Atasha Kawashiri Kodama da yo: Dangerous Lifehacker no Tadareta Seikatsu

There has never been an anime more in need of a 'skip opening' button on Crunchyroll than this series. The opening theme is full on half of the length of each episode. It's super irritating. If you put each of the 1:30 second skits back to back you'd not even have 2 full-length standard episodes of anime. The OP really pads out the runtime on this one, so I don't feel like this series is a bad time investment if you skip it. The show itself is quirky and unique and certainly worth 36 minutes of your time to watch in its entirey (without the ... credits). Aoi Yuki is a genius and does all the voice acting, and from what I could tell, maybe even all the sound effects. The jokes are bizarre, but funny; they show off these really weird behaviors of the main character Kodama Kawashiri. I really liked the art style here. Seemed to fit with the nature of the series just right. There's really not much to be said about this one I think. I liked this series quite a lot, but it's defintely not for everyone; I'd say this is a veteran level anime.

Don't feel disappointed when you watch the well-animated 1:30 intro... followed by the actual episode being only 1 minute long and drawn in a scratchy style with barely any animation. Disappointingly, despite the title, there are very few "life hacks" shown (which would be a good and original concept); it's mostly old-hat jokes about how Kodama is lazy, enjoys junk food, finds it hard to focus on work, etc. Still, the limited animation is charming at times, the sound effects (all of them made with the voice actress's mouth) are amusing, and some episodes are fairly interesting to watch (specifically those where Kodama actually leaves ... her home).

The most simple way I could sum up my viewing experience with Atasha Kawashiri is that, at least in the format presented, it has no reason to exist. Every episode starts with a 90 second OP, following by one minute of the actual anime. This might even be an acceptable format, if not for how hideous the show is once you get past a deceptively decent looking intro. As for the content of AtaKawa, every episode is just her daily NEET-esque life of getting drunk, eating junk food, and otherwise being a disgusting slob. That isn't to say even this is unappealing, there are characters ... like Tomoko and Gabriel who are really popular and are similar characters, but there are more to them than there is to Kawashiri. If I had to find something which was supposed to be the "hook" of the show, it's the attempt to present mundane daily life in a humorous way. I chuckled here and there, but a lot of the observational humor fell flat, even aspects I could relate to. I tried to find some of the manga to read online to see if that was funny and it was just a poor adaptation (which it almost certainly is, if even just from an animation standpoint), but alas, I could not.

Circling back to my original thought, there is no reason for this anime to exist in the form it was presented. Throughout the season, there are 24 total minutes of content, so why couldn't the money be found to create a decent one episode special? The world may never know... or care, to be honest.