Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru

And Yet The Town Moves, or Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru, has as much substance as a g-string. It’s thin, flimsy, and far too voyeuristic to have any lasting significance. The plot revolves around three teenage girls who you constantly see talk about quirky, shallow things, while working in an uncanny valley café with an elderly woman in a maid uniform, and that’s really all there is. Oh! And an uncomfortably intimate view of their bodies to bridge dialogue gaps!

• I usually don’t care about fanservice, but this series is so saturated with it that the characters are practically a pair of talking ass and tits. It’s ... to be expected of SHAFT because the Monogatari series is a thing, but to NisiOsin’s credit―he knows how to flesh out characters with more than just flesh, if you know what I’m saying.

• I feel like I had an immense amount of difficulty even having a favorite character because so much of each of the girls’ characterization were based on core traits: like this one is the dumb one that wants to be a detective and has a crush on her teacher (though there is seemingly no motivation for any of this), this is the one with glasses that’s perfect at everything and has a crush on generic main guy that likes the main girl because they’re childhood friends, I guess? And this one is the rocker chick that lives by herself, has issues with her mother, and is lonely? There’s never an exploration into that either.

• The characters just talk about obscure, random things while being a three person gag-reel. The humor isn’t even worth a dry chuckle, just INCREDIBLY awkward most of the time and there are often scenes that are left with a weird shot of a girls’ asses and the implication that every grown-man in the vicinity wants to bang her… honestly, this series just feels like doujinshi fodder.

• There are two episodes that I enjoyed slightly more than the rest of the series: 1. When Hotori’s (the protagonist who’s practically the living embodiment of an ass) older sister wanders into another dimension while looking for a mysterious rainbow snack that doesn’t exist in our world―this one piqued my interest because of the spooky atmosphere and there actually being a point of intrigue to follow, but sadly, this episode doesn’t match the rest of the series’ humdrum tone and is ostensibly a disembodied one-shot. 2. Another episode I enjoyed was the one where the three girls get trapped in a laundry mat while it’s pouring rain and decide to mess around with vending machines in their underwear―this episode had a very comforting and warm atmosphere, unlike many of the episodes that feel like cold, detached punchlines.

• The series lost even more traction towards the end, when there were entire episodes fixated on characters that were loosely associated with main characters… for no particular reason. Rather than using the episodes leading to the climax to give more insight to characters that are skeletally written, they chose to have segments where the main characters didn’t even show up!

• As anyone who’s followed me for long enough knows, I am not a fan of SHAFT, and despite that, this is still one of the worst that I have seen by them. Maria†Holic was even better than this hollow drivel because the focal characters of the series had motives that were used as either a self-inflicted hinderance or the layout of certain scenes and jokes, though admittedly Maria†Holic careened off the path of a structural narrative and never had a concrete resolution. The closest thing we got to that was the reveal towards the end of the first season with Mariya’s twin sister.

• Overall, And Yet The Town Moves felt like an empty visual spectacle with some enjoyable moments. There’s very little to remember with the characters and story, and the jokes aren’t very inventive. I give this lukewarm soup of a series a 3/10.

The best way to enjoy this anime is to be a fan of either [b] SHAFT [/b] shows or a fan of wacky episodic comedies. If for example you demand a story with a plot, evolving characters, or artsy visuals ain’t your thing, then you better not head this way.

As far as SHAFT works go, this one’s on the better half of what they have made, with a lot more actual animation, a lot less bizarre imagery and real life photographs for some pretentious nonsense symbolism. The camera does all sorts of motions and the sequence of scene transition is almost frenetic, while occasionally ... zooming in to cute faces and naughty female parts of the body, which is SHAFT’s trademark and recipe of success. It is a fine way to help the viewer visualize how awkward and troubled the minds of the characters are, and to spice up the jokes. They even try to change the formula as the episodes go on, from slightly changing the gimmicks to even adding more info about one’s inner self. There is still weird imagery, symbolisms, and trademark punch lines, albeit in a lot less degree than in, let’s say, [b] Sayonara Zetsubo [/b] or [b] Arakawa Under the Bridge. [/b] I must say that makes the characters to feel a lot less like caricatures defined by a few sentences or personality gimmicks.

At the same time, the cast of this anime is a lot less memorable because it does not follow a theme in its setting. Although the first episodes will make most think it is a comedy centering on maids in a maid café, after awhile it becomes just random shorts of practically anything the characters do in their everyday life. Soredemo is a lot more down to earth than most comedies by the same studio, while at the same lacks something to make it distinguishable amongst any other similar show.

I am not a fan of episodic comedies since the characters start to become boring fast without some development. When that kicks in, it’s the theme of the setting that can keep me going and in this case there is nothing to pay attention to. The whole maid café is nothing but a minor element [i] (perhaps yet another troll joke by the producers) [/i] so you end up looking at random people doing random things in hopes of laughing. They are the usual [i] “unusual” [/i] bunch of misfits and, typically of SHAFT, most of the humor is based on their total lack of common sense. Their appeal is based on quirks and bizarre personality, not character development. They lack punch lines [i] (since they keep changing them every few episodes) [/i] and are simplistic as far as personalities goes, following archetypes you have seen plenty of time.

In all, it is a good comedy but it is also unmemorable because of how fast it becomes aimless. Because of that my interest evaporated early on. I got used to the jokes and their volume drops considerably later on, becoming more tiresome than entertaining in the second half. Thus it’s very good at first, then loses steam fast, and eventually becomes a chore to complete.