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).

Quite possibly the most low quality, low EFFORT anime I have ever had the displeasure of watching. I was not exaggerating in my preliminary review at all. Short anime do NOT get a free pass from me, different run times? Not as much man power as your typical full length seasonal? Big deal. Once again, short anime do NOT get a free pass from me. There have been tons of 2-5 minute anime that ticked a lot of boxes in terms of good qualities, Atasha Kawashiri Kodama Da yo: Dangerous Lifehacker no Tadareta Seikatsu, only managed to tick one, the fricking opening sequence. The show ... runs for 2.5 minutes right? Well, the OP is a catchy tune that runs for 1.5 minutes, leaving only a SINGLE MINUTE for content. And the content is some of the worst in anime today.

The anime revolves around the manga creators day to day life in it's simplest and lowest form, her snacking on fast food and drinking beer. That's pretty much it, her "autobiography". Kodama eating takeaways and passing out at home for 24 stinking episodes. There might be the odd episode here and there where she does something else like taking a walk (!!wow!!), but it's mainly her stuffing her little derp face. The fact that producers gave this the green light absolutely baffles me, it's neither interesting, nor is it funny at all, instead it's very repetitive and tiring watching the same thing over and over again. They even managed to get an excellent seiyuu in Aoi Yuuki, but we only get to hear her speak in a quiet monotone voice, her full range wasted on a character such as Kodama. As a casting choice, not impressed.

Now let's get to the production values, the most laughable production values you will ever hope to see, it's a massive joke. One minute of pathetic slide show "animation" every week, it makes Gokushufudou look the Fate series, the art style itself is unsightly and low effort, the sound is simply Yuuki herself voicing out the effects, seriously, any sort of onomatopoeia, Yuuki has got it covered. Some might say it's charming, I say the creators couldn't be arsed.

About half way through the airing, we even started to get some technical problems with the show! A bizarre sound issue became apparent around episode 13, somebody must have messed up the audio mixing, because comb filtering appeared (two or more identical sounds are mixed together with a slight delay between them), leaving it sounding it was recorded in a fricking closet. This continued for some time as well, unbelievable.

And incredible, that's not even the most pathetic thing about the production. I'll remind you guys all again about the run time, 1.5 minutes of Opening Sequence, 1 minute of terrible slideshow, power point animation. They had the audacity to delay this short series FIVE FRICKING TIMES over the course of 24 episodes. FIVE TIMES. And one of the delays was for three weeks as well! I saw some people saying that Yuuki got covid on the 5th delay, but the raws of the final few episodes were released weeks before that happened, so that's no excuse in my books. Just the most embarrassing release of all time as far as I'm concerned. One person could do this, you have ONE MINUTE of actual content a week to produce, there are NO excuses.

I won't change my score of a 2/10, simply thanks to the OP being an absolute banger, if the OP was even slightly average, this anime would get the lowest marks possible. Overall, this is not worth your time, there are so many better short anime out there, anime that put in the effort, anime that you can see the love go into. There are plenty of interest stacks listing them. This one deserves a skip.