An elegant, lanky man goes on an inspection tour of all thirteen districts of his country, while other elegant, lanky men with more interesting hairstyles discuss his progress.
And if you think that summary is bad, you should read the official one at MAL. The jist is that this is a series about bureaucratic infighting, populated by characters not out of place in some harem yaoi series and taking place in what looks like a fantasy version of Mittel-Europa. Some may be reminded of Cold War Eastern Europe, but for me this felt like Austria-Hungary more than anything. A kingdom that consists of a patchwork of thirteen different states/districts, which survived a near revolution a century ago and as a solution made the districts “independent” while establishing a centralised bureaucracy with no oversight to run all civil services. All of this information is delivered in an infodump at the start of the first episode, as one character tells the other two what they should already know.
Adventures in Bureaucracy: the Anime may sound boring and in the first two episodes the plot has only barely shown up, but there is actually something compelling about watching our protagonist Jean Otus going about his business, visiting a district, uncovering some cigarette smuggling plot (or not), smoking cigarettes and come back to headquarters with delicious treats for his subordinates. He claims he’s not a rich man btw, but the show goes out of his way to show him smoking while emphasising how rare and expensive cigarettes are, while he’s also the landlord for a luxury apartment building together with his sister. It’s another data point for thinking there’s something wrong, that things cannot be as innocent as they seem.
So far we haven’t gotten into Jean’s head at all, so it’s unclear whether he is as innocent and clean as he seems to be, but the top brass have their suspicions. And then there’s this guy, who is pointlessly but hilariously hostile to Jean. You’d think a lowly branch officer would be more polite to somebody nominally his superior, the vice head of a major department even. But again, a hint that something is wrong. Maybe Jean really is the head of a conspiracy and we just don’t know it yet. Or he could just continue visiting a new district each week and sample their pastries. Either way I’ll keep watching.
No Comments