NP-BAW: Chio's School Road OR The Long Form Goodbye
I've decided to do a crossover between New Piece Offerings and Anime-BAW this week because of an anime that has gotten me thinking about animated comedy in a new light. I'm speaking, of course, about Chio's School Road. It's a slice-of-life comedy series that centers around the hardships and shenanigans of a socially awkward girl named Chio as she attempts to get to school on time. Each episode is split into two or three segments, each focused on a single situational gag, usually with a cast of no more than four actively participating characters.
This may sound like any number of modern American cartoons that have cropped up in visual media recently, but it's an apples-to-oranges comparison when you think about it. To make a point, I'm specifically talking about two cartoons based on previously enjoyable, non-comedic--at least, not entirely comedic, and not always on purpose--licensed properties that have been given the fully comedic or comedic-action treatment. Shows like Teen Titans GO! and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, when compared to their predecessors, have inferior art styles (to make for "better, smoother animation") and trade in distinct character personalities and engaging plots for dimensionless, attention-deficit joke factories that are the equivalent of the techno music you might blast in the background when you have more important things to do with your life, like writing a blog post about how badly a particular set of American cartoons suck when compared to a single particular Japanese comedy anime, even though maybe five people at most will read this. In fact, these cartoons are so bad that I wouldn't put them on in the background while doing something pointless and time consuming with my life.
I'll get back around to the original point later, but I'd like to take a moment to talk about the impact such shows have on society. As I might have mentioned previously, I grew up in the age of Saturday morning cartoons, a time when anything and everything that a child could be talked into coercing their parents to buy for them had its own animated series. Yes, I watched the likes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Street Sharks, Extreme Dinosaurs, Creepy Crawlers, Attack Of the Killer Tomatoes, Power Rangers, Transformers, Batman, Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, and the X-Men. I was also vaguely aware of Thundercats, Voltron, He-Man, and the Superfriends, but either their subject matter or the dated quality (these were early-to-mid-80's shows that I watched as a pre-teen in the 90's, by the way) didn't engage me like many of the late-80's to early 2000's cartoon series' did. Whatever the case, the shows I did watch were full of interesting plots and were mostly successful at mixing education and entertainment together in ways that I both understood and accepted. I wasn't toy crazy for every show I watched, but I did have a modest collection of Transformers, Power Rangers, and Ninja Turtles figures, which enriched my imagination when I pitted them against each other on a daily basis. I also learned from the cartoons I watched every Saturday morning, much of it before it became part of the school curriculum. And a lot of the magic of these shows came from watching a core set of distinct personalities work with and play off of each other in interesting ways amidst the usual "defeat the bad guy of the week" episode mechanics. So it's a wonder why parents of the eighties and nineties pushed the FCC to take legal action against animated programming for instilling poor social skills in their children, creating an overly commercial and instant gratification-based youth culture, and most severely, for not being educational enough. And yet, here we are twenty-plus years later, with the industry telling us it's okay to be unfaithful to traditional, quality character design and create simplified, ugly, lazily drawn visual media in the name of saving money on hateworthy new renditions that are now just simple-minded, plotless skits featuring five or more characters, all of whom have the "party dude" personality trait so they can churn out memes about waffles and tell uninspired fart jokes while the background goes all "Electric Soldier Porygon" around them. Perhaps the parental fears of my generation were well founded, seeing as how the modern American animation industry routinely cancels decently animated, well-written, deeply engaging series for costing too much so they can churn out cheaply made, generic Ritalin fuel like Teen Titans GO! and Rise Of the TMNT. Perhaps cartoons of my generation (the commercial handling of them as brand-perpetuation devices, specifically) led to the animation industry being what it is now. But content is (or at least, it should be) more important than that. Carmen San Diego taught me history and geography. Captain Planet taught me about cultural diversity and the environment. Batman taught me science and deductive reasoning. Listening to Krang and Shredder hurl insults at their underlings improved my vocabulary.
What are modern children learning from their cartoons, if the Rise and GO! series are accurate reflections? That conformity is okay? Everything is a joke? Laziness is the road to wealth and popularity? Legacy and story aren't important so consequences don't matter in life? The real world is slow, depressing, and dangerous, so stare at our psychedelic, golden dog crap instead? If the subject matter and episode structure I have witnessed thus far are any indication, the unfortunate answer is "all of the above." I'm turning into my parents, and for once, I don't care! This style of cartoon isn't just making our children stupider, it is, by its inherent structure, actively treating them like they already are stupid; furthermore, it's telling them that being stupid is okay.
And now, to the original point: Why Chio's School Road does everything a modern American animated comedy does, but better. Like the two series mentioned above, and others of their kind, Chio's School Road is a short-form animated comedy series. What makes it different from--and superior to--current American offerings in the genre is as follows:
The character personalities are distinct and consistent. Rather than having a cast entirely composed of comedians who occasionally spout their own thin, tropish dialogue or have baked-on expressions so the audience can tell them apart, Chio's School Road has one clearly defined comedic lead, a serious, grounded best friend, a perverted yuri jock, a sensitive, ex-biker tough guy, a by-the-books popular girl, and a handful of lesser, but no less defined, characters peppered throughout to make the show's small, linear universe feel rich and full of personality. What makes these characters funny when not all of them are comedic on a base level is how the writers and animators at Diomedea take each character's type to the extreme with exaggerated facial expressions and mannerisms. The best friend's grounded seriousness is so severe that it often borders on fish out of water hilarity. The perverted jock character's enthusiasm for sports and sex alike are demonic going on impish. The ex-biker acts so overconfidently tough that he often experiences stack overflow and breaks out in tears. The popular girl is so adherent to rules that it presents as a comedic form of police fanaticism. Even Chio, the lead of the show, isn't by default comedic. She's just naturally so socially awkward and so prone to viewing the world through gamer goggles that she pretty much always ends up triggering a given segment's gag single-handed. And in contrast to the one-note casts of today's two punching bags, who are seemingly unable to successfully retain the morals they weakly present to their audience as a poor means of keeping the shenanigans episodic (going back to the wrong-headedness of "legacy is unimportant so consequences don't matter"), the diverse cast of Chio's School Road are able to round each other out, bring some grounding to the hijinks, and create a rich microcosm of continuity and consequence for one another.
Speaking of gags and jokes, rather than resorting to as many low-hanging, meme-worthy one-liners as the writers can shove into an eight-minute segment like certain American shows do, the jokes in Chio's School Road are classically constructed and well-paced (not unlike what one might find in an old Warner Bros. short). There is one clear, overarching joke per segment (Chio thinking she can parkour her way to school on time, or having a full bladder and not being able to find a bathroom, for example), with smaller, relevant physical gags filling in the run time, usually of the "I've made it this far, now what?" variety. This improv-based structure gives the viewer time to register the hilarity of the joke presented and laugh for an appropriate length without missing the next one, instead of the writers machine-gunning psychedelic, golden dog turds at a wall to see what sticks.
And finally (and perhaps more importantly), the segments of each episode have little connections to one another, even among episodes. Characters encountered once do not simply fade into the background once a segment is over, they become part of Chio's world from that point on, and often catch her offguard in later segments and episodes to greater comedic effect. As previously mentioned, this gives the series a sense of continuity and consequence, teaches the power of delayed gratification, and further develops these secondary characters and their relationships to Chio, rather than presenting something purely episodic that holds little to no investment for anyone outside a company boardroom.
Even before I began to compare it to the likes of Teen Titans GO! and Rise Of the TMNT, I knew and liked Chio's School Road for what it was: personality-rich, well paced, well plotted, mindless, feelgood comedy gold (and not of the psychedelic turd variety) that knows better than to put the mindlessness first. I don't typically go for slice of life comedies as my first choice when selecting an anime series, but I also haven't really seen anything else lately that dares to call itself funny and truly delivers on that promise.
To quote a title of one of my favorite Chio segments so far, "Thank You, George." We miss you.
This may sound like any number of modern American cartoons that have cropped up in visual media recently, but it's an apples-to-oranges comparison when you think about it. To make a point, I'm specifically talking about two cartoons based on previously enjoyable, non-comedic--at least, not entirely comedic, and not always on purpose--licensed properties that have been given the fully comedic or comedic-action treatment. Shows like Teen Titans GO! and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, when compared to their predecessors, have inferior art styles (to make for "better, smoother animation") and trade in distinct character personalities and engaging plots for dimensionless, attention-deficit joke factories that are the equivalent of the techno music you might blast in the background when you have more important things to do with your life, like writing a blog post about how badly a particular set of American cartoons suck when compared to a single particular Japanese comedy anime, even though maybe five people at most will read this. In fact, these cartoons are so bad that I wouldn't put them on in the background while doing something pointless and time consuming with my life.
I'll get back around to the original point later, but I'd like to take a moment to talk about the impact such shows have on society. As I might have mentioned previously, I grew up in the age of Saturday morning cartoons, a time when anything and everything that a child could be talked into coercing their parents to buy for them had its own animated series. Yes, I watched the likes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Street Sharks, Extreme Dinosaurs, Creepy Crawlers, Attack Of the Killer Tomatoes, Power Rangers, Transformers, Batman, Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, and the X-Men. I was also vaguely aware of Thundercats, Voltron, He-Man, and the Superfriends, but either their subject matter or the dated quality (these were early-to-mid-80's shows that I watched as a pre-teen in the 90's, by the way) didn't engage me like many of the late-80's to early 2000's cartoon series' did. Whatever the case, the shows I did watch were full of interesting plots and were mostly successful at mixing education and entertainment together in ways that I both understood and accepted. I wasn't toy crazy for every show I watched, but I did have a modest collection of Transformers, Power Rangers, and Ninja Turtles figures, which enriched my imagination when I pitted them against each other on a daily basis. I also learned from the cartoons I watched every Saturday morning, much of it before it became part of the school curriculum. And a lot of the magic of these shows came from watching a core set of distinct personalities work with and play off of each other in interesting ways amidst the usual "defeat the bad guy of the week" episode mechanics. So it's a wonder why parents of the eighties and nineties pushed the FCC to take legal action against animated programming for instilling poor social skills in their children, creating an overly commercial and instant gratification-based youth culture, and most severely, for not being educational enough. And yet, here we are twenty-plus years later, with the industry telling us it's okay to be unfaithful to traditional, quality character design and create simplified, ugly, lazily drawn visual media in the name of saving money on hateworthy new renditions that are now just simple-minded, plotless skits featuring five or more characters, all of whom have the "party dude" personality trait so they can churn out memes about waffles and tell uninspired fart jokes while the background goes all "Electric Soldier Porygon" around them. Perhaps the parental fears of my generation were well founded, seeing as how the modern American animation industry routinely cancels decently animated, well-written, deeply engaging series for costing too much so they can churn out cheaply made, generic Ritalin fuel like Teen Titans GO! and Rise Of the TMNT. Perhaps cartoons of my generation (the commercial handling of them as brand-perpetuation devices, specifically) led to the animation industry being what it is now. But content is (or at least, it should be) more important than that. Carmen San Diego taught me history and geography. Captain Planet taught me about cultural diversity and the environment. Batman taught me science and deductive reasoning. Listening to Krang and Shredder hurl insults at their underlings improved my vocabulary.
What are modern children learning from their cartoons, if the Rise and GO! series are accurate reflections? That conformity is okay? Everything is a joke? Laziness is the road to wealth and popularity? Legacy and story aren't important so consequences don't matter in life? The real world is slow, depressing, and dangerous, so stare at our psychedelic, golden dog crap instead? If the subject matter and episode structure I have witnessed thus far are any indication, the unfortunate answer is "all of the above." I'm turning into my parents, and for once, I don't care! This style of cartoon isn't just making our children stupider, it is, by its inherent structure, actively treating them like they already are stupid; furthermore, it's telling them that being stupid is okay.
The character personalities are distinct and consistent. Rather than having a cast entirely composed of comedians who occasionally spout their own thin, tropish dialogue or have baked-on expressions so the audience can tell them apart, Chio's School Road has one clearly defined comedic lead, a serious, grounded best friend, a perverted yuri jock, a sensitive, ex-biker tough guy, a by-the-books popular girl, and a handful of lesser, but no less defined, characters peppered throughout to make the show's small, linear universe feel rich and full of personality. What makes these characters funny when not all of them are comedic on a base level is how the writers and animators at Diomedea take each character's type to the extreme with exaggerated facial expressions and mannerisms. The best friend's grounded seriousness is so severe that it often borders on fish out of water hilarity. The perverted jock character's enthusiasm for sports and sex alike are demonic going on impish. The ex-biker acts so overconfidently tough that he often experiences stack overflow and breaks out in tears. The popular girl is so adherent to rules that it presents as a comedic form of police fanaticism. Even Chio, the lead of the show, isn't by default comedic. She's just naturally so socially awkward and so prone to viewing the world through gamer goggles that she pretty much always ends up triggering a given segment's gag single-handed. And in contrast to the one-note casts of today's two punching bags, who are seemingly unable to successfully retain the morals they weakly present to their audience as a poor means of keeping the shenanigans episodic (going back to the wrong-headedness of "legacy is unimportant so consequences don't matter"), the diverse cast of Chio's School Road are able to round each other out, bring some grounding to the hijinks, and create a rich microcosm of continuity and consequence for one another.
Speaking of gags and jokes, rather than resorting to as many low-hanging, meme-worthy one-liners as the writers can shove into an eight-minute segment like certain American shows do, the jokes in Chio's School Road are classically constructed and well-paced (not unlike what one might find in an old Warner Bros. short). There is one clear, overarching joke per segment (Chio thinking she can parkour her way to school on time, or having a full bladder and not being able to find a bathroom, for example), with smaller, relevant physical gags filling in the run time, usually of the "I've made it this far, now what?" variety. This improv-based structure gives the viewer time to register the hilarity of the joke presented and laugh for an appropriate length without missing the next one, instead of the writers machine-gunning psychedelic, golden dog turds at a wall to see what sticks.
And finally (and perhaps more importantly), the segments of each episode have little connections to one another, even among episodes. Characters encountered once do not simply fade into the background once a segment is over, they become part of Chio's world from that point on, and often catch her offguard in later segments and episodes to greater comedic effect. As previously mentioned, this gives the series a sense of continuity and consequence, teaches the power of delayed gratification, and further develops these secondary characters and their relationships to Chio, rather than presenting something purely episodic that holds little to no investment for anyone outside a company boardroom.
Even before I began to compare it to the likes of Teen Titans GO! and Rise Of the TMNT, I knew and liked Chio's School Road for what it was: personality-rich, well paced, well plotted, mindless, feelgood comedy gold (and not of the psychedelic turd variety) that knows better than to put the mindlessness first. I don't typically go for slice of life comedies as my first choice when selecting an anime series, but I also haven't really seen anything else lately that dares to call itself funny and truly delivers on that promise.
To quote a title of one of my favorite Chio segments so far, "Thank You, George." We miss you.
This will be my final post on Blogger for awhile, as I am mere inches away from going back to school, and will need to devote the majority of my time to more important pursuits. Not that I don't enjoy writing these sorts of things; I do. I'll always love writing, and this blog and its history are small points of pride for me. But while it is an adequate expenditure of time, it has not always been a good use of time at this...time...in my life. There is a future out there for me in a field that will both suit my talents and line my pockets, and I have neglected it for far too long. Until I see you again, Stay Tuned to re-runs whenever you can and spread the fever to your friends and loved ones.
Sean Wilkinson,
Master of the TicketVerse,
out for now.
Comments
Post a Comment