

However, the best thing about this show is possibly the phrase I learned. Whenever she was lacking in confidence, Nobuko would say,

野ブタパワー
注入！
(Nobuta power! Infusion!)

Which is just pretty great. Some dude compiled a video of a bunch of times she does this (starting with the first time Akira comes up with it). I think it’s gonna be my new power-up as well.