ItaKiss

イタズラなKiss (Itazura na Kiss)

7.4(152,597)

MAL Score

Ranked #2713

Popularity #942

Comedy
Romance
School

Episodes: 25
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Apr 5, 2008 to Sep 25, 2008
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

After an earthquake destroys her newly built house, third-year high schooler Kotoko Aihara—awkward, accident-prone, and struggling in school—ends up moving in with Naoki Irie, the top student at their school and reputedly one of the brightest in Japan. Living under the same roof would be daunting for anyone, but Kotoko’s situation is even more complicated: she once tried to give Naoki a love letter, and the memory hasn’t exactly left him with a good impression.

With a handful of eccentric friends and a mother who can’t resist getting involved, Kotoko’s pursuit of her cool, seemingly unreachable crush becomes an everyday challenge. Still, she refuses to give up, convinced that this unexpected closeness might finally bring her feelings within reach.

Otaku Consensus

ItaKiss earns its reputation as a durable shoujo rom-com because Osamu Yamasaki and TMS Entertainment let the romance breathe across a full 25-episode life span, with the college and medicine-era material giving it more forward motion than the usual school-only adaptation. The core appeal is Kotoko and Naoki’s abrasive comic chemistry, but the most consistent criticism is real: the long run can feel tedious when the push-pull dynamic repeats before the next major time-skip resets the stakes.

Why You Should Watch

Watch ItaKiss if you want a shoujo romance that keeps moving after the first blush instead of treating school confession drama as the finish line. It scratches the same itch as Lovely Complex’s public embarrassment comedy and Toradora!’s prickly romantic standoffs, but with a broader coming-of-age structure that moves through high school, college, family pressure, and medicine-related adulthood. The appeal is not polished wish fulfillment; it is messy persistence, social humiliation, meddling relatives, and a heroine whose worst decisions are often the engine of the joke. Viewers who need a gentle male lead from episode one may bounce off Naoki, but anyone who likes old-school shoujo with sharp edges, long-form payoff, and cringe comedy that actually changes the characters will find it unusually satisfying.

Key Characters

K
Kotoko Aihara
Kotoko is remembered as a chaos-powered shoujo heroine whose academic struggles, emotional transparency, and refusal to become cool are exactly what make her comedy land.
N
Naoki Irie
Naoki functions as the series’ hard-edged tsundere axis, a character fans tend to debate because his intelligence and emotional distance make every small shift in behavior feel consequential.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
The 25-episode TMS Entertainment adaptation aired in a single 2008 run from April to September, giving it room for time skips rather than compressing the romance into one school term.
2
AniList’s tag profile is unusually revealing: Tsundere sits at 96%, Shoujo at 92%, Coming of Age at 90%, with College, Medicine, and Family Life also present, signaling a romance that expands well beyond classroom comedy.
3
The production uses a sizable design chain for a 2008 TV romance: Kazuhiro Soeta and Maki Fujioka handled character design, Noriko Takahashi handled sub-character design, and Kayoko Nishi set the color design.
4
Its reception remains split in a very specific way: MAL users rate it a solid 7.38 from more than 152,000 votes, while critics and fan reviewers often praise the laughs and emotional investment but cite the 25-episode length as a source of drag.
5
Compared with the original manga, at least one reviewer singled out the anime as the more immediately approachable version, calling it prettier while noting that it does not radically diverge in presentation.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: ItaKiss is based on Kaoru Tada’s Itazura na Kiss, one of the most widely adapted shoujo romance properties; the anime is notable for giving the story a complete TV form after the manga was left unfinished by Tada’s death.
Fun fact 2: The credited creative staff separates literary, visual, and branding roles unusually clearly: Yukie Koyake is listed for Literary Arts, Yumiko Tejima for Title Logo Design, Hiroki Matsumoto as Art Director, and Youhei Kodama for Art Design.
Fun fact 3: The show’s database footprint is stronger than its numerical score suggests: it sits at MAL popularity #942 and has 708 AniList favourites, indicating a long-tail romance audience rather than a short-lived seasonal following.
Fun fact 4: Although the anime is categorized under Comedy and Romance with a School theme, its tag data confirms that school is only one phase of the structure, with College at 62% and Medicine at 67%.