You don’t have to be an adolescent schoolgirl to find Seven of Seven funny. © Anime Works/Media Blasters.

Seven of Seven. V.1, The Luckiest Number. V.2, A Test of Love. V.3, Greatest American Heroes. V.4, Heartbreak by the Numbers. V.5, Eight is Enough. V.6, title to come.
TV series (25 episodes), 2002. Director: Asako Nishida. V.1-2, five episodes/125 minutes; v.3-5, four episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.95. Distributor: Anime Works/Media Blasters.

A friend watching this schoolgirl fantasy-comedy with me said, "I have never enjoyed a program so much that was this ridiculously silly!" I could not put it better. This is about a junior high school senior's first romance, but judging by the juvenility of the humor and the suggested-age rating of 7+, it seems just as appropriate for elementary-school seniors of an age to giggle at an Older Sister's first crush.

Nana Suzuki, a junior high school student, is hopelessly in love with handsome classmate Yuichi Kamichika, but is too shy to let anyone know about it except her best friend Hitomi Onodera. In Japan, junior high students do not automatically go on to their neighborhood high school. They can apply to the high school of their choice. The top high schools are deluged with applications; only the best students can hope to be accepted. Nana has never really cared about high school, but she does not want to be separated from Yuichi so she is determined to get into the same high school he does. They both get into their junior high's special "fast-track" class for seniors that preps them for tough high school entrance exams, although Nana seems hopelessly out of her depth.

Nana's parents are temporarily living in San Francisco on business, while she stays home with her grandfather; a kindly mad scientist. When she opens the microwave oven to bake a chocolate cake for Yuichi, she interrupts Grandpa's experiment to condense the colors of the rainbow into solid jewels. This somehow multiplies Nana into seven Nanas, each with a different personality: tomboyish Nana, brainy Nana, giggly Nana, crybaby Nana, lazy Nana, superstitious Nana and the original Nana. (By no coincidence, Nana is a girl's name and also a homonym for the Japanese word for "seven;" there are Nana puns throughout the series.)

Each Nana gets a color-coded jewel which gives her super-powers and together they can form a team just like their favorite TV heroines; the Nana Rangers. The other six Nanas help run interference for Nana against bullying classmates and comically sadistic teachers who bury her in homework; but they cannot help her to pass the fast-track class' hard tests if she spends more time mooning over Yuichi than she does studying. Worse, each of the Nanas is equally enamored with Yuichi and really wants him for herself. As Nana says at the end of each episode, "My love life and exams are out of control!"

Seven of Seven (Shichichin No Nana, produced by the A.C.G.T. studio, 25 TV episodes January 10 through June 27, 2002 plus one unbroadcast episode) is a quirky school comedy that contrasts very ethnically Japanese social customs (young girls' giving sweets on Valentine's Day to the boy that they like; attending the mid-August Obon Week Festival in traditional Japanese dress) with a lot of American early 20th-century popular music as background music; especially Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag which appears in several arrangements.

English is a required subject in Japanese schools, and a running gag is that English is Nana and Yuichi's worst subject. Even their pompous teacher, Assistant Principal Handa who boasts of his English skills, mangles it. Contrariwise when an American teenage girl visiting Japan tries to coach Nana with her diction, it is a disaster because she is a parody of a Hollywood cowgirl with an exaggerated Texan accent (reciprocated for Japanese viewers because she learned to speak Japanese with a burlesque Osaka accent).

In episode #14, Nana uses her Nana Rangers powers to fly to San Francisco and becomes a parody of a Japanese tourist in America, with cartoon animation over photographs of San Francisco's best-known landmarks. (Strangely, all the English-as-a-foreign-language jokes are translated faithfully in the DVD's subtitles to go with the Japanese language track, but the English dub is rewritten with different jokes that hide the fact that English is a dreaded school subject in Japan.)

Whether you are an adolescent schoolgirl or not, Seven of Seven is very funny. Its fantasy, its humor and its idealized puppy-love romance are obvious sugar-coatings for advice on the importance of avoiding distractions to studying for exams.