|
|
|
Digital
|
|
Tuesday, 04 October 2011 00:00 |
|
Page 1 of 3
The latest series from fan-favourite studio Kyoto Animation, Nichijou takes the lives of a group of high school students and the people around them, and has a little fun. But it's not to everyone's taste...
I'm not going to bother putting any sort of synopsis here, as no matter where in the series I took it from, it wouldn't really be representative - "random" in Nichijou's stock in trade, so picking one or two pieces to try and describe the series by example really doesn't work. A bit like aliens landing in Antarctica, and assuming the whole earth was a frozen wasteland. If I had to draw a comparison to something similar, Azumanga Daioh would be the closest thing (both in comedic and visual style), but even then they're not quite the same thing - Azumanga was based on a 4-koma manga, for starters, while the Nichijou manga is long-form. It's apples and oranges.
Think more of a comedy skit series, actually, and you'd be closer to the mark. There's the adventures of Mio, Yukko and Mai; the adventures of Nano and the Professor; the janken skit, the Helvetica Standard skit; "gundere" girl skit; Princess Starla & her airship; Nakamura-sensei; goat boy; and quite a few other "skits", each based around particular characters and themes and that each episode flits back and forth between. The series has a short attention span, most of the time, and even if you come across a character or situation that doesn't work for you, it's never long before something else comes along.
The core of the series is around the two main groups of Mio / Yukko / Mai and Nano / Professor / Sakamoto, though, so let's concentrate on them. Yukko is a bit of a space cadet, and as clumsy as hell; Mio is a secret mangaka, and probably the closest of the show's main characters to "normal" (yet still quite some way off it); Mai seems to spend her life trolling her friends, oblivious to most of what goes on around her. They're a good trio of friends, and their antics is one of the highlights of the show.
Whereas they're just normal highschool girls, though, the other 'core' trio is very much out of the ordinary. The Professor is a young girl, around 8 or 9, and a veritable genius; Nano is her prized creation, a robot girl with a giant wind-up key sticking from her back that she wishes wasn't there so that people would see her as normal. Their cat Sakamoto wears a special scarf created by the Professor that allows him to speak - and he has snark on the level of Sabrina the Teenage Witch's cat Salem, which is only natural for a cat. As a contrast to the other three, they're great - and with the series eventually turning out to really be "about" Nano and Yukko (as far as you could consider Nichijou to have a story), the contrast between the two groups and the way they eventually start mixing with each other is key to the show's fun.
That "fun" is a little tricky to pin down, though, and amongst KyoAni followers Nichijou is turning out to be highly devisive. Yes, it's a skit comedy, but instead of going entirely for light and easily-understood gags, it sometimes expects you to use your brain a bit and work out what's going on for yourself, skipping from a 10-second janken skit, though a lavishly-animated and almost-in-silence chase scene, to a 10-minute Princess Starla "story" that turns out to be nothing more than an elaborate setup for a 2-second visual gag. The series and characters take a while to grow on you, it takes a little work to get the best out of the situations, and that means that, even moreso than most comedy shows (comedy is, after all, one of the most subjective genres) it really doesn't appeal to everyone.
With all that said, though, I loved it, and it's been the highlight of my Sundays for the past six months. I'm genuinely going to miss it, and the fun that the characters always seemed to be having (with the exception of Helvetica Standard, which really went right over my head). All the indications are that the series hasn't been all that well received, especially by KyoAni standards, and that's a real shame - but I have to say that, for every person I know who watched the first few episodes and thought "no", the vast majority of those who give it a few more to prove itself ended up loving it. A little bit of patience is the key - allow Nichijou some time to work its magic, and you'll be well rewarded. Definitely worth checking out.
<< Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >>
|
|
Reviews Archive 
