Well. It seems another competitor has entered the ring. I was kinda expecting my last post to go totally unnoticed. But it seems that certain people still have this site buried in their RSS feeds or email notification lists and managed to see that I updated, and it seems that a certain Navarr-esque entrant has decided to compete for the latest post. With a Minecraft post, even (Which I consider to be cheating)! So I must find something else to post about. I’m not going to lie, part of me was justifying My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic as being just as otaku as Minecraft, and I was so tempted to make a random pony update. But I’m above that, so in its place I’ve actually mentioned SOMETHING JAPANESE (*cough cough*) and written a review of Nichijou. But I warn you, Navarr. You’re playing a dangerous game, and my threat of ponies is ever-present!
So I should probably get on with it.
Nichijou (日常) is Japanese for ‘everyday’. And honestly, I can’t think of a more perfect word to sum up this slice-of-life comedy series. Originating as a manga series in Shonen Ace in December 2006 by Keiichi Arawi, it was given the anime treatment by Kyoto Animation, airing 26 episodes between April 3rd and September 25th of this year. The same studio that brought such hits as Lucky Star, K-On! and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya – And it shows. The series meets the high standards that you would expect from the creator of all of these.
The actual ‘storyline’ (if you would go so far as to call it that) revolves around multiple intertwining groups of people, the main two being a group of 3 high school girls, Mai, Yūko, and Mio, with their high school shenanigans, and an 8 year old professor who’s never actually named that somehow has the intelligence and resources to create an advanced high school aged robot called Nano and a talking cat called Sakamoto. Just like real life, right? There’s also a bunch of other colourful characters that have their own adventures, such as Kōjirō Sasahara, a posh kid that rides a goat to school, Tsuyoshi Nakanojō, a… kid with a natural mohawk, and Kenzaburō Daiku, president of the after-school ‘go-soccer’ club, a game for which the rules are… interesting, to say the least.
Okay, so you might have got from that that it’s not the easiest anime to describe. But the series takes the formula of ‘high school girls doing things’ and really lets the imagination flow, and in time the characters all become part of this world. The quickfire nature of the sketches means that if a particular sketch may not be to your liking then a funnier one is likely not that far off. However, this can act as a bit of a double-edged sword. The series doesn’t quite have the character development of other similar series’. The characters and personalities are the same from beginning to end, which can make it slightly harder to really get into the characterisation. I walk away from the series only really feeling that I’ve ‘connected’ with maybe one of the characters. The series has no persistence – For the most part, sketches could fit in any episode, and the world just resets to the state it was in before the sketch started at the end of it. This can make it easier to jump in to episodes, but means that the characters don’t really flesh out as much as one might hope.
Graphically, the series looks amazing. The colours are slightly washed out, which makes for a very nice visual style to watch. Audibly, the series is also amazing. All of the OPs and EDs are incredibly catchy and are now thoroughly embedded inside my head. There are a lot of voice actors that also worked on Lucky Star and Seitokai no Ichizon, which makes that well done as well. In terms of humour, that’s always going to be subjective. But I would definitely say that the series has a good balance between cheap laughs and long payoffs. Certainly a style of humour that I personally loved. The only real issue I have is that people may be turned off by the lack of persistence in the world, no episode is affected by any other – But that’s a common theme amongst anime, so it’s acceptable in this context. Overall, incredible, a must-watch for any fans of Azumanga Daioh, K-On!, Lucky Star, PaniPoni Dash or anything similar.
A solid 10/10 from me!
