Is Lovely Complex Worth Watching? A 7.68 Decided by Risa Koizumi and a Height-Gap Premise That Actually Means Something

Toei's 2007 shoujo earns its 24 episodes on character writing and a thematic conceit that outperforms the animation carrying it — the rubric says yes, conditionally.

Most people just want to know: is Lovely Complex worth your time, and for whom? Answer that fast, then back it with the rubric. Yes, if you can tolerate 2007 Toei production values and want to see a shoujo heroine who behaves like a comedian rather than a mirror. No, if you're auditing the season for visual craft or need a romance whose emotional peaks aren't routinely deflected into chibi mode. The Codex puts it at 7.68. That number is doing precise work.

Engaging the 8.03

The MyAnimeList crowd scores it 8.03. That's a 0.35-point premium over the Codex weighting, and it's not random — it's what happens when a demographic-native audience grades on chemistry and forgives everything else. The MAL number treats Risa and Ootani's banter as the whole show. The Codex treats it as one criterion out of six, weighted for shoujo, and then asks what Toei Animation actually put on screen across 24 episodes in 2007. Two different questions. Two defensible answers. The gap is almost entirely explained by animation (6.5) and world-building (7.0), where a communal romance score has no incentive to be strict and the rubric has every incentive.

This is a recurring pattern in shoujo scoring — the same dynamic that produced the Kare Kano gap between MAL's 7.60 and the Codex's 7.83, only inverted. There, the crowd underweights character. Here, they overweight it. The rubric doesn't move.

Risa Koizumi Is the Score

Character lands at 8.5, and that's not a courtesy. Risa Koizumi is the least passive shoujo lead of her era — loud, physically expressive, comedically proactive, and structurally the pursuer rather than the pursued. Aya Nakahara's original design was to invert the shoujo template on both axes, height and agency, and the anime honors it. The confession arc in the show's first half doesn't turn on Ootani noticing Risa; it turns on Risa deciding, out loud, that she's in love with someone who will hurt her feelings about it, and then getting hurt exactly as predicted. That's not a will-they-won't-they. That's a character making a decision the format usually reserves for men.

Ootani is the harder achievement. His obliviousness could have played as contrivance — the shoujo love interest who fails to see what's in front of him because the plot needs 24 episodes — but the Osaka-ben banter reframes it as pride. He and Risa are labeled a comedy duo by their homeroom teacher, and Ootani has internalized that role to the point where romantic recognition would require him to break character in front of himself. The thaw across the reconciliation beats reads as earned rather than scheduled. Nobu, Seiko, and Chiharu are distinct rather than decorative, and Seiko's gender presentation is handled with a warmth that was not standard for 2007 shoujo television.

The Height Gap Is Load-Bearing

Themes score 7.8, and this is where the show quietly separates itself from the recommendation-list ghetto it gets filed into. The height gap is not a gimmick that resolves; it's a concrete metaphor for social judgment and the fear of not fitting a partner's idealized picture, and the writing keeps returning to it long after a lesser show would have moved on. Risa's insecurity about being too tall and Ootani's about being too short are treated as real, adult-shaped anxieties in a high-school container. The recurring proposition — that compatibility comes from shared taste, from bonding over Umibozu and Kansai humor, rather than from physical convention — lands sincerely because the show refuses to let either character grow out of the insecurity. They just learn to hold it together.

Where themes lose their half-point is in comedic deflection. The show has a reflex, when a scene threatens to go deep, of cutting to chibi distortion and reaction-shot slapstick. It's tonally consistent, but it caps the emotional peaks. Compare the way Nodame Cantabile, airing the same year, lets its comedy dissolve into stillness during Chiaki's interior scenes. Lovely Complex almost never permits that stillness.

The Second Half Is the Structural Bet

Story sits at 7.5, and the reason it's not lower is a specific structural decision: the leads get together around the midpoint rather than at episode 24. That's the bet. It means the back half has to justify itself on the sustaining of a relationship rather than the achieving of one — Ootani's job aspirations, the college and long-distance material, the rivals Mimi and Kohori arriving without triggering the manufactured-melodrama reflex that kills most shoujo. The bet mostly pays. The cost is that some back-half episodes — the Christmas and seasonal detours — read as filler-adjacent, coasting on the couple's established dynamic rather than pressuring it.

Two arcs carry disproportionate weight: the early Nobu-Nakao fake-setup material, which establishes the comedy-duo framing as a diegetic fact rather than a narrator's joke, and Risa's confession-and-rejection sequence, which is where the show earns its emotional credit for the remainder of the run.

The Production Ceiling

Animation at 6.5 is the honest number. Toei Animation's 2007 output here is functional — flat palette, budget-conscious motion, heavy dependence on super-deformed distortion for comedic beats. Kounosuke Uda's direction on the bookend episodes shows real comic timing in the argument scenes, and Ikuko Itou's key animation on the opening sequence and the finale is the visual high point of the show, but quiet emotional staging is conventional throughout. The opening theme "Kimi + Boku = LOVE?" is more memorable than most in-episode craft, which is not a compliment to the in-episode craft.

This is where the MAL premium quietly evaporates. A romance graded on chemistry doesn't care that Toei was working to a shoujo TV budget in 2007. The rubric does.

The Counter-Argument

The strongest opposing view: none of this matters because the couple works, and a romance that makes you believe two people belong together has cleared its only real bar. It's an honest position. The Osaka-ben duo dynamic is genuinely uncommon, and the show's cultural footprint — Aya Nakahara's 49th Shogakukan Manga Award, the live-action film, the recurring "comfort shoujo" recommendation slot — reflects that the chemistry did the job for a very large audience.

The rubric reads it differently because the rubric is not grading whether the couple works. It's grading six things. Character delivers (8.5). Themes deliver (7.8). Story delivers with caveats (7.5). Animation, world-building, and cultural reach (6.5, 7.0, 7.0) do not, and shoujo weighting cannot rescue those three. 7.68 is the honest resolution of a show whose strengths and weaknesses are unusually legible.

Verdict

Watch it for Risa Koizumi and the height-gap conceit, which is a real thematic engine rather than a hook. Skip it if you need production values or if comedic deflection at emotional peaks is a disqualifier. The Codex's 7.68 against MAL's 8.03 is not a disagreement about whether the show is good — it's a disagreement about how many criteria are allowed to count.