Anime Spotlight #6: That Time I Reviewed Comedy and Slimes With Chuck Norris

Happy #AniMonday...again!

And I actually got it in on time this week!

Speaking of time, it's That Time again! Time for me to stop using exclamation points? Maybe, but that wouldn't be very exciting. Time for Alison Hannigan to do something sexually adventurous at band camp? Again, maybe, but I hear she's moved on to watching bad magicians fail to impress good magicians on the same network that is trying to hold the Verse Formerly Known As Arrow together by its frayed bowstrings and sell Sam Winchester as the new Chuck Norris. And Chuck Norris destroyed all of his clones because no one replaces Chuck Norris. For similar reasons, he also roundhouse kicked every copy of Blade Runner out of existence and killed the Marvel Universe in his sleep, along with Superman, Goku, and all ninjas.

Because you don't end a Chuck Norris joke, Chuck Norris ends the joke that is you, let's get back to time jokes. Is it time for a wounded hand because it likes to heal? I don't know; I'm half the man I used to be. Time for "the talk?" No, because, if you can't tell by my incessant terrible jokes and the fact that I review anime in what little spare time I have, I have yet to be attracted to a woman who doesn't turn out to be a two-faced, immature twat, let alone meet a woman who will have sex with me, and the isolating nature of the pandemic isn't helping things, so I don't have children to have "the talk" with.

Okay, now, I'm just being a self-loathing, sarcastic prick and I've run out of jokes. The reason for the whole "That Time" meets Chuck Norris trainwreck (the natural final state of anything that meets Chuck Norris, by the way) is something that I will save for the end of this post. For now, though, it's that time for me to put the Anime Spotlight on a couple of series that recently wrapped their dub runs: one of which was hilarious and pretty good, the other of which could have approached okay if it wasn't...not okay.

First, the "hilarious and pretty good" anime is Kakushigoto, which is also the portmanteau'd name of the series protagonist (Kakushi Goto, which translates to something like "secret artwork" in English). Kakushi is a famous ecchi mangaka (author of perverse Japanese comic books, basically) who is trying to keep up with production on his manga, "Tights In the Wind," while juggling his personal life, which involves him going to comedic extremes to keep his impressionable young daughter, Hime, from finding out that he draws racy comic books for a living. If you haven't figured it out yet, Kakushigoto author Koji Kumeta likes him some Toriyama-esque name puns, because every character in this anime has one. For example, Hime, as I mentioned in a previous post, means "princess." So the fact that she doesn't know of her father's fame and reputation makes Hime Goto a himegoto: a secret princess. Fortunately for the viewing audience, young Hime is about as dense and intelligent as a box of rocks, rendering her father's already ludicrously unorthodox attempts at secrecy almost completely unnecessary, and therefore even more hilarious. Throw in the occasional misunderstood romantic cue (which the adult female cast interpret as you'd expect, with the results you'd expect from a comedy with a hyper-focused father as its central foil), and thine cup runneth over with laughter. But what makes Kakushigoto more than just a mindless display of semi-predictable physical comedy is the heart that beats between the jokes. Kakushigoto, at its heart, is the story of a father who loves his daughter more than anything, and a daughter who loves her father regardless of everything. In addition to the tender, almost saccharine moments between the two in the present, each episode ends with a flash-forward to a time when Kakushi has fallen ill and Hime has come of an appropriate age to learn of his secret profession. The presentation of these segments functions as a series of effective cliffhangers and brings them together as a compelling story of their own. Sure, the jokes can be predictable, and the final episode plays like something out of a soap opera based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, but...yeah, Kakushigoto really is hilarious and pretty good.

Now for an isekai anime about a salaryman and slimes. No, it's not the one you're thinking of. It's not

That Time yet. This one is called By the Grace Of the Gods, and it sucks for many reasons. As per the isekai usual, a corporate slave at Nameless Japanese Conglomerate #69,420 works himself to death and meets three gods who give him overpowered magic knowledge and inhuman strength, plop his soul into the body of a young boy, and set him loose in a fantasy world. So does he use his mastery of magic and CNRK-ing trees into dust to fight monsters and defeat a demon lord? Does he meet a party of odd, interesting badasses with whom to roam the land, uncovering secret dungeons and ancient artifacts? No. No, And, no. I realize I only asked two questions here, but the series itself requires at least that one extra "No" for reasons you are about to learn. Instead of doing awesome, tasteful, interesting things, he moves into a cave, trains slimes to do household chores, befriends the most human-scenery-boring noble family in anime history, falls in love with their underage daughter—remember that, inside his child body, he's fucking forty years old—cleans the house of a cat-lady (seriously, she's a hoarder who lives next to a public toilet and she's literally a lady who is a cat—also, don't forget that he's a fucking forty-year-old man who's physically attracted to a child), and spends half of the series making his pets eat literal shit and running a commercial laundromat that uses his enslaved genetic experiments as cleaning appliances. Also, despite the three gods expositing that our "protagonist" is mentally regressing day by day to match his new body, don't forget that he's a fucking forty-year-old man pursuing a romantic relationship with a child.

Okay, it's finally That Time. OVAs have been trickling out over the past year and a half, and a second season has been announced as releasing this year for That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime. This isekai, which is better by human decency and volumes than By the Grace Of the Gods, also follows a boring, perverted desk jockey and his fantasy world reincarnation adventures. Our protagonist (no sarcastic qoutes this time) gets stabbed to death and, by virtue of generic ramblings in his final moments, ends up isekai’d into a slime body with ridiculous resistance and strength attributes, the ability to eat, shapeshift into, and mass-produce anything he wants, and a village of cohabitating monsters (a few of whom—though not all, or even most—are cute, busty monster girls because of course) at his command. The isekai formula is an old one, but the hero’s avatar (now calling himself Rimuru Tempest) and the mechanism by which he comes to inhabit it are both novel and hilarious. The supporting cast is rich with personality across all genders and species (whereas other isekai either completely omit male supporting characters or shove them into the background for harem wish-fulfilment purposes—see above), and the exchanges between characters, whether comedic, dramatic, or in action sequences, are meaningful and unwavering in their emotional accuracy. The only problem with the series thus far is what I call its “I Wonder What the Cheese Will Want” pacing. Rather than getting to the point and staying on course, our lead spends most of the series lost in a seemingly endless collectathon of tit-for-tat side-quests before getting dragged back to high stakes territory in its second half to militarize his giant party of loyal storm wolves, juvenile goofballs, skillful stoics, charismatic muscle-bruhs, and mostly disposable monster-babes against the nigh-unstoppable forces of your typical isekai demon lord threat. The OVAs that follow the series' first season are, at first, your typical, standalone fanservice episodes (go to beach, visit hotspring, cue harem fight...), but the last few comprise a continuation of the first season's final arc (basically the same kind of "get the bratty kids to trust authority" tale as I previously mentioned in my reviews of Arte and Ascendance Of a Bookworm), and follows Rimuru and his class of isekai'd children as they compete in an intramural practical exam and run afoul of their world's more powerful sinister elements. It's not a perfect series, but it's a superior example of how to do this kind of series right, and I can't wait for the second season to get a dub.

As usual, the best place to check these out is through Funimation or Crunchyroll. But for your general anime needs, affordable streaming subscriptions can be found through VRV (Crunchyroll, HiDIVE, and Rooster Teeth), Funimation, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. 👀

In honor of a great series that is about to end, and another that has returned this year for its final season, next week's Anime Spotlight will focus on two series about giant things. But first, Stay Tuned for another series of mine to make a return, where I will cover the first three episodes of a real algorithm-chaser.

Animeister,

out.

Ticketmaster,

in.