Spring 2016: the healing power of moe

The cute girls doing cute things (and occassional cute boys doing cute things) show is one of the staples of anime and this season is particularly rife with them. These slice of moe shows may all look alike, starring a bunch of high school girls going through their everyday lives having mild adventures, sometimes centered about school club activities, but as Digibro shows in the video above, there are clear differences in quality and aim between them.

When I started getting back into anime properly last year this sort of show wasn’t on my radar, but as I got in the habit of watching anime seasonally, I found myself watching them more and more. Not just cute girls doing cute things, but slice of life shows in general. This season about a third of the shows I follow are slice of life, not counting a show like Haifuri which is also cute things doing cute things, but with a bit of action thrown in. If I put them in order of how much I like them and how well they were made, this is the order I’d come up with.

1. Flying Witch
   This comes out late enough on Saturday night that I end up watching it on Sunday mornings and it’s perfectly fitted for that: calming and soothing, about the small trials and triumphs of an apprentice witch living with her non-witchy cousins in the countryside. The Japanese call this sort of show an Iyashikei or healing show, meant to calm you the fuck down and it certainly does for me. What I especially like about it is the natural way in which the various characters interact with each other, how much Chinatsu actually looks and acts like a young girl rather than an anime stereotype of a little girl.

2. Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge
   Tanaka-kun is a lazy sod; Ohta-kun is his enabling friend together they fight crime. The consistently most funny show this season, with great sense of timing, a lot of excellent supporting characters and nice twists on anime cliches. (Case above).

3. Nijiro Days
   This actually started last season and at first I thought it would just be another obnoxious anime romcom, but turned out to be much better than its first episode would suggest. Centered around four high school boys and their romantic interests, each episode is only fifteen minutes long, which might be the ideal length for a show like this. It keeps things tight and moving fast, while still having room to flesh out the characters. One of those shows where each episode builds on the previous ones and is stronger for it. Each of the characters is also well rounded enough that you can see why they’d fall for each other, rather than have the series tell you that they did.

4. Shounen Maid
   When his mother dies, a young boy is taken in by his uncle and works for him as a housekeeper because his mother taught him that he shouldn’t be dependent on charity. That description was enough to kept me from trying the series, but after hearing somebody rave about it I gave it a second chance. I expected age inappropriate sexual tension between the primary school protagonist and his uncle, what I got was a show about family and grief. There’s an undertone of melancholy as Chihiro and his uncle learn to live with each other as a family, while each learns new things about their mother/sister; an undertone of regret at how things could’ve been.

5. Sansha Sanyou
   A show about “the black-hearted class representative, the poor girl on a daily bread-crust diet and the wlaking black hole” as the ending theme has it, this is the quintessential cute girls doing cute things show. Three main characters who are somewhat more fleshed out than needed, a host of slightly less rounded supporting characters going through daily life and familiar anime situations. It has a good sense of humour and some character growth which sets it apart from similar shows.
6. Bakuon!!
   Cute girls riding big motor bikes. What sets it apart is that it gets rather deep into bike culture and doesn’t use it as just an excuse to have a group of cute girls hang around together. I know little about bikes, but the good natured trash talking between Onsa Amano, the Kawasaki fangirl and Rin Suzunoki, the Suzuki fanatic is very recognisable.
7. Anne Happy
   Five girls each with their own particular unhappiness/misfortune hanging over them, are put in a special class to learn to overcome them and become happy. They mostly stick rigidly to their roles and there really isn’t any character development, but it’s funny and not a bad way to spend twenty minutes.
8. 12-sai – Chicchana Mune no Tokimeki
   Twelve year olds in the last year of primary school learn to struggle with romance and friendship. This would be higher if not for the unconscious sexism on display in it. At one time the main protagonist is the love interest of two boys and then gets blamed for it as two timing by the rest of the class. This may be realistic, but missing is some pushback against this idea; instead the show seems to tacitly agree with this. In general, also the idea that you can’t be friends with boys if you’re in a relationship.
9. Sakamoto desu ga
   Sakamoto is the perfect high school boy: cool, cooler, coolest, able to turn every situation to his advantage. All the girls want him, all the boys …find him somewhat of a prick until they’re won over by his perfection. This is humour so deadpan, so dry the Atacama Desert feels oppressively humid in comparison. When it works, it’s great, but it misses more often than not.
10. Kuma Miko
    A slice of life comedy about a middle school priestess and her bear god living out in the boonies. She wants to go to high school in the big city, he continuously challenges her on that because she’s patently unsuitable for it. Hilarity ensues. Somewhat.
11. Pan de Peace!
    As Digibro shows in the video, this is bargain basement moe stuff, with no depth to it and arguably made just to fill three minutes of dead air. But because it’s this short, I still end up watching it.