Reviews

Sep 18, 2024
Others: This anime is brain rot.
Me: Yes. And?

My Deer Friend Noko-tan is one of the better comedies to come out in recent seasons. It's certainly one of the most memorable, if nothing else. The sheer amount of gags they manage to create from deer is ridiculous and fantastic in equal measure. That's one of the things I respect most, when anime can take a singular focus and go all-in, taking it far beyond any conceivable limits, and Noko-tan exemplifies this completely.

(But what about the accusations that this show is just mindless brain rot? Didn't your intro to this review imply you agree with it?) That's the point. The point is, it's pointless. Noko-tan is dumb, insane, all over the place, and it's all the better for it. A coworker of mine commented a while ago that Dadaism seems to be on the rise, a hundred or so years after it was originally coined. The idea behind that artistic movement is that not everything needs to have some profound point, not everything needs to be taken seriously. I genuinely think my coworker is onto something, though I'd peg the 21st century resurgence to be a little bit earlier than now, nearer to the era of YouTube Poop. But it still rings true. You don't need to turn your brain off completely, so long as you can sit down comfortably in the roller coaster, buckle up, and let yourself get taken for a ride. That's precisely the experience Noko-tan attempts and succeeds at giving the viewers.

Is this anime peak comedy? No. Is it great comedy? Deer god, yes! The timing and setup for gags are executed wonderfully, taking turns and twists out of nowhere, while maintaining a rapid-fire pace that achieves a lot of comedic payoffs in its runtime. All this because the creator apparently had a wacky idea one day about a girl with deer antlers, and imagined a world around that girl, and this anime is their vision brought to life. Everything that happens is a direct result of this insane type of world-building, with gag setups that are as ingenious as they are psychotic. Everything might be centralized on deer, but that in itself is a major achievement. In that respect, Noko-tan is one of the most creative animes I've ever seen.

To offer a bit of pointed criticism, I think Bashame is a bit of an underutilized character. Between the main cast, her personality is the most one-dimensional, and most gags beyond her introduction are just, girl likes rice because deer haha. There's no chaotic antics like Shikanoko, no sharp straight-man retorts like Torako, and no spicy siscon obsession to counterbalance the deer hijinks like Anko. Plus, I said this anime is memorable, and taken as a whole, it is, but individual scenes and setups blend together, and I find it difficult to remember what all happened during the middle section, having watched the anime as each episode aired. I could rewatch them and enjoy it just as much, but it doesn't have the same lasting impact as other great comedies.

I had two goals with this review: to leave a positive rating and wholehearted recommendation, and to address the disparity between existing positive and negative reviews, because as of time of writing, the number of reviews that don't recommend Noko-tan dwarf those that do with a tally of 27 negative to 17 positive. I'm not trying to disparage those reviewers or imply in any way that they're wrong - this anime genuinely isn't for everyone and that's fine! - but I find the ratio strange. Compare the user ratings for Noko-tan to Joshiraku and The Vampire Dies in No Time, two other shows with wacky, bizarre, rapid-fire, barely-continuous comedy and plot progression, both with a similar average user score (7.44 and 7.27 compared to Noko-tan's 7.31). Both of those shows have barely a handful of negative reviews compared to swathes of positive ones. (Incidentally, I recommend all three, for virtually identical reasons.)

So why are people just now feeling compelled to voice their displeasure? Is it some kind of societal pushback against meme culture and its impact on the broader Internet? Is it just because it's vogue and trendy to attack and vilify Generation Z? Should I invoke the spirit of Alex Jones and claim it's a far-left conspiracy to condemn and eliminate dumb and simple fun anime that refuse to push any sort of liberal agenda? Are these people just unhappy and don't like fun? Really, only one of these thoughts makes any amount of sense (obviously the third one) but even so, it still baffles me how this anime specifically has come under fire. As someone born in 1997, I consider myself to be between the Millennial and Z generations, and this has led me to having a bit of a nuanced perspective. I remember recently enough, how much flak the Millennial generation was getting for being terminally online and dumb, too idealistic to have any meaningful real-world practical knowledge - and I agreed with a lot of this at the time, but I've come around to see it all as mostly baseless criticism levied against them by Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y. We're seeing the exact same thing happening again, but towards Gen Z. Because of that, I think it's far too early to draw any major conclusions about the broader societal impacts of these trends, since all it amounts to is stereotyping. All this to say, criticizing this anime purely on the grounds that TikTok is dumb and so is the generation that uses it, is doing a huge disservice to the actual quality and creativity shown by this anime, as well as being willfully ignorant of the other myriad absurd shows and elements that have been in the anime medium throughout the 21st century, not to mention the Internet in the mid-2000s.

At the end of the day, just look at the premise for this show, and a small handful of the things people are saying about it. You'll know immediately whether it's hot trash or a comedic gold mine. Because you will lose brain cells from having watched this anime. To me, it was completely worth it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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