Alternate Titles: Kinmoza!, Yellow Mosaic
Manga adaptation by Studio Gokumi
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise: Japanese girl Shinobu Oomiya takes part in a homestay exchange where she goes to England and becomes friends with British girl Alice Cartlet. A few years later Shinobu and friends, now in high school, are shocked when Alice shows up as a foreign exchange student.

Zigg’s Verdict: The Past is Another Country

This is pretty entertaining during the first two thirds of the show that concentrate on the overseas antics. Japan’s super idyllic middle class fantasy of Britain is extremely amusing to me and it helps that the lovely animation adds a real cosy vibe to the whole thing. Sure, it’s a silly and facile as any slice of life show, but it’s heartwarming in an innocent, childish way and very funny, though how intentional that is is up for debate.

Things move downhill rapidly once we skip forward in time though. Everyone still looks eight years old despite being in high school and the return of the omnipresent Japanese schoolgirl tropes instantly makes the entire thing feel crushingly unoriginal. I got nasty Yuruyuri vibes from it which is about the worst possible outcome. Having said that, I did laugh a fair old bit at this opener and was charmed sufficiently that I’ll consider giving it another spin.

Lifesong’s Verdict: Boring

The British antics are somewhat amusing and the show is cute, It was also pretty boring. Cute girls do cute things in Britain before going back to Japan. The Engrish was probably the most amusing thing about the episode. I’ve seen enough to drop this. There are plenty of other more interesting shows with cute girls in them that I can watch.

Aqua’s Verdict: Blimey, A Jolly Good Laugh, Mate

Whether Kiniro Mosaic would actually be good was never the question. No, the question with which I went into Kiniro Mosaic was whether this would be one of those rare shows that is so incredibly bad, it becomes more fun to watch than any decent comedy?

I’m glad to announce that Kiniro Mosaic is indeed in every regard the glorious trainwreck I had hoped it to be. That much becomes evident once our main character Shinobu leaves the admittedly beautifully portrayed London and gets dumbed in ‘Britain’, which clearly looks like the bloody county of Midsomer with cows merrily grazing on the fields and cars from fifty years ago gayly trotting around while people say “Oh, jolly good day to you, my fine sir” to each other. All the Brits have blonde hair and blue eyes, live in massive mansions, do nothing but drink tea and bake crumpets all day and sleep under bedsheets decorated with the Union Jack.

This evidently gives rise to the bulk of Kiniro Mosaic‘s jokes, providing citizens of the glorious nation of the rising sun with ample opportunity to laugh at these silly limeys who…

• … don’t take off their shoes when they’re in the house! (Yes, they do.)
• … don’t fill their baths until the water come up to their shoulders! (Yes, they do.)
• … speak in hilariously broken English because God forbid we hire some actual foreigners to voice foreigners!

Speaking of hilariously broken English, unlike Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, Kiniro Mosaic handles the language barrier extremely poorly because of course it does. Alice’s mother is fluent in Japanese for some inexplicable reason and no effort is made to show Shinobu and Alice trying to communicate with each other aside from miraculously being able to understand each other. They could have just called this show The Magical Adventures of Harro and Arigatou.

All things considered, Kiniro Mosaic is everything I wanted and more. Just don’t think that what I wanted was a show that is actually good. Oh dear goodness, no. It is vapid, extremely tiring on the ears, hilarious for all the wrong reasons and suspiciously haughty about its own culture being obviously cooler than all these silly foreigners, yet for some reason still extremely charming. … So basically like the United Kingdom, then.