Akebi-chan no Sailor-fuku

This show is some creepy, grimey, fetishy shit, and I’m not gonna lie. I’m a big fan.

Nowhere else will you find such lovingly crafted artwork and animation of a cute moe girl clipping her toenails and smelling the clippers like a complete fucking degenerate. I think it would be grievously disrespectful to the artistic merit this series has to offer to simply say the whole point of it is to show hebe lolis striking extremely suggestive poses while zooming in on them in a blatantly sexualized fashion, but if someone watched it and walked away with that impression, I couldn’t really blame them. If something ... like Non Non Biyori was an appreciation of countryside middle school girls’ innocent ways of life, then Akebi-chan no Sailor-fuku is an appreciation of countryside middle school girls’ innocent…umm…bodies? I honestly don’t really know what to make of it sometimes. It feels like it was made by that one guy from Night Is Short, Walk on Girl. That old sleazeball from the beginning who was in crippling debt with Rihaku. I always thought it was such a hilarious gag to have him desperately trying to convince everyone his collection of old erotic paintings was more than just masturbatory fetish-fuel, because everyone was just like, “Yeah, sure. Whatever, man. You’re totally not just a perverted old geezer. Totally.” And his pathetic grandstanding was actually kinda compelling. I mean, yes, that guy was obviously just a pervert, but defending his collection of erotica as some from of “high-art” actually had a layer of credibility when they were all genuinely old and preserved paintings from past eras. If his argument was simply that a certain level of discipline and culture is required to collect and preserve historical, hand-painted erotica that isn’t required to download hentai off gelbooru, then he honestly wasn’t wrong.

I have similar feelings regarding this show. By no means am I oblivious to the sexual pandering on such flagrant display, but there’s a genuine elegance and artistry to it, I feel like there’s something more going on here. Or, hey, maybe there isn’t, and all cute girl shows are made exclusively to promote pedophilia, am I right? Either way, what you walk away with is a charming, endearing, gorgeously animated slice of life show which just happens to have an extreme foot fetish, tons of armpit shots, lipservice, and a cast of cute girls whose clothing hugs their bodies as tightly as it possibly can whenever they stretch or move even slightly. Our angelic protagonist, Akebi, is an adorable middle school freshman who studied as hard as she could to get into the prestigious academy her Mother went to when she was a girl, not because she had any particular academic aspirations, but simply because she fell in love with her Mother’s old sailor uniform and wanted to wear one herself. However, went she arrives, she learns the school has since changed their uniforms to more modern blazer jackets and black skirts. She’s devastated, but luckily, the nostalgic principal empathizes with her feelings and decides Akebi should be allowed to wear the sailor uniform if she so wishes. And thus we have our gimmick: Akebi is an eccentric, lovable, headstrong young girl who stands out, who is usually the center of attention, and who everyone becomes inspired by and/or enamored with. As her best friend, Kizaki, so aptly puts it, “It’s fun just watching her.” And the show capitalizes on this appeal 100%. It’s no coincidence, if you ask me, that Akebi enjoys doing yoga, dance, and gymnastics wearing short-shorts and skirts for all to see.

If there’s anything I have to really complain about, it’s that the show doesn’t go far enough. For example, in episode two, there’s a scene where Akebi bends over backwards and flips over in front of the class. There’s no pantyshot or anything—or at least not as far as you can see—but all her classmates are freaking out and blushing, and later in the episode they poke fun at her for showing her panties to the class. This obviously confused me, so I went to investigate the same scene in the manga, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by what I found. In the manga, you do, indeed, see a pantyshot, but it was censored from the anime by having her skirt not hike up as far. This is why I brought up that old sleazeball from Night is Short, Walk on Girl. I feel like the normal reaction people would have to reading a review which complains about an anime adaptation toning down more sexualized imagery from the manga would be to say, “Aren’t you just saying that because you want to see more perverted fanservice?” And the answer is no, not really. I mean, from a utilitarian perspective, what is even the point in bitching out like that as a studio? Anyone who was going to be mad about the show for including things like that would've already been mad about it regardless. It shows hebe lolis in the bath, and a myriad other things which had probably already pissed off communities like Twitter whether there was a pantyshot or not. Either cut it all to garner the acceptance of general audiences who hate anime and lose viewers who care, or include it all for the sake of viewers who care and lose the acceptance of general audiences who hate anime. Taking a middle ground which pleases nobody makes no sense to me.

This is a fetishy show. Much of its intended appeal is looking at twelve year old anime girls and indulging in the culture of extreme fetishization surrounding them and their iconography, like sailor uniforms, school swimsuits, and so on. Bastardizing the manga’s fanservice for the adaptation defiles the artistic integrity of the work, and I’m not just saying this because I’m particularly desperate to see up some two-dimensional cartoon character’s skirt. Indeed, if that old pervert from Night is Short, Walk on Girl was as much of a degenerate as the other characters made him out to be, he wouldn’t have wasted years of his life collecting and preserving high-class paintings. He would’ve just stayed home, watched porn, and not have given a single shit about the creative longevity of a classic medium. This, of course, leads into my thesis: if a studio as unreliable as Cloverworks could produce something this beautiful, clearly more was on their minds than tossing out some cynical fanservice for a quick paycheck. Seriously, I expected all their effort to go toward Sono Kisekaeningyō wa Koi wo suru, but in some episodes that show is a Powerpoint presentation with almost no actual animation and endless panning shots, and meanwhile this show looks fantastic almost consistently. At its best, the art direction looks quite nice, but unfortunately some of the outdoor backgrounds can sometimes look really, really, really bad. But, again, I expected a great deal of inconsistency from Cloverworks anyway, and while this show doesn’t have the jaw-dropping highlights of something like Wonder Egg Priority, it’s honestly their soundest production since they spearheaded the second half of Darling in the FranXX nearly four years ago.

Aside from its excellent visuals and striking presentation, Akebi-chan no Sailor-fuku is a solid, if fairly unexceptional CGDCT show. The unique character designs and their odd moe qualities are certainly memorable, but the characters are less so. Akebi is an absolute delight, but is she a terribly interesting character? No, not really. Everyone and everything are just kind of “what they need to be,” for lack of a better phrase, but even then there are still undoubtedly some unexpectedly touching moments of characterization. For example, there was an amazing side story in episode seven where the character Hebimori is caught listening to rock music and decides to make the excuse that she’s actually a rocker herself. This is obviously untrue, so she then spends the rest of the episode desperately trying to become proficient with a guitar to reify her excuse, all the while undergoing a cathartic character arc and learning healthy lessons about the importance of humility and dedication. Personally, this is so something I would do: lie about having something done or being able to do something well, only to then task myself with quickly and secretly making that lie become true before the time comes to actually deliver results with the readiness and skill I originally purported to have before the person I lied to ever learns I was a total hack all along? If that doesn’t scream SingleH, I don’t know what does. It was just a nice, relatable moment of empathetic character writing that confirmed—while generic—this show is by no means incompetently written. It doesn’t really break any molds or innovate any genres, but it looks splendid, its characters are lovable, its themes are sweet, and of course, its fetishization is quite singular.

Thank you for reading.

Cute-Girls-Doing-Cute-Things slice-of-life anime usually comes in two flavours. The first one focuses on the Cute-Girls-Doing-Cute-Things bit, smothering the viewer in moe candy floss that offers little nutritional value beyond the saccharine. I call these the K-On Klones. The second type actually gets what the slice-of-life genre is all about. These anime use the Cute-Girls-Doing-Cute-Things merely as a premise as they go about bringing into focus the sublime facets of life through the lens of the mundane.

The question is, which category does Akebi's Sailor Uniform fall into?

The show follows Akebi Komichi as she enters the all-girls middle school Roubai Academy. Growing up in the countryside, Akebi ... graduated from her elementary school in a class of one, so she's looking forward to attending a school where it will actually be possible to make friends.

The first three episodes of Akebi's Sailor Uniform is not that great. The characters designs may not be particularly off-putting, and the girl's voices may not be on helium, but I found the shenanigans between girls at the school to be rather inane. Worse thing is, the creator seems to be someone with a leg/foot fetish. And it's not as though this only results in the odd foot shot: you get bizarre scenes like a girl sniffing her own toe nail clippers and a whole storyline about Akebi admiring someone's legs and harassing her victim about sending her a selfie of them. When you consider the target of all this fetishisation is a bunch of middle school girls, the whole thing honestly becomes a little creepy.

However, after that the show markedly improved, with the foot fetish mostly relegated to a few shots here and there. But by then the damage was done, as I found myself viewing all the foot-related scenes with all the suspicion of a parent who's spotted a convicted pedo lurking near a playground. Perhaps in a different anime, a scene about an embarrassing hole in a sock wouldn't raise an eyebrow from me, but in this anime it reeks of yet another excuse to satisfy someone's foot cravings.

But like I said, the show does get better, and I should mention that even though the first three episodes weren't great, they were terrible either. A few moments of magic caught my attention: a dramatic reading of a book; an often absent father's struggles with connecting with his eldest daughter … these scenes hinted that Akebi's Sailor Uniform belongs in the second type of anime I mentioned at the start.

Character development wise, Akebi's Sailor Uniform manages to introduce quite a few different characters while focusing its efforts on a Akebi and a few of her closest friends. I'd say the show fleshes out most of the characters to the point where they feel like real people and not just objects with feet attached. Even the characters who only got a single episode of focus time mostly feels real, and in fact my favourite episode is about one of them. The episode in question involves this slacker student wanting to learn the guitar. This kind of episode is like a litmus test for the pedigree of a slice of life show, most notably one that K-On spectacularly failed on. Well, Akebi's Sailor Uniform not only passed the test, it knocked it out of the park, producing a believable story with the kind of attention to detail that an anime about music would have been proud of. Having briefly messed around on the guitar myself, I found the anime pinpointed the exact pain points that I discovered as a complete beginner, and the progress of slacker student strikes me as realistic. And all this is just a framework for a character study of a slacker who's learning the joy of throwing herself into something for the first time!

This kind of attention to detail is a strength of the series. Akebi's Sailor Uniform understands the value of subtlety. For example, details like the peeling window panes and leaky roof of Akebi's house suggests that her family isn't very well off, even if the anime never explicitly states this. In fact the whole premise of Akebi's attachment to the sailor uniform of Roubai seems silly until you consider the likelihood that a large part of her appreciation for clothing comes from the fact that her mother makes them herself. Likewise, the anime never tells you why Akebi's elementary school only contains Akebi and her sister, but you can make that connection if you know about the hollowing out of Japanese rural communities due to urbanisation and low birth rate. When you join up the dots, the slow demise of Akebi's old school isn't just sad, it's tragic, and the sight of the Akebi's classmates briefly breathing life back into the old gym becomes all the more bittersweet.

Despite Akebi's Sailor Uniform's eye for the provocative details of every day life, it sometimes struggles with finding enough meaningful material to fill entire an episode. When it fails those episodes can be quite dull for large stretches. The guitar episode is interesting throughout but for me the series only hits that kind of height once. Another episode about a girl learning to get comfortable with her body through its growth phase only really gets good towards its conclusion. The last episode is also surprisingly weak. Interestingly, the penultimate episode is much better and contains all the elements normally reserved for a slice-of-life finale: an re-iteration of one of the anime's main themes of friendship, the encore for all the characters etc. Unfortunately the story hasn't wrapped up by that point, so instead we're left with a montage-laden, overly sentimental last episode which rehashed the revisited themes from the penultimate episode.

Another element that drags Akebi's Sailor Uniform down is that, in addition to the foot fetish elements, the yuri baiting and the presence of tired tropes like one girl falling into the breasts of another signals to me that the show is primarily aimed at a male audience rather than one that resembles the main characters. This adds to creepiness although, to be fair, the show also had scenes which could have turned more fanservicey in a seedier series but didn't in this one.

Overall, I did rather enjoy this anime. While parts of it's a bit cringey, Akebi's Sailor Uniform does enough of the important things right for me to say for certain: this show really does get it.

Personal rating: +0.5 (decent)

Akebi-san had a brief explanation in her announcement, the girl likes a sailor uniform and wants to have friends. The polished graphics immediately caught my eye, so I decided to go for them.

And yes, the graphics and music in the series were of a very high level. The graphics stay on a consistent level from start to finish. Details of single drops, falling leaves or the movements of figures and the arrangement of fabrics are reflected in the high quality and accuracy. It is a great joy to observe such a detailed image along with well-chosen music.
Character building also adds value. Each of the girls ... in Akebi-san's class has her own unique character, each is different in her own way and we have a chance to enjoy their diversity.

Unfortunately, as the supporting characters are interesting, the heroine is the mary sue of the series. Despite a few shortcomings, she is presented in the series as special and is the centrepiece of everything, and what other classmates thoughts. She’s the force that pushes them to action, but the time allocated to make it unique in the series is too large and clear. The series would benefit if the time only for the side heroes were increased. One gets the impression that the entire class has created a harem and a cult around her. It rejected me and irritated me, the heroine herself didn’t show many emotions apart from the first episode, playing the 'angel' 'goddess' ‘the special one’ in the whole class.

Ultimately, I didn't get much pleasure from the screening being bored with the slow story and the main character. The series may appeal to people who prefer to calmly watch the school life of the heroes and won’t be disturbed by yuri themes.