_
I watched the English dub for a majority of this series, but the last two episodes in Japanese. Because of that, I’ll be crediting both sets of voice actors here.
I don't know how it happened, exactly. How I ended up in a place where, at the ancient and creaking vintage of 32, I still watch romcom anime about high schoolers instead of going to chick flicks like a responsible woman of my age, but it did happen! And you know what? These are my shows, OK? The soap operas and the sitcoms alike, this stuff still speaks to me. This one is really good. Uncomplicatedly good, even! And I think that very simplicity is why I was so drawn to it. I wasn't planning to write about this, but its charms are so direct that it called out to me in a way. And I'm not the only one! I think this is a case of the public just plain getting it right, an instance where basically everybody is on the same page, and the book is damn good. Written on that page, in beautifully girly cursive, with the heart loops and all, is one sentence. One sentiment: ___You & I Are Polar Opposites_.__
The basics: Suzuki Miyu [Suzushiro Sayumi/Celeste Perez] is a hyperactive gyaru with a mile-a-minute motormouth and a goofy personality. Sitting next to her in her high school class is Tani Yuusuke [Sakata Shougo/Brandon Acostaim], a stoic fellow of few words with a dry wit and perpetually low energy levels. The "opposites attract" principle is so bold-script here that it's literally in the name of the series, and just in case you miss that, Suzuki drops that title in the first episode when describing herself and Tani.
Mixing things up slightly from the usual "will they or won't they" shenanigans is the fact that Polar Opposites actually starts as the relationship proper begins. Our first episode does hit these beats, but it climaxes with Suzuki realizing that she very much does have a thing for Tani, and she needs to act on it now. The ensuing confession scene is bombastic as hell, all shouting and stammering and candy colors. Tani, who feels the same way, is moved. And she and Tani start going out basically right then and there. The remainder of the series is thus about their relationship developing, as opposed to coming into existence in the first place. This puts it in a pretty distinct category from a lot of romcoms I talk about on this site, which tend to fall more into the whole "girl with a gimmick" space, where the female lead, in even the best case, is defined by some kind of specific trait that acts as a bit of wish fulfillment. (Think Marin from My Dress-Up Darling and her cosplay hobby, for example, to pull a character from a show that, mind you, I like a good deal.) Polar Opposites largely avoids this, not just with Suzuki herself—who is a total screwball, but in the way that real hyperactive teens often are—but with her entire friend group and, thus, its entire cast. There's not a single flat character here, everyone is dynamic and bursting with personality. That said, since this is a show about couples at the end of the day---even those that aren't actually dating yet---it makes the most sense to bracket the characters off into pairs. (Of course, they all have plenty of interactions outside these pairs, too.)
Suzuki and Tani themselves have a classic nerd x outgoing girl thing going on, and the interlock between the two of them is by far the simplest of those in the anime, but that shouldn't be taken to mean it's not excellent. Suzuki and Tani both have a tendency to get stuck in their own head a bit, a shared insecurity that leads to a very realistic foible in their relationship: they're not great at communicating! Ouch! Been there! That stuff is hard! Still, their main arc through this first season is one of learning to trust each other. The stakes are largely quite small---we'll get to the one semi-exception---so this mostly relates to learning to not overthink things on dates and the like. It is relentlessly cute, and to paraphrase a conversation in the third episode of the dub, adorable. The definition Suzuki gives there of the word, which she applies to Tani but also many other things, is an equally good fit for their own relationship and, in fact, the show itself. Endearing. Something that squeezes your heart a little. They also meet each others' families about halfway into the season, marking that things are indeed getting serious. Ish.
Nishi Natsumi [Oomori Cocoro/Rebecca Danae] and Yamada Kentarou [Iwata Anji/Van Barr Jr.] , the second couple the show follows, take a bit more legwork to get on the same page. Nishi isn't actually in the same classroom as most of the rest of the cast, and she spends the earliest parts of this story wishing she could be involved in their friendly banter and the like. She comes off as a bit Bocchi-ish, in fact, so shy that she can't really even function in social spaces at all. Some doing from both her only friend Honda Rikako [Kusunoki Tomori/Cheyenne Haynes] eventually pushes her into the orbit of Yamada, the class clown of the class that Suzuki, Tani, and the rest are based on. Yamada isn't your run of the mill class goofball, however (that title more goes to his female counterpart, the also-blonde Watanabe Manami [Taniguchi Yuna/Hannah Alyeah], a supporting character), he takes special pride in getting laughs out of those who don't laugh that often. This alone is enough to make him interested in Nishi, and circumstances---and Yamada's own taking of the initiative---push the two of them closer together. By the end of the season they were probably my pick for cutest couple overall. (Although, that's a close race of course.) The last episode of the first season is in part about the two going on a date to a Chinatown and it's just, like, heartburn-inducingly cute. They get meat buns, it's lovely.
This brings us to the last pair, and the one presently furthest from "officially" being a couple, and the least "cute" of the three. Azuma Shino [Shimabukuro Miyuri/Sarah Roach] and Taira Shuji [Katou Wataru/Mauricio Ortiz-Segura]. Azuma and Taira, to put it bluntly, are the sourpusses of the friend group. Azuma has a longer dating history than most of the cast, and she's world-weary and cynical, something she masks (just barely) with a wry, dry wit. Taira meanwhile is an example of ye olde "self-lacerating jealous guy who gets mad at himself about his jealousy" shtick. Both of them have rougher personalities than the rest of the cast and, despite everything, they're probably my favorite pair overall. Taira's bristly cynicism plays nicely off of Azuma's "been there, done that" attitude and both of them are kind of putting up a front about things. Azuma in particular has noticeably low self-esteem, often just putting up with it when people, such as her former friend group at her old school, take advantage of her and pressure her into things. This makes it all the better when those masks start to break down as we get further into the series, Taira encourages Azuma, in his own way, to value herself more. That more serious aspect of their relationship---whether it ends up being romantic in the long term or not---is what makes these two so interesting to me. It shows that the series can operate in different emotional registers. (Which also leads me to look forward to The Ramparts of Ice, an anime adapted from another manga by this same author that, if you're reading this article on the day it goes up, will have premiered today. Apparently it is a bit more focused on this side of things.)
I don't want to make Taira and Azuma's relationship sound overly serious of course. At the end of the day, Taira is the sort of person who catches himself thinking poorly of people and then goes "oh god, I'm such a chud." That's not me editorializing! He says that in the English dub!
That's as good a place as any to springboard to talking about the dub, in fact. I watched most of this series with the English voice track after checking it out on a whim. It is fantastic, one of the best dubs in recent memory, remixing and reconfiguring the presumably a bit more direct sub track's translations into something with a lot of zing and flavor. In practice this means a fair bit of localization---including a use of the old "they were talking about English class in the Japanese track, so we switched them to be talking about Spanish here" trick that I more associate with the long-gone days of the Azumanga Daioh dub and the like. That particular example might strike some as a bridge too far, but overall the dub is really excellent at assigning believable patterns of speech to individual characters. Suzuki in particular must be heard to be believed, some of her lines are so intensely inflected that they sound like they were written in tumblr-ese in the script (at one point she calls Tani her "boi" and I swear she says it in such a way that you can practically hear the I on the end instead of the Y.) My favorite performance by far though, is Sarah Roach as Azuma, who brings a really impressive sense of deadpan humor to the character, making her feel like your most love-cynical mutual. (I in particular really love how she drags herself for "not finding good people attractive" in an early episode. We all have our vices, girl!) Do real teenagers talk anything like this at all? I have no idea! But it conveys the feeling of that just-hangin'-with-the-gang atmosphere extremely well, and verisimilitude is more important than strict realism. Sources credit the dub's script and voice directing respectively to Macy Anne Johnson and Emily J. Fajardo, to whom I can only say: well done, you really nailed it. The only real problem with the dub is that it isn't finished! At the time of this writing, delays have meant that the last two episodes are JP-audio only, which is a real shame given how good the dub is. Obviously, that's not the fault of anyone who worked on it (it's mostly just more evidence that the dubs for these things really need more lead time), but it does put Polar Opposites in the frustrating camp of "shows where I had to take time away from talking about the anime itself to discuss the release situation." At least Nokotan has company.
In any case, outside the more comedic moments, the dub handles the more serious stuff well, too. I've already gone over Azuma and Taira's whole thing, but there's also an interesting plot that springs up a ways' into Suzuki and Tani's relationship where the former runs into her ex. That character, Oka Rihito [Ishiya Haruki/Trey Michael Upton], is at least on the surface a lot more similar to Suzuki than Tani is. We get a flashback, even, showing that in middle school they were very much two peas in a pod who loved to banter back and forth in class. Unfortunately, people at that school took that to be not just friendship but romantic chemistry, and the two ended up dating more or less out of social pressure. This got awkward very quickly, and the two are still awkward around each other now. There are two interesting aspects here, one being that this doesn't actually get cleanly resolved by season's end (thus perhaps implying Rihito is going to come back) and that Tani actually gets a bit jealous. Tani is a fairly level-headed guy, so this is a bit surprising and it certainly surprises Suzuki. They work things out just fine, but it's nice to see the show grapple with one of the common foibles of young relationships, emotions that we don't necessarily have full control over.
(You could, if you really wanted to, nail Polar Opposites here for being a bit basic. It's not like "learning to deal with jealousy" is a groundbreaking concept for a plot beat in a romcom. All the self-respect stuff is fairly straightforward, including a similar plot point about Azuma. Still, at some point you're just ragging on a show about teenagers for having teenage characters. At some point that kind of "criticism" feels more like nitpicking. Yes, You & I Are Polar Opposites does not account for literally every possible life situation, but pointing that out is pedantic, not insightful. Especially when you remember that this is a Shonen Jump title and is at least ostensibly aimed at readers about as young as its characters.)
All of these writing merits would be harder to get to if the show didn’t look and sound so good, but it does! While not quite as stylistically daring as some of say Dress-Up Darling or Love Is War!‘s more experimental excursions, Polar Opposites‘ anime is a tight and direct translation of the manga art’s charms into its new medium. It’s easy to give a series guff for being slavishly over-faithful to the source material, so I want to be very clear that I’m praising the show here. Nagatomo Takakazu (on his first-ever series directorial credit here) and his team at Lapin Track seem to really understand the characterful nature of Agasawa Koucha‘s art for the manga, and they make it work in anime format more or less directly. Stylistic flourishes are strong but smartly-deployed, so we’ll get Suzuki shrinking into a pink, gremlinoid blob when she’s overly excited for example. As with so much of the show on the whole, it sticks to the fundamentals but it absolutely nails them, an expression of a decidedly 2020s neo-retro aesthetic that’s come to define the medium’s highlights over the last few years.
If Polar Opposites has a secret ingredient however, it might honestly be its soundtrack. I don’t even mean its OP and ED themes here—although those are fantastic, too, a pair of lovely numbers by singer-songwriter noa and hyperpop group PAS TASTA respectively—but rather the actual background music. It animates the show when characters are just hanging around together, bristling with an array of fizzy guitars, popping drums, blooping synthesizers, and the occasional acoustic guitar for flavor. All of which really helps the world of the show feel alive and bursting with activity. This decidedly electronic soundscape seems to be the work of tofubeats, a DJ and musician whose list of work of this nature is fairly short, although impressive in context. Consisting of theme song arrangements for Love Live and Hypnosis Mic, which are not small gigs by any means! (He also has a similarly broad “music” credit for The Concierge, though having not seen that I can’t comment on its BGM). I hope him doing the Polar Opposites OST is the sign of his future involvement with the medium in specifically this capacity. He’s damn good at it.
All told, this is just a fantastic little romcom. As I said at the start of this article, sometimes the viewing public gets it right. We already know that more Polar Opposites is coming in summer, and I personally can’t wait, since this show’s beautiful bold colors and heart-eyes romantic tendencies will make even more sense in the July sun than they did here in the early part of the year. Until then!
