Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 2011

[krpalmer]

“Variety of anime sampled” just might contain some element of “checking off different boxes.” There’d seemed some element of danger in just checking boxes and moving on, but trying to pick shows I’d enjoyed in the past appears to have helped. One more quantity to acknowledge lodged in my mind in the form of the animation studio Kyoto Animation. There, however, in competition with numerous other recent series and facing a certain tension where one articulate fan’s “well-animated charm” becomes a different and perhaps somewhat older fan’s “dread moe” as I seem stuck somewhere in the middle, I wound up going back to a series it’s harder to make claims about “the house style” for (even if that might escape being reprimanded that “if you’d just pay attention, you’d see the subtle differences.”) Nichijou also happened to wind up one of my top picks for its year, and I watched through all of it again not that long ago.

After previous thoughts about what to link Azumanga Daioh to didn’t quite work out, I could still at least compare it to thoughts of Nichijou. Just as Kiyohiko Azuma’s four-panel manga is different from Keiichi Arawi’s work, though, the Nichijou anime (or at least its first episode) swings between the sort of subtle discussions that raise questions (or just smug comments) about how “comedy” does or doesn’t translate, wild cartoon fantasies (the first episode includes an elaborate sequence of trying to catch a lunchtime mini-sausage), and the peculiar warmth of Nono the robot girl trying to deal with the little-girl professor who’d built her and put a big wind-up key in her back. There was just a bit of a surprise in the first episode already introducing and beginning to develop some of the more apparently minor characters of the series.