What would you do if you found out your school was about to close? Accept it? Fight it? or would you form a group of girls with the purpose of drawing attention to the school by becoming idols?

This anime centres mostly around Honoka Kosaka, a rather hyper and bubbly character who rushes into things without thinking, and her two friends as they are dragged along into the unknown world of School Idols. Having heard that their school will be closed when the current first years finished, Honoka set out to find a way to increase the school applicants and soon stumbled across the highly successful group "A-RISE" at one of the areas most popular highschools. Recently school idol groups have become quite popular and there are now large contests being held between them to find the best of the best. The most prominant of these is the "Love Live!", an event that A-RISE has won the last few years. Honoka getting inspiration from this, set out to gather members to make her own group, however she is met by much opposition from the student council and other soon to be members of the group. It is not hard to notice that each girl portrays a different personality, each one as stereotypical of any anime character as another, and each with their own special reason for eventually joining Honoka's group "μ".

Though the flow of this story is somewhat irratic, with some scenes being portrayed in a fast and obvious fashion whilst others being shown in a more slow drawn out fashion. School Idol is definitely an exciting and quite comical anime which is worth a watch for any avid fan. Throughout the series new songs are constantly being introduced, and though they use 3D graphics in some parts of the performances, the flowing change into 2D on closeups actually makes this seem very well done. As an advocate for keeping 3D out of anime, School Idol has almost convinced me that in maybe some cases, there is room to add a bit of 3D.
I would certainly recommend anyone who loves music, which you would normally say has an anime like feel, to watch this anime. The mixture of characters helps to maximize a sense of individuality of the members which otherwise would only have a feel of general cuteness and a rather bland feel.

When watching this anime, I was often reminded of another somewhat similar anime named "Lemon Angel Project". If I was to compare the two, I would say for number and quality of songs, I'd probably have to choose School Idol, however when it came to story, I feel that animes such as Lemon Angel Project definitely have the upper hand.

See also the Game Review here.

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