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.
Jul 9, 2020
Zashiki Warashi no Tatami-chan
(Anime)
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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 ... 
Nov 12, 2018
Arakawa Under the Bridge
(Manga)
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Having read the entire manga and watched the anime, I am so glad I chose to read and see both on a whim, a manner very like this work. That is not to say that I don't recommend it, quite the opposite. In fact, this is perhaps my favorite comedy based manga out there because it's so "out there." Arakawa Under the Bridge to me is like Monty Python's Flying Circus with its random, absurdist humor.
But I believe it's so much more, it shows the fragility of how humans act in accordance with one another and how love and friendship can heal all wounds. ... |
