Based off of a manga by Iwami Shoko, who has done nothing else of note, and directed by Takayanagi Shigehito, who was also the director for the first two seasons of The World God Only Knows, it tells the tale of a girl named Kana. Her grandma, who was also her guardian died, and due to the fact she apparently has no other living relatives, she is all alone. She flees her house when the movers begin moving stuff of her grandma out, fearing they will take her too, and ends up finding a job at a newspaper place that also offers room and board, giving her a place to stay. The other people working at this newspaper cafe are of course a group of eccentric girls, and the comedy begins.
Like the majority of slice-of-life anime, Kanamemo is a rather episodic show, with no true plot for it. One episode Kana is attempting to put on a perfect work smile, another all the girls want to go to the beach but can't as they all have different days off (doubled with the musical episode also. Don't see those too much in anime), and another episode has Kana believe one of the girls left the place and it also has them playing with sparklers and a meeting between two characters at a vending machine tacked on the end, because hey, they need to fill 23 minutes. Things are not purely comedy however, Kana just lost her grandma and her only family after all. However, all the drama is purely light and fluffy and works, but it's enough for the characters to develop a bit. Due to this, I consider Kanamemo to be more of a iyashikei or a healing-type slice-of-life show instead of a purely comedic one. Speaking of comedy, the show has nothing spectacular in that section, but nothing bad either. It did make me smile a lot and laugh like, twice I think. They are a few running gags that get annoying though, but even then they still aren't that bad.
You cannot talk about a slice-of-life show without the characters. There is of course Kana, who fulfills the role as the ditz in the cast, but it's actually used. Kana feels somewhat guilty a few times as she's not that good of a worker compared to the rest of the cast. But yeah, most of the times she's just another ditz, nothing truly special. Then there's Saki, who is somehow the boss of the place despite only being 10, younger than Kana. She is rather mature, typically has a deadpan snarker air about her, and seems to care a whole lot about her job. However, she is hinted to care more about the other workers more than she seems, and is actually called a tsundere at one point (though a character I'll discuss later fits the archetype much more). Then we have Hinata, an idiot who has failed her entrance exams 3 times and cares a whole lot about money. Then we have Yume and Yuuki, the yuri couple in this cast. Yume is always bright and happy and Yuuki is much more calmer, though does get jealous when Yume gets too close to another one of the cast members, but despite this they still manage to have a rather cute relationship. Now, all of these above cast members are good, but the final worker at the newspaper place is not very good. Haruka, who is a lolicon that loves to try and group Kana. Now, I wouldn't mind this, but this is literally the only element to her personality. It is taken to such extremes that Kana yells for her to stop- While the other members of the group do nothing but watch as Haruka more or less molests Kana. She takes away some of this show's purity and makes it more into otaku bait. Oh, and there's one more, Mika, who works at a rivaling newspaper company and is tsundere for Kana. Despite the fact she seems to be a rich girl, she is for some reason working at a newspaper company, which sort of makes no sense, but ah well.
Now, there is one more thing you need to know about this show- The censoring. Most of the censoring is done by these huge boxes with a picture of a cat on them (it's a slice-of-life show starring a bunch of cute girls, of course there's gonna be a cat in there). These boxes are humongous and whenever they appear on the screen they are distracting. And they're so big too, you can't see anything at all. At least make them a little smaller, or just find more better ways to censor. And some of the stuff they censor does get useless (Kana's pants rip, and they put a big huge cat box over the rip. Either she's not wearing any underwear, or the TV station that aired this was so paranoid they didn't want to get sued over seeing a young girl's panties or something like that, I don't know. The censorship gets in the way, is what I'm trying to say.
Besides that, the show is rather nice. Soundtrack is good enough, though the opening is an idol song of the dull variety instead of the catchy one and the ending theme I think I already forgot and I finished this like, 20 minutes ago, but besides that it's good. The animation is on-par from what you expect from slice-of-life shows, with a rather colorful color pallet in there. It looks cute at least.
Kanamemo is a good slice-of-life show. It has enough drama to make it relaxing but concentrates enough on comedy to not make it boring, unlike a few other iyashikei slice-of-life shows, like, say Tamayura (which suffers from a few other problems, but I'll review that some other time). While one annoying character and some nonsense censorship get in the way a little bit, it remains an entertaining show from beginning to end. A must-see for all slice-of-life fans.
