Yamada-kun is a show about a guy named (surprise!) Yamada who kisses upwards of seven different women every week with varying degrees of frequency, but given the lack of perceived societal value in having a permiscuous male high schooler—with an earring and delinquent personality no less—we also get a supernatural plot to excuse it. That reason is his accidental discovery of the existence of seven “witches” in the school, who hold powers such as turning invisible and telepathy, which are activated through kissing. When Yamada falls down the stairs on top of the quiet genius girl Shiraishi, they wake up in each other’s bodies, and fairly quickly they figure out that kissing was the impetus. Fairly soon, the two of them share kisses as a matter of going about the day, a tool for swapping bodies with absolutely no other implications, but we already know that for young curious high school students this cannot stay innocent forever, no matter how objective it may seem.
They meet witches and non-witches, and for the sake of finding space to conduct their planning and dirty dirty kissing they revive an old club, ironically the Supernatural Studies Club, and suddenly their high school lives start to nucleate around the clubroom and fellow members. While Yamada-kun doesn’t sidetrack itself from the purpose of finding witches, a daunting task to accomplish in 12 episodes without cutting corners, we do get plenty of shots of the characters just lying around the clubroom, frying their lunch in the microwave or reading just to pass some time. Those are nice shots, even when they are meant to lead into the plot before too long, because it makes us believe they actually want to join each other even when there’s no searching to be done.
It also quickly becomes obvious that the powers are small ways that the girls manifest their frustrations with the complexity of adolescence, and Yamada himself, having the ability to copy their powers, is destined to be the one that understands them and sympathizes with them, giving them a place to exist as themselves in the school. This is a fact, one that brings surprisingly little drama and is never explicitly stated by the show, both of which would have treated the audience like simpletons. Does it quite reach the point of symbolism, or having any real implications about school and youth? No, not really, aside from maybe that kids are going to find ways to justify kissing on a regular basis if it may solve their not-so-deep-seated emotional issues.
But if there's a reason to watch Yamada-kun, it's simply that it's a high school comedy that's pretty funny. It starts as boy-meets-girl and turns into boy-kisses-girl-to-cheat-on-tests, which goes into boys-and-girls-all-kiss-each-other-for-no-reason, and the non-witch students are all given enough scenes to put a believable face to their comedic archetypes, to the point that we actually get a group of friends rather than a group of stock characters in the same club. Their speech patterns fly around as they trade bodies, and soon the silent lady is swearing and sprinting around the school, even kicking delinquents in the face, while the yankee boy sits reading and studying, speaking in a monotone, matter-of-fact voice. Sometimes the guys kiss each other, and they always treat it with an unnecessary degree of trepidation and surprise. They can’t help but feel that this convenient tool they use is a direct challenge to their sexuality and the air of intense masculinity they try to put on. What they don’t know is that they're in an anime, and the people watching never cared about either of those.
The last episode makes it unfortunately clear that any more time, even just one more episode, would have done a few of the characters more justice, but rather than try and prolong it to be less awkward I may have even been happier stopping an episode or two earlier, where the group had reached the stable equilibrium of a normal high school life, with kissing. There was never a strong reason to follow the plot; it was there to help widen the circle of friends and justify their bizarreness. Their secret, in contrast to most high school romances, is not unspoken pure love, but casually accepted impure friendship, and as we sit their laughing we wonder when they’re going to just drop the pretense and start kissing each other for the hell of it.
As a postnote, for the theme of the show there is very little that one could consider “fanservice”. With a cast of almost ten girls and two or three guys it is clear who's supposed to be enjoying Yamada-kun, but even so the environment is engaging even to the audience, rather than putting them on the outside to justify a multitude of voyeuristic shots. All I can say is thank you.