JK Meshi!

I have very much enjoyed this series.

At the core, it's about a group of three friends who briefly discuss going-ons with life/school, followed by enjoying a meal they have prepared.

There's not a lot of story to be told. The episodes each are only around 3-minutes in length, so it is over quickly. Each episode can be watched standalone, without depending on information from previous episodes, which is nice.

The art is fairly basic, but I feel it is cleverly used to the show's benefit and humor.

The characters are well-voiced. They don't feel forced.
There's not a whole lot of room for character development, but over the ... series you do get a clear sense of each character's "quirks". Especially from Ruriko, who is definitely not "normal".
Practically all of the comedy of the show comes from discussion of Ruriko's misunderstanding of common aspects of life.

At the end of each episode, one of the characters prepares a meal for the group, which typically involves looking at common food/ingredients, and showing them in a new light, or with a unique spin.

Despite the lack of story, and basic art, the overall enjoyment factor of the show is very high, and all the parts come together in a cohesive and enjoyable package. Episodes are short, yet still give a sense of satisfaction after each episode.

The meals presented are interesting, and leaves me wanting to try the new ideas for myself.

I find this show extremely refreshing. Nice change of pace in between other high-action, story-dense shows that are out there. I encourage people to watch an episode or two before being turned away based on other reviews. Thank you very much!

JK Meshi is the only anime I've ever seen that's so unbelievably bad that they literally had to have an episode where they straight-up admitted to having the lowest TV-ratings of the season, the worst production value and just being plain uninteresting, solely in order to try and score some sympathy points from their audience. When an anime is so embarrassingly awful that the best the show can do is make fun of its own miserable self, that's when you know you've hit rock bottom. And rightfully so, because this is the absolute worst anime I've *ever* seen.

In short, JK Meshi is a short ... series about three girls who every week discuss random trivia with each other for a minute or two, have a meal together, and then the episode is over. Nothing more, nothing less. End of story. But unlike your typical plotless slice of life comedy, in JK Meshi's case I legitimately don't understand what the purpose of the show is. Like it's not even a matter of taste really. Case in point: this is NOT a show meant for entertainment. There is ZERO enjoyment value in it. Why? Because it's an educational program. Literally the only thing it gives you is random trivia to learn. But the trivia is like elementary school level in terms of difficulty, for example “did you know that the capital of Australia is not actually Sydney, but Canberra?” Uhm yeah, I've known that since I was like 10 years old or something even if I live on the other side of the globe, thank you very much. Like who is this supposed to be aimed at? Elementary schoolers? Yeah right, good luck finding a 12-year-old who willingly watches lame educational programs on TV in their own spare time, not to mention that this is a late-night anime and thus evidentially not a kids' show. And adults should already know pretty much all these things given how basic it is. In other words... it's not just that the show is bad, but *there is no target demographic at all*. I find it sincerely baffling. I have no idea what the writers were thinking when they came up with this script.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, there's another equally horrendous aspect of this show. To put it bluntly, the animation quality is about 20 years outdated. When watching JK Meshi... if your eyes could puke... they would. The best way I can phrase it is that it looks just like an amateur made it in Flash in an hour or two of their spare time. It's just *that* bad. I can't believe something so putrid-looking was aired on TV in the year 2016. Like were they even trying when they made this show? The entire thing just feels like an intentional joke to me. If this is actually the best a studio can come up with, my faith in the anime industry is taking a serious blow here. Granted the producers of JK Meshi are some total unknowns as far as I know but still.

JK Meshi might be worth watching just for the rather... *unique* experience it provides, but otherwise I'd recommend you to stay away. FAR away.

Garbage... Review ended :D

To be honest i don't think there could be anyone who actually like this, it doesn't have story, a elementary school kid can make a better animation on a Nintendo DSi, the characters don't have any bparticular charisma, they are just three normal (and maybe very normal) girls how are losing hers time with friends (and I would rather lose time with friends myselft than watching this) and it doesn't bring anything interesting or at least any useful knowledge. The only reason I can imagin for someone to watch this thing to the end is just to add an anime to his ... or her list (Just like me)

Now, out of all the shows that I watched in 2015, JK meshi was by far the worse show out of them all and probably the worst anime I've ever seen to come out from any animation studio. The show is produced by Kyotoma and office Nobu...and both together they've only produced 4 shows in total, all of which are of very bad quality, and this anime is no exception to that.

Essentially, all we have from this show are three girls called Ruriko, Reina and Ryouka who are high school girls who discuss their daily lives...that's it! In the same location, near enough every ... time with horrible, lack luster animation. Now, in the past I've discussed horrible animation such as that presented in anime such as Absolute Duo and Sailor Moon Crystal, but these two examples look like a god damn masterpiece when compared to JK Meshi. JK Meshi is completely compromised of very simple, and very ugly looking flash animation. The flash animation is some of the worst I've ever seen in an anime before and not only that, they still fuck up something so simple by having really dull, and boring scenes. If one character it talking, the others are stuck mid-frame with the same expression on their stupid faces. Now, this is common to most anime where one character speaks, while the others stop and listen without any animation but in other shows it's a lot less noticeable and the animation flows much better, where here, because the animation is so bad, it's far more obvious.

They may occasionally change location or something but it shows you just how dreadful the animation actually is, and how lazily it's put together. The characters are one dimensional and have hardly no personalities. One cooks, one is stupid and the other one yells a lot at the other girls lack of knowledge. THAT'S IT!

The music is poor, but there is a catchy little jingle that plays at the end of every episode...that's about five seconds long....

The comedy in the show is weak, and while, on occasion, it can be humorous or funny, most of the time it fails thanks to the terrible visuals and aesthetics that keep dragging me out of the scene and reminds me that I'm watching the show known as "JK FUCKING MESHI!

Hell, I remember in one episode (I don't quite remember which one it was) where they actually make fun of themselves for how terrible they actually are, saying things about how nobody watches them or how they're ranked at the very bottom of the anime charts in Japan. This is just so tongue in cheek, and in its own way, humorous, but this sad attempt at self awareness about how bad the anime is, is undercut by its shitty production.

The only good thing I can say about this anime is at least the voice actresses are decent and you can tell they're actually trying to make the anime enjoyable, but aside from that, stay away from this one. This show is on level with bottom of the barrel titles such as Mars of Destruction.

I found this Anime fairly enjoyable and as such gave it a 7/10, with 5 being in my view average and anything higher being better, of course.

You might wonder why and it's because of the purpose of this anime. This anime is (as the show itself will even say!) A fairly cheaply made anime but one with charm. The voice acting is quite good and the DVDs you can get (at least they're purchasable in Japan!) come with a Karaoke-style script you can follow along for 2 of the episodes to help people practice or even just try voice acting. The spirit of the show, ... to me at least is all about making something from very little and indeed the dishes in the show are quite easy to make and don't require much effort. The show also mentions many times how they wish to help others with voice acting and indeed if you look at the profiles of the three voice actresses, they got their start on this show and later starred in quite a few other anime.

In an objective sense, there is not much in the way of actual animation, which is of course a bad aspect of the show. The in-joke made by the show about a show identical to it being cheaply made with only 3 voice actresses did not come across to me (as it seems to have to others) as a way to garner pity. Instead I just felt that the show was poking fun at itself and not being too serious about itself, which is a good thing for anime seen as 'bad' by many.

In the end, this anime helped launch the careers of the voice actresses involved and likely with the DVD's Karaoke-style scripts, potentially inspired others to take up voice acting and so while not ever being on the level of a show like K-On in terms of animation, contributed more to anime than an anime that is actually 'bad'

Or in the words of Anton Ego from Ratatouille "In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."

Many people miss that this project was more about showcasing and holding an event related to recruiting and encouraging up-coming seiyuu. For that reason, the animation is quite downplayed. It's more like a radio or short drama CD with flash animations as an after-thought.

Some of the banter is witty. It covers a large variety of topics, so the odds are decent of it hitting on something of interest to you at least once. If you don't come in expecting hidden depths, you'll at least find some running character jokes and that the girls are distinct and play certain set roles in manzai like bits. ... The show is quite self aware, and just as the meals cooked aren't meant to be gourmet, this is not meant to be more than a fun snack of an anime.

You'll mostly enjoy it if you enjoy audio dramas. If you're not into those, you'll probably hate this, expecting more of the common visual focus of anime. Sadly, the seiyuu do not have much great chemistry bouncing off of each other, either, but their individual performances save it and make it successful at what it's trying to be, despite some below average elements.

Sometimes a show comes along that stands out for the wrong reasons, it could the content, art style or animation. JK Meshi! is a short series that suffers from one of these but can it overcome this to bring some entertainment to those watching or will it follow suit and crumble?

The premise here is simple and effective, three girls sit around discussing all sorts but mainly revising various topics for school. After they have finished revising or they get distracted they get hungry and Reina (mostly) cooks something up from the odds and ends of food she has around the kitchen. That’s it and for ... the length of the show (3 minutes per episode) it feels just right, the topics of revision never overstay their welcome and the snack preparation parts are short and to the point as well as being rather creative in what you can make.

The food part is where the title comes from. JK meshi being a simple to make food that almost anyone can make apparently. It’s nice that the series focuses on this instead of the more elaborate foods you see in other shows. Sure it may be nice to see these incredibly hard to make dishes in a series like Shokugeki no Soma but they aren’t realistically something you can make. Here it is not the case and whilst some of the dishes may look odd or unappetising they are doable. If I weren’t such a picky eater I would have made some of these myself. It stands out from the pack because of this.

The girls are all a treat, Ruriko is the lax one who does appear to be ditzy, Ryouka is the serious one and Reina is in the middle. Their conversations feel natural as it should since they are all friends and being that it is just those 3 the majority of the time it is more than welcome. Ruriko brings most of the humour to the series, be it thinking she saw a Neanderthal in Germany or mixing up historical figures and modern celebrities and much more. It is genuinely funny to see what they come up with and how the other two react to her comments and it happens almost every episode.

Now to the elephant in the room, I’m not going to beat around the bush or make up excuses here, the animation is incredibly poor, absolutely no doubt about that. It looks like it’s been done in Flash and probably has. It is choppy, the mouth movements barely match up to the voices and there is little to it in general. The last part is not really its fault, you have a series about girls talking to each other then cooking something of course there is going to be limited animation.

In the sea of anime that we have these days it stands out for the wrong reasons because of this which is unfortunate as it will deter viewers. It is the worst animation I have seen this year, only Triggers Uchuu Patrol Luluco comes close. The only positive that I can make in regards to this is that it is only a short series so it won’t bother you too much, hopefully. It feels wrong to say it kind of gets away with it due to that but it does in my eyes.

This cheapness crosses into the art as well, character models look a tad off and the designs basic but it seems it was needed like that for the animation. Thankfully the colour palette is nice and vivid and the foods look okay when they make them. The sound for what it’s worth is bland and forgettable. There is no OP or ED, just part of the soundtrack playing over a very breif credit sequence.

For me this really is a case of content overcoming a poor budget. If you can ignore the very cheap feel to this series I wholeheartedly recommend this, it is very fun to watch and really interesting to see what you can make from what you have left in the cupboard. The conversations are interesting and usually will bring a smile to your face or make you laugh so it does its job.

On a Japanese poll, this anime ranked higher than Shoukugeki no Soma at #1.
How...?
Beats the hell out of me.
JK Meshi! first appealed to me since I figured it'd be about cooking. If you're a super lazy fuck who can only microwave pizza, maybe this is a cooking anime for you. If you want to learn how to boil an egg, that may be a bit too complicated for this anime.
The recipes in this anime were at first about eating low calorie, but it seems to have deviated from that unless that was only for just a few episodes. I have to say that the warm ... candy on rice (was it) was the weirdest recipe I would never even want to consider, but I'm guessing it's for the comedic effect?
The "comedy" is nothing short of the girls randomly talking about different subjects from agriculture to government and history, which is really weird because then they just say they're hungry and go on to make something. So yeah, can't say it's funny at all.
I also want to say that I have a hard time believing that the short haired girl is anywhere near the same age considering how she dresses and looks. Ummmm really? Anyway, I don't recommend the anime.

Hello fellow masochists and welcome to JK Meshi, an anime that makes absolutely no sense! This anime is so absolutely garbage that I think this is the worst anime to come out of this season's anime lineup.

JK Meshi is an anime with almost no existent story, bland forgettable characters and poor art/animation that a 10-year old can do better with his eyes closed. Give me 5 minutes and I can write a much better story than the one of JK Meshi! Seriously, every episode is either random banter on food or history lessons.

Stay as far away as can from this anime. You will be bored ... to the death just by watching 1 episode of this crap.

The MAL community is generally forgiving of Slice of Life anime with banal premises - see the reception of K-on, Non Non Biyori, so I wondered why JK Meshi was scored among the worst entries to ever appear in the database. Surely it can't just be the fact that its only three minutes long per episode?

About a minute into the first episode I understood why - JK Meshi fails to execute the bare minimum of what a slice of life anime needs to be loved by at least a portion of the anime community - cute and personable characters. All of the girls have bland, ... uncreative, forgettable designs. The animation looks like it was done in flash with choppy movements and barely any variance in facial expression or gesture. You’re not gonna find any waifus here nor will you find any cute personality types that will endear a viewer to a character.

This could be somewhat forgiven if the topic explored was well executed - JK Meshi does in part aim to be an educational cooking show of simple meals that anyone can prepare, but because the art is so fugly it makes all of the food look disgusting. It’s the exact opposite of Souma in that respect, or the lesser known Osake wa Fuufu that damn near made me an alcoholic with its appeals to creating adult beverages.

So here you have what is quite possibly the worst attempt at a SOL ever, failing to be likable from a character endearment standpoint and failing to have a topic or a familiar setting that viewers can immerse themselves into (take for instance, school life environments). I suppose it being a short anime does give it some reprieve, as you don't waste much of your time in efforts of completing it, but even so it's deservingly placed among the worst anime for sucking at the foundational points of its own genre.

I decided to add this to my Crunchyroll queue after blasting through Wakako-zake and taking a quick glance at the promo art and thinking to myself "sure, cute anime girls and cooking, I'll check it out", and admittedly I didn't really pay that much attention to the artwork and missed all the weird mistakes, but my first impressions were that it'd just be a cute innocent little show about cooking - and to an extent it is, but it's just so goddamn ugly and disappointing.

Each episode is extremely short and from what I've seen they follow a pattern of 1) have the girls discuss something ... 2) suggest taking a break from studying 3) make food 4) educate the audience on the dish. This isn't necessarily a bad pattern to follow but this show is so short that it just doesn't work. Maybe it's just Japanese humour that I don't get, but I always found the opening discussions to be really boring and unfunny, and that isn't helped by the fact that they usually take up around HALF of the entire episode. I get the slice-of-life appeal to this, but it just seems like unnecessary fluff that's only there to fill out their THREE MINUTE run-time because they didn't wanna do enough research on certain dishes to perhaps make entire episodes about it rather than just shoving it into the last 30 seconds of the episode.

I've gotta say, despite the art and animation being the biggest complaint about this show, I don't necessarily hate the art itself. Sure, there are lots of ugly mistakes here and there and the character designs are kinda bland, but it's not the worst thing I've ever seen. It kinda looks like the animators traced a few sketches from a semi-decent artist with the line tool. THE ANIMATION HOWEVER is what really kills it. JK Meshi is so obviously flash-animated and done in such an unappealing way that it's almost painful to watch. I know that animation is hard and all but I swear I've seen better animation in Cbeebies flash games. Animation in JK Meshi is essentially just bad tween effects, 3-frame mouth movements and the occasional blink. That's it.

The voice acting is alright at least, in fact it's probably the best thing about the show. All three actresses do a good job and considering Fujita Nao and Natsuko Hara don't seem to have taken on many voice acting roles, I at least hope this show does good in adding to their portfolios and helping them get work in the future. There's not really much I can say about the sound effects or music though. As for music, there is none. As for sound effects, they're just about as generic as possible and remind me of old Pucca flash cartoons.

To me, JK Meshi feels like it was made because somebody in Japan saw a bunch of lazy young otaku who pretty much live off of instant noodles and take-out and thought "somebody needs to teach these fuckers to cook", so they created a show about cooking and made the main characters cute anime girls to attract an audience, but they did just about everything wrong. The cute anime girls look generic as hell and the animation completely kills any kind of visual appeal they have, the show doesn't focus enough on the actual food and can't even provide nice illustrations or even photos of the finished result to make people want to eat it, and the show spends so much time on boring chit-chat that it barely leaves time to actually explain properly how to make the dish. Wakako-zake could get away with skipping this part because the show was about Wakako going out and eating at restaurants and was more about the act of eating and enjoying food, but JK Meshi is a show about cooking that does provide information on how to cook the dishes seen in the show, but a lot of the time it's barely enough information to use as reference, meaning if this show does somehow motivate you to cook, you'll either be relying on the internet or guessing if you're somehow stuck without it. If Wakako-zake can teach me almost entirely how to make karaage chicken minus how long it takes to cook despite the show having no need to, then this show has no excuse for it's complete lack of effort.

I've seen worse. Of all the food-themed animes I've seen, this is definitely not the worst.

I like these little animes, especially food-themed ones. It's true the art is cheap, but cute enough for me. Three and a half minute episodes are fine, especially when it doesn't have that long theme song unlike some other short animes. It has the best kind of cast: all-girl joshikousei.

So. This one is half a slice of life, half about cooking. And the cooking is ... well, you'll see. Considering this is Japan, maybe it's even based on reality. I'm actually tempted to write down the recipes.

thank god its 3 min per ep
the show is boring, ugly and somehow still too long despite the whole show being only 80 minutes long
i thought it would be so bad its good but it was just bad, dont bother watching it
the story is uninteresting, the episodes are all the same. it looks like it had a $100 budget and was made in a week because its one of the worst anime ive ever seen visually
the characters are boring and 1 dimensional
the voice acting was mediocre, its probably the best part of the whole anime
it wasnt fun to watch, it just felt like a big ... waste of time

This is my first review on My Anime List. This anime surprised me positively. After the ratings and other reviews, I was expecting something bad. However, what I saw was a great experience. The characters are really cute and the story is silly but fun. It was a really nice time. The dishes that were at the end of each episode turned out to be true! They are very good and for the next dinner I will definitely use them again. Only the animation does not suit me, but it does not bother me after some time. I ... can even say that it suits this silly anime. JK Meshi was very sweet and I can easily give 8/10.