Pefect comedic timing.
Every episode of Hitori Bocchi managed to make me laugh at least once, which is not always the case with adaptations of comedy manga series. It’s easy for the transition from four panel manga gag to animation to fall flat, to get that timing wrong, but Htori Bocchi delivered week in, week out. The clip above shows that perfectly. You know exactly what’s coming, you know that Aru will botch that serve, but despite that it’s still funny because it gets the buildup and timing exactly right.
It also works because it fits in with Aru’s character to flub it so badly. She’s the type of person to want to present herself as perfect, but unfortunately ends up failing miserably most of the time. But she doesn’t let this get her down, she keeps doing her best and even has her own theme tune to sing to cheer herself up(the full version of which was released as a single). She’s far out my favourite character of this series that’s full of likeable characters. Apart from Aru there’s the blonde ‘yankee’ Sunao Nako, who frightens their home room teacher who is sure she’s some sort ogf juvenile deliquent. There’s Sotoka Rakitā, the obligatory foreigner with strange ideas about Japan, who came to the country to look for ninjas. And then there’s the protagonist herself, Hitori Bocchi, who suffers from an incredibly amount of social anxiety to the point that she thinks her friends will forget her if she stays home sick for a day.
Bocchi’s social anxiety is what drives the series. It all started when she graduated from elementary school and her only friend turned out to go to a different middle school. Worse, she said they could no longer be friends until Bocchi had befriended her entire class. So Bocchi does the only logical thing: trying to cancel her class, because if she’s the only one in it, she’s technically fullfilled the quest. When that doesn’t work, she sets out to make friends and ends up with Nako, Aru and Sotoka. Her attempst to make and keep her friends are both adorable and hilarious and a lot of the humour revolves around how her social anxiety makes her over react. It’s never mean spirited though; Bocchi’s fears are taken seriously, it’s just the way that she reacts that makes it funny. What’s more, she has the support of her friends. Which is one more reason why this was the series that I wanted to watch first each week last season.
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