While I’m not terribly familiar with the manga series A Couple of Cuckoos, this new promotional video advertising the upcoming anime adaptation doesn’t fill me with confidence.
In the first subtitled promotional video for the April 2022 series, we learn quite a bit about this romantic comedy, including some major story beats and the primary cast and crew. If you’re like me and are also not totally familiar with this series, let’s start at the beginning.
Originally a manga series created by Miki Yoshikawa, the series began its serialization in Weekly Shonen Magazine in January 2020 and has already published ten volumes in Japan as of January 2022. In the series, the main character is a high school boy named Nagi (played by Kaito Ishikawa) who is informed that he is not actually related to the family that raised him because of being switched at birth in the hospital. While on the way to meet his actual biological family, he runs into a girl named Erika (played by Akari Kito) who is trying to escape from an arranged marriage. It isn’t until later that our main characters, Nagi and Erika, realize that they were the ones switched at birth and their parents want to fix things by having them marry each other.
As for the anime adaptation, Shin-Ei Animation and SynergySP are going to jointly produce the animation with Hiroaki Akagi serving as chief director and Yoshiyuki Shirahata serving under him as director. Yasuhiro Nakanishi will write the scripts and Aya Takano will provide the character designs. Crunchyroll has already licensed the series for simulcast outside of Asia.
Labeled as a rom-com, that promotional video definitely gave me some harem anime vibes (particularly with one character thinking out loud about how she’s not actually related to her brother). I’m always open to being surprised, particularly as this series has been pretty heavily praised by Japanese fans, but let’s just leave it at, I have concerns.
Source: Otaku USA
