Zashiki Warashi no Tatami-chan

Zashiki Warashi no Tatami-chan, which shall henceforth receive community-wide officiation to be shortened to Tatami-chan, is a series of short episodes that aim to satirize elements of Tokyo culture, from rowdy festivals to mixer hook-ups. The main character is a sharp-mouthed, country bumpkin ghost, the titular Tatami, who frequently reacts to the culture shocks she experiences in her day-to-day life as a city dweller.

Despite its roots in Japanese culture, none of the jokes or scenarios are particularly hard for a western audience to understand. The comedy is more humorous than it is hilarious. That is to say, you probably won't laugh, but you'll have ... a hard time thinking any of the jokes are terrible, because they're all based in truth. Thankfully, every episode is three minutes long, so it doesn't overstay its welcome.

Tatami-chan's defining characteristic is that it has on average 2-4 frames of animation per character per episode: mouth open, mouth closed, and then maybe some extra expressions to emphasize a punchline, if necessary. While this may work to add to its appeal, it does nothing to add to its quality.

To be honest, I don't see what need anyone would ever have to watch this show post-airing, unless you're fulfilling a quota, or some sort of challenge, but if for whatever reason you're in the market for an obscure, marginally entertaining, poorly produced comedy short, look no further than Tatami-chan.

This is quite possibly the worst comedy I've ever had the displeasure to watch and it's not just the comedy not being up my alley, I have a hard time believing anyone would find this funny.

The charaters are flat, the conversations are stiff and it looks like it was animated by a bored highschool student in their spare time. The sound is also quite bad but I guess it's acceptable for a low effort gag series like this one.

Every episode is a single dragged out skit and I think the punchline is that there is no punchline, well sometimes they have something resembling a punchline ... at the end but the tone stays the same throughout so it doesn't add anything, it's just complete crap all the way through. Funny, right? If there is any actual praise I can give this series it's that it accidentally eased up my frown a bit a couple of times.

Story: 0
Art: 0
Sound: 2
Character: 0
Enjoyment: 0
Overall: complete and utter shit

Words cannot describe my hatred for this pathetic trash that doesn't deserve to be called an anime.

Starting off with the comedy aspect of this show, this show doesn't have any funny moments. All the "funny moments" that are supposed to make you laugh are disgusting and make me wanna throw up.

The fact that this trash bag of a show can call itself a "comedy" is a disgrace to other comedies.

Secondly, the characters are all trash and easy to hate.

There isn't a single good character and like the comedy every time a character is on screen I feel like throwing up from how trash it ... is.

The story is trash as expected as well as it's basically about an annoying ghost that moved to Tokyo. It's so bad that it makes me wanna throw up just like everything else in this trash show.

The art and sound aren't appalling but still below average in my opinion.

You might enjoy this more than I did, but The 5.24 average is deserved.


Story: 1/10

Art and Sound: Both 3/10

Character: 1/10

Enjoyment: 1/10

Overall: 1/10 ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC AND TRASH



I don't recommend this trash to anyone and even if you watch it don't have your expectations too high

You could spend less than an hour watching Zashiki Warashi no Tatami-chan, a short form "anime" in its entirety, or you could just rewatch anything else you've ever seen because it has a high chance of being better. There is no room for an ironic watch either, it's just plain horrible without the comedic horror it wishes it had.

Perhaps like other MAL users this past spring season, I decided to waste about an hour of my time to watch this short 4 minute series per episode series a few weeks back. I even had some hopes because I liked High Score Girl, and the author ... of that series was attached to this project. Those hopes were dashed swiftly and brutally, and few anime have I actively disliked more.

I think of myself as a fairly generous grader when it comes to anime and manga, perhaps too much so on my page (I generally rate enjoyment rather than totally objectively), yet this "anime" warrants the objective two it gets.

So let's go into the why of the wretchedness that is this "anime."

A quick synopsis to in order to set the stage: Country ghostly girl-youkai decides to move to Tokyo to see what the hullabaloo is about and meets with other mildly scary youkai to share different city life experiences.

The biggest driving factor in my opinion that royally messes up this "anime" is the lack thereof said animation. The characters are basically static throughout the entire vignette of an episode excepting the mouth and eyes, the forehead vein popping, and maybe some vibration of movement. The color pallette is understandably dreary due to the supposedly "creepy" character of this "anime," but is otherwise unremarkable except for the static nature of said drawings with no overlays put partially into motion (I hesitate to call this "anime.)" The background is entirely static throughout the series. In fact, the most animated part of the entire episode is the 30 second outro/ED in which the upper third is animated moving with relation to what happened in the episode. The art itself is in the same style High Score Girl, as the author had a heavy hand in this series. The drawing would be fine if this was a manga, but as an anime it fails fairly spectacularly in most technical regards. In fact, it's almost as if the basic character designs were all that could be animated after using the rest of the budget on the outro.

Let's move onto the second main fault of this anime: the characters. They are forgettable. I mean sure they are creepy but not in the scary way this "anime" wants to be (just scary bad). You have the main character Tatami-chan, whose name I had to look up to write this (heck I even forgot it was in the title). Her character is as follows: a whiny, angry, country-youkai lost in the big city. She gets angry at everything for every reason. And that's it, no more dimensions than that. Then you have the tentament owner, who is quite well... sexually frustrated to put it nicely and lightly. Her main emotions range from sad to sexually frustrated to angry. The Tickling priest is creepy because he, well... tickles? and that's about it, then there's a few others various characters that are generic creepy, sad, or cheap. They are B.L.A.H. blah. Vegetable stock soup couldn't be this blandly annoying when talking about this series as all the characters are fairly static until the end of the series.

Thirdly, the vignettes stories themselves are standard fish out of water, so let's laugh at how much of a country bumpkin Tatami is. In other words, the overall story is boring, overdone, and does not contain one iota of imagination. With Slice of Life as a genre, if the show neither is focusing on the slightly innovative, sympathetic characters, nor is focusing on the story told in a different enough way to be a satisfying reality, the entirety of the show will fall apart because it's often the perfected reality that people use to escape, not the overplayed mundaneness of tropes seen in other anime that this "manganime" continually uses. The comedy mostly falls flat due to the characters.

The outro/ED was probably the least egregious thing about this anime, and probably saves it from an actual one. The song is actually somewhat catchy, while the outro is probably visually the most pleasing part of the entire series due to the fact the characters are actually animated and aren't talking, not to mention the fact it signals the end of the episode. I'm sure the VAs tried their best as well with what little instruction they got, so I blame the directors for letting this rushed-student-project of whatever-this-is to reach a wider audience.

I tried to watch with an open mind; I expanded my 3 episode rule just to see if there was a chance it got better and because short anime are easier to put down for a spell if need be. I probably should've dropped. I thought about doing so as well, but the whole situation was like stopping at several consecutive red lights while driving, then slowing down at the next green light expecting it to change to yellow then red, yet nothing happens. You slowly coast through the intersection and somehow feel let down and anxious at not being stopped at that light. If there was an "anime" that could express that feeling, this would be it. This anime does not crash and burn, rather it never really alights to begin with, forever disappointing in the doldrums of its setting in the Tokyo-tinged Twilight Zone.

Tatami Chan employs a fast-paced manzai-adjacent comedy style that doesn’t always translate very well into English, which I initially thought could be the reason the series gets such poor reviews. I quickly realized though that the writing just isn’t that good, and the rapid fire dialogue feels like an attempt to conceal that.

I was disappointed because the concept for this show is excellent: the foibles of Japanese folklore creatures struggling to navigate a bustling, hard-knock modern Tokyo is a premise that should lend itself to great comedic effect.

Unfortunately the show suffers from a few core problems:
1. Jokes that should be a few lines long ... are milked for entire (short) episodes. Tatami Chan struggling to figure out how to use an IC Pass is kind of funny, but an entire episode this does not make. Or maybe it actually could have made a whole episode, but instead the producers chose to use and abuse the same comedic device throughout the whole episode.
2. The protagonist is just not charming or funny enough to compensate for her shrill, whiny rambling. I call this the “Caillou effect”.
3. Finally, the animation and character design itself is just bad, even by low-budget short form anime standards. (Except the backgrounds which are fine). I think there was a vague attempt to recall Hyakki Yagyo artwork but it is too sloppy to be successful.

There are definitely a few funny moments in this show but they are drowned out by the sound of dead horses being beaten.

At first i want to tell you how i find this anime. I wanted to watch The Tatami Galaxy but made a typo and found this. I thought horror comedy doesn't sound too bad, so i watched it. I regret my decision.

This anime is a insult to animation. Not just anime. Animation
but yeah lets talk about stuff more detailed

Story: non existent. like fr. its a girl from the land in tokyo and like the sketches are about it, but a story that can be explained in 1 sentence without even missing anything out is pathetic.

Art: Some indian youtube cartoons are looking better than this

Character: Annoying
the ... ghost and the landlady are assholes and the priest is a fucking pedophile.

Enjoyment: i felt pain during the anime
pain in my heart

overall: this anime is the most lazy, annoying, unfunny, terrible piece of animation i have ever seen! It is just pathetic and i hope i can find The Tatami Galaxy and watch it now, so i can cure my severe depression that i got from just 2 episodes of this show

My sense of guilt brought me here.
I watched this anime.
I still can't believe it.

Story: 0

Art: -1
The animation is non-existent,I wanted to punch the screen everytime there was a zoom in and zoom out on the character's face;
it's animated like a visual novel, with 2 sprites for characters.Art is horrible.The backgrounds are the only thing ''''''acceptable'''''

... Sound: 1
I put one just cause the sound is present

Character: 0

Enjoyement: -(2)^2
The humor could have saved this, but no.Not at all.
Even though some jokes might have been funny, the way they are timed,no, the way EVERYTHING is timed is awful.
In every episode you feel like everyone is just screaming/blurting random lines directly into yours ears and it gets annoying pretty quickly.

Overall: I hated and regretted every minute of it.I regret even losing time writing this review.