Review: Kenichi - The Mightiest Disciple

From childhood, Kenichi Shirahama has had a very strong sense of justice.  One day while walking home from school, he sees a bunch of street thugs threatening a beautiful girl, so he decides to rush in and save her.  Unfortunately, he has no idea what he's doing, so the thugs make fun of him and push him away.  As they are about to beat him up for being a hero, the girl takes off her glasses and gracefully kicks the stuffing out of  the thugs.

It turns out the girl, Miu Furinji, was raised at a martial arts dojo with her grandfather and 5 other masters of various martial arts.  After finding out Kenichi is merely getting picked on in the school's karate club instead of trained, Miu offers to bring him to her dojo so the masters can train him.  Hilarity ensues as the masters train Kenichi using methods that seem very much like torture.  (It's funnier than it sounds, I promise).  The rest of the series follows him as he continues to train to be the best, while fighting off a local gang, Ragnarok, who want to at first recruit him and then destroy him as he continues to grow in strength.


Much like Naruto, Bleach, or DBZ, this show is mostly about fighting and getting stronger.  One big difference is that unlike everyone on the other shows, Kenichi has absolutely no talent.  His enemies tell him, his masters tell him, and I'm pretty sure he tells himself that constantly, too.  But what he does have is a lot of perseverance and hard work.  I think that makes it that much more awesome when Kenichi gets serious, uses a new technique he learned and defeats someone who would have destroyed him one episode before.  Another nice difference from the other fighting animes is that Kenichi learns actual martial arts moves and with quite a bit of detail and explanation, so it's possible you might be able to learn or at least understand the moves yourself.  Even if you don't, a lot of the first season adds little history lessons with his training.  I'm not sure how accurate these lessons are, but it makes me want to learn more, which is pretty impressive.

The other awesome part of the show are the masters themselves.  They have the feel of old kung fu movie masters with lots of wonderful cliches: everything is a lesson or training, the aforementioned torture-like training methods, the pervy master, the drunk master, the wise and sensible master, etc.  And by far the best of the whole lot is the Muay Thai master, Apachai.

To make up for the awesomeness of the masters, I guess the show needed an annoying character that I kept wishing would just go away and that comes in the form of Kenichi's "friend", Niijima, who (along with the Masters) is really the only truly unrealistic character.  The first time I watched the series, I remembered them joking about Niijima being an alien, but thought no one seriously thought that, but watching it again, I'm pretty sure Niijima is just an unexplained random demon or alien or something.

Overall, I feel the show is worth watching if you're a fan of any of the previously mentioned anime series or just like to see a really talentless and weak character grow in skills, confidence, and knowledge to be something so much more awesome.