This Art Club Has a Problem!

この美術部には問題がある！ (Kono Bijutsu-bu ni wa Mondai ga Aru!)

7.2(138,635)

MAL Score

Ranked #3976

Popularity #867

Comedy
Romance
School
Visual Arts

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jul 8, 2016 to Sep 23, 2016
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Mizuki Usami throws herself into her school’s art club with genuine enthusiasm—only to find she’s practically the only one treating it like an art club. The club president is more likely to nap than organize activities, Collette rarely shows up, and Subaru Uchimaki, talented enough to earn awards if he applied himself, is fixated on drawing his ideal “2D wife” instead.

Trying to get any real work done becomes an uphill battle as Usami navigates her eccentric, unmotivated clubmates—made even harder by her growing crush on Subaru, which keeps turning club time into something far more distracting than she’d like to admit.

Otaku Consensus

This Art Club Has a Problem! lands as a polished but modest 2016 feel. school-club rom-com: Kei Oikawa's direction and the studio's clean reaction animation make its strongest material feel sharper than its premise suggests. The consensus weakness is structure, with reviewers repeatedly pointing to an uneven episodic rhythm where roughly half the run plays as relaxed slice-of-life rather than fully tuned comedy.

Why You Should Watch

Watch this if you want a school-club romance that lives in awkward timing, facial-expression comedy, and otaku-specific embarrassment without turning into melodrama. It scratches a lighter version of the Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun itch: one-sided romantic energy, a talented but emotionally obtuse creative type, and jokes built around people not quite speaking the same language. It is also gentler than most high-concept club comedies, using its 12-episode length for quick room-scale incidents rather than big escalation. The appeal is in the contrast: visual-arts seriousness bumping into 2D fixation, tsundere frustration, absentee chaos, and a director-studio combo that knows how to sell a punchline through a face before anyone says the joke out loud.

Key Characters

M
Mizuki Usami(VA: Ari Ozawa)
Usami is the show's emotional engine, with fans often latching onto how her tsundere frustration turns ordinary club-room nonsense into tightly timed reaction comedy.
S
Subaru Uchimaki(VA: Yūsuke Kobayashi)
Uchimaki is interesting because his technical drawing skill is never the joke by itself; the comedy comes from how narrowly and obsessively he chooses to use it.
C
Collette
Collette adds the show's most free-floating chaos, functioning less like a conventional club member and more like an unpredictability device dropped into episodic scenes.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Studio feel. keeps the animation approach modest but precise, with outside reviews specifically calling out the exaggerated facial expressions as one of the production's strongest tools.
2
The 12-episode structure leans heavily episodic, matching AniList's high Episodic tag at 83%; this makes the show easy to sample but also explains why critics singled out structure as its recurring flaw.
3
The staff pairing of director Kei Oikawa and series composer Naruhisa Arakawa gives the adaptation a gag-first rhythm rather than a romance-drama rhythm, keeping most tension inside short club-room interactions.
4
The theme-song credits are unusually notable for a compact school comedy: Nana Mizuki performs the opening and appears on the episode 12 ending, while Sumire Uesaka handles ED1 and also appears on the final ending alongside Nao Touyama.
5
Its tag profile is more specific than the average school rom-com: Drawing at 85%, Otaku Culture at 72%, Unrequited Love at 79%, and Tsundere at 72% accurately map the show's central comedic machinery.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The anime adapts original creator Muru Imigi's work and aired as a completed 12-episode TV series from July 8, 2016 to September 23, 2016.
Fun fact 2: Its database reception is strikingly consistent across platforms: MAL lists it at 7.16 from 138,635 votes, while AniList records a 70/100 score and 803 favourites.
Fun fact 3: Despite being a high-school club comedy on the surface, AniList tags it with Seinen at 40%, reflecting its source-demographic flavor rather than a shounen-style gag tempo.
Fun fact 4: The sound side is split among named specialists: Satoshi Motoyama served as sound director, Yuka Kazama handled sound effects, and Gin composed the music.
Fun fact 5: Critical response often separates the show into two modes: one spoiler-free review judged about 6 of the 12 episodes funny overall, with the remainder landing closer to relaxed slice-of-life.