Love Rice

Do you love rice? Do you love boys? If yes, you'd better hand yourself in to the police. But before you do, you'd better watch Love Rice. It might make you reconsider your life choices. Hinohikari is a boy who knows what he wants & what he wants is to be the HarveStar of the Harvest Show. There's just one problem: nobody likes rice any more, which is unfortunate enough when you're a rice-boy (not the car kind) but doubly so when it means the Kokuritsu Inaho Academy he attends is in danger of shutting down. Undeterred, Hinohikari will achieve his dream & save his schoolthe only way he knows how; by joining a cross-dressing idol unit? Okay. Rice Boys sets out to answer the ultimate question – which is better: bread or rice? After quickly ditching the women's clothes, the newly christened Love Rice (because they love rice) prepare to do musical battle against their wheaty rivals the Yeast Kings; using as many bad puns, bland songs & homoerotic moments as it takes. In case you weren't able to tell, Love Rice is out to promote Japanese rice (white, sticky, short grains only. None of that exotic Indian stuff here) to women. Each character is named after a specific strain & some effort is made to tie their personalities with their namesake, though it's hard to tell with rice - since it's rice. Their musical performances take place in golden paddy fields & dammit if they aren't trying their hardest to be the best rice-boys they can be so the Gourmet Girls will vote for them. It's a concept silly enough that it could have been a lot of cheesey fun. But for a concept as silly as pretty rice-boys, Love Rice for the most part plays itself frustratingly straight. Part of this is down to the utterly uninspired production, which makes almost no effort to visually accentuate the humour & often leaves the characters looking like rough drafts rather than finished articles. But even beyond that there isn't much to it. The story is for the most part bog standard, with the bland songs doing little to improve things. It take a turn for the suitably stupid when Love Rice & the Yeast Kings set aside their differences – because at the end of the day rice & wheat are both grains - to thwart a kidnapping, but it's so rushed & disjointed that the humour is lost. When compared to other male idol or anthropomorphic pretty boy series, Love Rice hardly measures. Unlike Sekko Boys, It doesn't do nearly enough with the ridiculousness of its core concept, relying instead of repetitive agriculture puns & Sasanishiki coughing up more white fluids than Paris Hilton. It barely manages to fill its four minute episodes, even with songs & cooking tutorials padding out the runtime, whereas Miracle Train managed to build an entire regular length series out of sexy male train stations. Or they could have gone in a completely different direction & made Love Rice about actual rice. Worked for The Nameko Families. Instead, whatever the intentions behind its creation, Love Rice just feels like a half-arsed attempt to ride the male idol & fujoshi waves by combining “attractive” male character designs with a silly gimmick that's supposed to make you think it's just a bit of fun, so who cares? It's certainly no Pillow Boys, but there are plenty of better examples of what Love Rice is trying to do, though you might get some new meal ideas from it. Unless you really love boys...I mean rice, it can be safely ignored.