In this Spring 2011 Kaleidoscope, I’ll be blogging a different series each week. For me, a week starts on Monday and ends on Sunday, so for this first week I could only choose between Dog Days and Nichijou. Now, I really don’t like Dog Days (it’s not the premise; it’s the half-assed execution that gets me), I figured that this would be a good chance to wrap up my thoughts on the tons of slice of life series this season. In technical terms, Nichijou again has the most solid execution, but I’m probably going to drop it after this episode.
The thing is that I love slice of life… as long as I care about the characters. If not, they they bore me beyond belief, and unfortunately after three episodes (the OVA included), I’m still missing this with Nichijou. There are several reasons for this, but there are two that really stand out for me:
First of all: it tries to be funny, while it actually isn’t and I really don’t like people making jokes that just aren’t funny. Sure, this episode had some laughs, but they’re just too few and far inbetween. This series also has the tendency to make a joke, then instead of just wrapping it up, dragging it further for way too long in the hopes of squeezing some extra laughs out of it. Take a look at Hen Zemi and Yondemasuyo, Azazel-san: those are two series that actually figured out that you don’t necessarily need to take up 20 minute episodes. I think that that would also have fitted Nichijou. It would have really tightened up the pacing.
The second reason: who are these characters? What exactly do we know about them? I mean, the whole point of slice of life is to show the everyday activities of its characters without the usual forced drama or unrealistic action plot: just show some ordinary people living their daily lives. However, it’s not like ordinary people are completely bland either. Everyone still needs to have at least some background, but even there this show just refuses to show even the slightest hints at characterization. All we know right now is that the lead character has a sister and the professor made herself a robot.
It’s the same problem I had with Lucky Star: these characters are simply way too one-dimensional and one-sided. K-On at least bothered to make its cast feel like regular high school girls. These two however don’t even bother.
Where this show stands above Lucky Star (and really miles above), is with its animation and creativity. Especially the running scene in this episode was excellent. It’s the scenes like that that are the big selling point of this series. At this point though, I don’t think that it’ll be enough for this series: there are just too many other scenes that just don’t work.
Rating: (Enjoyable)
Yessss blogging wheel!
Dog Days’ second episode was pretty good though, with some well executed action scenes and actually not so annoying ecchi. if it keeps fun like this, I’m sold.
About slice of life, I disagree about your concept on characterization. It’s important to make the viewer care about the characters, sure, but it’s not necessary to let the jokes aside and you can very well work with them along the series. So far I don’t really sympathize with anyone in particular, but I can still laugh out loud (humor is subjective though, so we can’t discuss about jokes being funny or not, which they are for me). Now I’m more interested about them because they are entertaining to watch.
Now take A-Channel. It tried to make a deeper analysis on characters, but completely forgot about making them interesting or enjoyable first. So in the end I didn’t care about any of them, didn’t find anything remotely funny and couldn’t stand watching the first episode until the end. Which rendered all the efforts useless.
Ok,maybe I’m having a brainfart so bare with me.
But you loved GA,yet I don’t think that show developed its characters either,they were all characterised with generaly one personality trait and that’s it.
Right now the only difference (appart from production values) that I see with GA is the type of jokes that revolved around art which seems to be more to your liking but I have a hard time seeing how you can give Nichijou this kind of critisism and not do so for GA.
I think it’s a combination of not caring about characters and the jokes falling flat.
If it were actually funny, having characters you don’t really care about would be fine (for now).
So you found Squid Girl funny, but not this? You have a very strange sense of humor. Or maybe selective is the right word.
totoum: it’s indeed that GA actually did have something that was really interesting: its focus on art, plus the way in which most of its jokes worked. Because of that the slice of life also made the cast even better. Nichijou though… just has too little to make me care about the cast. If it did one of those two things I complained about right (ie either being funny for me or having good characters), I probably would have loved this show.
Well, I’m not exactly surprised that you think Dog Days first episode had a half-baked execution, it’s second episode was exceedingly better done than what I can say for Nichijou, which I have found downright boring from the beginning.
For Nichijou, a lot of it’s humor is strictly japanese humor, but not exactly the japanese humor I like.
Some say the bizarre out of this world jokes is funny, but that’s a hit or miss sort of thing. If it’s a hit, you love it. Otherwise, you hate it. I don’t think there’s middle ground for it because if you hate its brand of comedy, there’s nothing else redeeming about the show bar its animation.
Personally, I feel like the jokes are far too forced to be entertaining, and characters serve as a punchline with uninteresting personalities. That said, people are free to like what they like, even if I personally think its redundant shit that doesn’t even have a twist to what’s already been done.