This slice of life - or rather, a slice of a perverted mangaka's life anime contains a wonderful mix of colourful characters, absurd settings and best of all: the erotic, crude humour. Slap all these ingredients together, and you bake up this tasty treat: Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to: The Animation, almost guaranteeing laughter in every episode.
Story:- 6 out of 10.
You really wouldn't expect it to be driven by plot given it's premise and so it follows the main character; Aito, an extremely perverted mangaka; and his assistants in their chemistry of daily happenings. Humour is the central concept that drives this anime with some sub-concepts here and there.
Art:- 7 out of 10.
The art is solid, crisp, consistent and sensible. The animation smartly split into sections (to match the manga's structure), which keeps the anime fresh so it doesn't get stale over the 13 minutes. The body language, facial expressions are very well done.
Sound:- 8 out of 10.
I feel like this is one of the winning point, no, not the catchy music, not the beautiful OSTs but the voice acting. They definitely got the perfect voice actors for each of the characters. The way they express through voice is flawless, this is especially true for the main character Aito (Matsuoka, Yoshitsugu or Kirito from SAO, yeah.. I know). A mesh of tone, amplitude and pitch really sets the mood and allows you to properly connect to the anime and its scenes for example: you could just listen to the audio and figure out what they're doing.
Character:- 8 out of 10.
If you could describe the anime's two winning points as a one-two punch: one being the voice acting, then two would definitely be the character chemistry and interactions.
The characters themselves all hold true to the generic band of tsundere, sensible girl, loli, and etc. However with the dynamics being in harmony with the magnificent voice acting, it really packs the punch when the characters interact with each other and differentiates themselves from other anime's by giving each of the characters distinctiveness: e.g. Ashisu's S side. I feel like this gives a better comedic sense in the anime i.e. certain reactions would only work between characters which have built up a certain relationship and this works with Mangaka-to because they communicate well.
This being said, there is almost no character development except for maybe one or two other characters.
Enjoyment:- 10 out of 10.
Despite being 13 minutes long, and something I first didn't think would be worth watching - oh boy was I wrong on so many levels. I would always anticipate for the next episode and would wish the episodes would be longer - and hope for a 2nd season. Definitely recommended for people who love perverted humour in strong small segments. It's very unfortunate this is overlooked and underrated.
So wrapping it all up I think this anime is very deserving of a 8 out of 10, despite its weak plot, the voice acting and character dynamics really pull through an extremely good sense of humour.
(N/B: The scoring system I used is relative to it's genre,)
