Yuru Camp△ S2 is Filled with Relaxing!

I got to finally watch the first couple episodes of Yuru Camp season two and I found myself more or else enjoying it as much as its first season.

As most who watched this show knows, this show relies on some fundamental slice of life elements: comedy, relaxing atmosphere, and cuteness. In its first season, Yuru Camp relied on the emulation of the “camping” atmosphere through slow pacing and relaxing music. And Yuru Camp’s second season follows up on this very well.

Episode one’s first half Rin’s first camping trip as a middle schooler. There’re a lot of funny moments created by the gap between the professional-like solo camper that Rin is we saw in season one, and the clumsy, inexperienced camper she was before. The sequence of scenes with Rin setting up the tent for the first time — having papers fly away with the win, breaking her tent nails, feeling cold, being unable to win with the wind, burning her pot — were some of my favorite scenes in this episode (of course this is hilarious when you compare it to the tent set up speed run that she does in episode two).

I love how the show really shows down the pace of these scenes to show all these troubles rather than doing all this in a single montage. After every screw up that she makes, the show takes time to get her reaction both facial expressions or thoughts (with nice voice acting by Toyama Nao) to really set up her inexperience. 

Of course, despite the troubles that she goes through, what makes her fall in love with camping is that one cup of instant curry ramen just like the one she gave to Nadeshiko in episode one of season one. Was I excited for season two? No doubt I was. 

This start, which was anime original content, was probably the best way to ease the viewers into a second season without abruptly continuing or starting somewhere awkwardly, especially since Rin mentions her middle school camping experience in episode 12 of season one briefly.

The rest of the episode returned from the past to set up what different characters will be doing, presumably, in the first few episodes of season 2 over their breaks. It slowly introduced us back into Nadeshiko and others with a little bit of their part-time jobs.

With Yuru Camp, what I think is very interesting was how they show the messaging between the characters. Rather than flipping between scenes of different characters and having them talk in their head as they type, Yuru camp decides to have messages floating on the screen with voices with rather still scenes of images.

Like subs, this creates an illusion of more movement happening than it actually is on the screen because your eyes are focused on reading. While I’m not really a huge fan of this, I think this was a fairly concise way of bringing us back into the characters. 

While the latter bit felt a little too loose with the way it relied more on voice acting rather than animation to convey events, I thought it did fine to set up the camping trip that Rin will be on in the next episode.

Other than that, I thought the opening and ending were both fantastic. They both fit the relaxing mood of the show and the opening’s visual presentation was pretty to watch. Hopefully Yuru camp’s second season is as relaxing as its fire. There doesn’t seem to be a reason to doubt it.