Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto

Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto is a comedy anime based on a short manga by Nami Sano. The manga ran in Enterbrain's Harta magazine (first called Fellows!) from 2012 to 2015 and fills four books. It was a surprise hit. It won the 2013 Comic Natalie Grand Prize, and its second volume reached number one on the Oricon weekly manga sales chart. Studio Deen made the anime, with Shinji Takamatsu as both director and writer. It aired on TBS from April to July 2016. The TV run had 12 episodes. A 13th episode was held back because news coverage of the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake took over the time slot, and it was later shared online.

The idea is simple. Sakamoto is a first-year student at a Japanese high school, and he is perfect at everything. He is calm, smart, stylish, and always polite. The girls in his class adore him. Many of the boys are jealous and want to see him fail. So they set up pranks and traps to make him look silly. But it never works. Sakamoto always gets out of the trap in a way that makes him look even more amazing than before, and often in a way that makes no sense at all.

That is where the humor comes from. Each joke grows bigger and stranger, and the situations get more and more absurd, which means wildly silly and unreal. Sakamoto also has a set of odd "secret skills" that he pulls out at just the right moment. The show plays all of this with a straight face, so the more serious it looks, the funnier it gets. In a way, it is a playful joke about the "perfect student" type found in many school stories, pushed as far as it can go.

The classmates matter too. Yoshinobu Kubota is a shy boy who gets picked on, and Sakamoto quietly helps him, even finding him a part-time job. Atsushi Maeda, called Acchan, used to be one of a trio of troublemakers who picked on others. Yuya Sera is a class clown. Aina Kuronuma has a crush on Sakamoto, and Megumi Fujita, the class representative, loves taking photos of him. Through them, the show has a kind heart under its silly surface. Sakamoto does not just show off. He often helps people, in his own strange way.

The episodes are short stories that mostly stand on their own, so it is easy to watch one at a time. It is a light comedy with no heavy drama. In North America, Seven Seas Entertainment published the manga in English, and Sentai Filmworks licensed the anime. If you enjoy deadpan humor, where jokes are told with a totally serious face, Sakamoto is a fun, quick watch.