What Is The Plot Of Overflow Anime?

My interest with ‘Overflow’ is how the plot is used to create scenes that lead to more scenes to further create more scenes in order to convey character, and the fact that it mainly focuses on that shows a lot about the series. To list off a few examples, the childhood friend of the main character is possessive, the new roommate of the main character tempted him into doing things, and most of the time the main character is in a state of fluster apologizing to everyone around him. These scenes bring up the same themes of jealousy, accidental intimacy, and rivalry for attention of another person.

The anime does a great job of adapting the comic in a highly visual and hugely entertaining way. It’s a short, punchy, filthy (and I mean that literally) and often hilarious anime that follows a bunch of characters as they get into all sorts of personal and often risqué situations. It’s great to watch as light entertainment and it’s really funny at times, but the anime isn’t trying to develop the characters and so on, so I wouldn’t expect that to happen here. Instead there’s lots of hilarious ‘choreography’ of events as the various personalities clash from time to time and then get all flustered and blushy afterwards.

Overflow is a very short (less than 10 minutes), somewhat risqué romantic-comedy that relies heavily on a single location and will rely on misperception and silly situation after silly situation. Overflow follows an overwrought young man whose rather quiet life is disrupted when a a rather attractive woman (new house-mate) and the young man’s very close female friend move into the young man’s house. The two women sharing the young man’s space quickly leads to a love triangle, and lots of tentative, ‘flustered’ scenes between them, which are ‘fanservice’-oriented and thus meant to be comic.

On another level, there’s a look at jealousy, friendship and that which is funny because it’s awkward to the watcher. The movie develops no characters in any great depth, relying instead on timing, hilarious situations and outrageous visuals. If you are into the kind of flicks like ‘Kiss×Sis’ or ‘To LOVE-Ru’, then you may enjoy this short. It has the same ‘ookama-kei’ characteristics but within a tight framework. It’s humorous, at times ridiculous, and even lovable in its fixation upon the script’s intent. Guilty-pleasure material that I found somewhat amusing.

Initially I thought Overflow was another pretty straightforward manga adaptation, the plot getting set up and then just progression from one scene to another. A guy moves in with his childhood friend and her and then there’s another girl there too which complicates things for him. Yeah, it’s a pretty uncomplicated storyline really, just a series of misunderstandings and accidents which result in more and more revealing scenes as the episodes go on. There’s a lot of flirting and some pretty funny attempts at pushing boundaries of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior and then of course there’s the fanservice.

It is what it is: light, uncomplicated and – where it wants to be – entertaining enough. A easy to digest smudge of uncomplicated situations. Of course, not deep, but seriously: as light, easily consumed ecchi-comedy Overflow does know its target audience very well. And therefore even is kind of fun once in a while.