Re-kan! (The title is excited) is a low-key comedy about a girl who is a bit unusual getting to fit in and make friends in her new class. To bring something fresh to this time-worn idea, Re-kan! doesn’t just play the matter straight. Instead of some usual trait, the main character in this one, Hibiki Amami, has an unusually strong sixth sense, allowing her to see and interact with ghosts as well as a more ordinary student would living humans. Thus, quite a few of the eccentric folks who are all set to help Hibiki out in her high school career are, in fact, spectral in nature.
That said, the show does largely play the matter like it’s a normal “odd students in High School” scenario – though it has some similarities to both shows, it’s more like Komi Can’t Communicate than like When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace. Except, in either case, with ghosts.
The show is relatively plotless – not enough to be called Slice of Nothing, but at the same time it’s more of a meet and greet of various classmates and ghosts than it is a linear story with a well-defined beginning and end, so I will do my best to give a sense of what the show is like more than anything.
To that end is the other critical component of the comedy, Hibiki’s first introduced (living) friend, Narumi Inoue. Narumi, you see, is not good with the spooky stuff. She can’t see ghosts, but she’s terrified of them despite (or perhaps because, given how threatening most of the ones in the show are) of that fact. This means that when Hibiki has a chat with empty air or makes it clear that a spectral friend is in the room, you can count on Narumi to react with disproportionate terror.
All the same, whether because Hibiki is about the most generically sweet and friendly sort of person you could hope to meet or because Narumi is kind of a tsundere, she keeps hanging out with the girl who can reliably terrify her in such a manner. One thing this show does do is have a little character growth, though, so while Narumi is never exactly comfortable being surrounded by the spirits of the deceased, she does become better able to tough it out and get used to the strangeness Hibiki brings to bear.
While there are a number of fairly creative ghosts seen throughout the show, there are a few that make themselves known as recurring characters. These include Narumi’s grandmother (more of a comic prop than anything; her ghost is little more than a ball of light hovering around Narumi more often than not), a pervy ghost cat (usually prevented from getting an upskirt view), and Hanako-san (The famed toilet apparition, here a rather cute girl.) Later on, we also get a gyaru ghost, who hangs around despite having gone through an episode to, via Hibiki, make peace with her still-living mother.
The most major undead part goes to the “Roll-call Samurai”, the ghost of a Samurai who starved to death in a former era who, after Hibiki shows him kindness, becomes something of her protector. He got his appellation as one form his “protection” took was answering roll for her when she was asleep in class.
The one recurring ghost with a legitimate creep factor is a mysterious girl with a red umbrella who appears when it rains, her offer to share an umbrella with others revealing the scare that she has no face. This, of course, does not faze Hibiki in the least, and she actually befriends the umbrella ghost.
Most of the episodes are more or less structured around some human issue that dealing with ghosts can help resolve. Perhaps the most effective, and a good one to use as an example in any case, is episode 3. In the third episode, we’re mostly concerned with Narumi’s little cousin, who is a picky eater, offending Narumi by rejecting the eggs she makes no matter how much work she puts into them. Hibiki manages to find out that he only wants the eggs his late father made, and is able to acquire the proper recipe from grandma’s ghost in order to please the kid and help him and Narumi get along.
Some episodes are lighter and more comedic, others (like the gyaru ghost’s focal episode) are more heartfelt, but none of them really stray too far from the baseline of being worthy of a smile, but not a tear or for the most part a real laugh.
Despite the episodic nature of the show, it does have something of a capstone: episode eleven features Hibiki wishing to see her mother, who died giving birth to her and whose spirit she’s never encountered despite her abilities. The Roll-call Samurai and gyaru ghost venture into some spiritual space and find mom’s spirit, tending a mystic flower. They offer to take care of it for her, however briefly, so she can see her daughter like they’d both wish, but sadly the two substitutes aren’t enough, and it seems like the encounter between mother and daughter is going to be the end of Hibiki’s sixth sense. However, a tour (courtesy of Narumi) of all the living people she’s met and helped restores Hibiki’s mood and, through that, the spiritual flower and her abilities along with it. This is basically the climax of the show (even if there is one more light-standard episode after to play us out), and… it’s good enough for what it is.
Which, I suppose, is also an apt description of Re-kan!. The show isn’t great. The drama works but is fairly uncommon, and the comedy can’t ever really go too big. It doesn’t have quite the charm of some other slice of life efforts, because it gets distracted on the supernatural elements, but at the same time the supernatural elements are at least competent, getting us a good variety in spooks and specters, harmless though they may be. The show isn’t much to look at either; the animation is cheap and the backgrounds lackluster… but it’s not doing anything that really needed to break the bank on appearance. It would have been great if it looked a little better, but it’s not utterly killed by the cheapness. The characters are perfectly watchable, but there’s not really anything particularly memorable about them. The Roll-call samurai is about the only individual who goes big enough at any point to leave much of an impression.
In the end, the show is extremely forgettable, as no doubt the brevity of the review would suggest. It ranks a C-. True, it’s warm and friendly and won’t hurt you if you watch it, but Re-Kan! doesn’t offer anything of substance either. Every couple of episodes you’d get a moment that would be legitimately alright, which is what saves it from falling into the D-ranks, but more often the show acts as soporific pleasantness. Honestly, it’s probably one that you could fall asleep watching fairly easily. If you’re looking for a plain comfort pick, something to just make you feel a little good without the pain that “feel-good” stuff usually needs to inflict in order to do its thing, Re-kan! will serve the purpose just fine, which means I can kind of recommend it in that incredibly narrow band… but even then I’m fairly certain that there’s better to be found.