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Nichijou
Anime Review
Nichijou can be a polarizing series. Some will find it hilarious, while others will continually find themselves asking "where's the joke here?" Kyoto Animation's 26-episode comedy focusing on the daily exploits of high school friends Yuko, Mio and Mai, a shy robot-girl and her creator, and a whole host of other eccentric characters, features some genuine belly laughs, but most of the humor is more of the quirky variety. Those who enjoy the mix of the bizarre and the mundane will find Nichijou's off-kilter tone and pacing entertaining in and of itself, while those looking for a more traditional comedy may find the jokes too few and far between.
Nichijou takes place in a world where people can produce rocket launchers out of thin air, ride their pet goats to school, and perform wrestling moves on wild animals, yet most of the real action of the series is centered around typical coming-of-age fare: keeping up with homework, making new friends and dealing with school crushes. It's almost like a typical slice-of-life anime was injected with some Looney Tunes DNA, which may frustrate some viewers; why can't it be all-zany, all the time? We appreciated Nichijou's lower-key moments, but we can't fault anyone for wishing the series would stick to its strengths: being completely off-the-walls insane.
 Like a lot of anime comedies, Nichijou unfortunately isn't above driving a once-funny joke into the ground, Saturday Night Live-style. Some of the jokes seem to take too long to play out, and others are simply repetitive. However, the show's unusual format helps mitigate this problem somewhat; the show is organized as a series of vignettes. Even if you find one joke tiresome, chances are the next vignette will feature something more to your liking. The show is also visually inventive, sometimes elevating simplistic jokes to the next level just by virtue of the novel way they're presented.
Still, on those rare occasions when Nichijou is laugh-out-loud funny, it's in a league of its own. We loved watching Mio, a student who draws yaoi manga for fun, go to incredible lengths to keep her sexy drawings out of enemy hands. In fact, we liked just about everything Mio did, which made the show's general focus on the dimmer, spastic Yuko a bit frustrating. The show's ensemble cast can work against it when it chooses not to focus on the characters you like; we would have been happy to see a good 5-10 characters shaved off if it would have given Mio and Sasahara, an elegant boy who rides a goat to school, more screen time.
 Aside from the adventures of school friends Mio, Yuko and Mai, the other main characters of Nichijou are Nano, a shy robot-girl, her genius eight-year-old inventor (simply called "Professor") and Sakamoto, a cat that can speak with the aid of a special bandana. We found that the show picked up quite a bit during the second half of its run just by virtue of finally mixing these two main casts; Watching the shy Nano try to hide her robotic nature from the rest of the kids at school is fun, but we couldn't figure out why we had to wait so long in the series for it.
Like a lot of the scenarios presented, if you actually sit back and think about it, Nano's situation is more than a little disturbing: she's a sentient being completely at the mercy of an eight-year-old girl with ADD who enjoys making secret "modifications" to her robot body at the drop of the hat. However, of course we do not generally advise using "Nichijou" and the phrase "If you actually sit back and think about it" together.
 Regardless of whether or not Nichijou's idiosyncratic sense of humor tickles your funny bone, the show has several other merits; it's one of the few anime primarily about teenage girls that really doesn't fetishize its cast. One of the criticisms of popular high school life shows like K-ON! (also by Kyoto Animation) is that despite ostensibly being about females, the characters are very much designed with male viewers in mind. Not so with this show; for the most part, you could replace the leads with male characters and little about the show would change. There's something nice about how gender-neutral it is. Even Azumanga Daioh, the (arguably much funnier) school life show that Nichijou appears to take direct inspiration from, features more fanservice than Nichijou does.
 Despite the popularity of the manga, poor DVD and Blu-Ray sales in Japan make it unlikely that there will ever be another season of this unusual comedy. Still, hope springs eternal: even if we think the show could have used a few less characters and a few more legitimately funny jokes, we wouldn't mind seeing what Mio and Nano get up to next. Also, if you like vending machines, getting drinks out of vending machines and jokes about malfunctioning vending machines, this might just be the show of the century. Currently, the series is available streaming on Crunchyroll.
Reviewed by Karen Gellender, January 2012
Below: Scenes from Nichijou.
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