Karen's Anime Blog

Sometimes it’s an asset to have watched anime on and off for a good three decades: I’ve seen a lot of shows, meaning I have a lot of context to put things in when new shows come out. Unfortunately, I just don’t remember everything I’ve seen. I remember watching Nichijou in 2011 and enjoying it, but I don’t actually remember the show much. I do have the manga sitting on a bookshelf somewhere; I’ll get into that one of these days when I’m not watching so much anime and I have more time.

I found it– jackpot! Thank you local comic store!

CITY: The Animation is a new collaboration between Nichijou manga author Keiichi Arawi and Kyoto Animation. I imagine the staff meeting at the beginning of the project going like this: “Hey, guys? We’ve got a chance to adapt some manga from Arawi again. Listen, we are going to animate the living fuck out of this. Anyone not onboard with that, kindly get gone.”

CITY is a treat for the eyes, and a masterclass in what you can do with simple character designs. The opening couple of minutes are one of the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever seen animated, which is saying something. Does the show hold up in other areas too, or is it just a chance for KyoAni to show off their impressive animation chops?

To be honest, I’m not sure. Watching CITY reminded me of something I had forgotten about Nichijou: Arawi’s jokes aren’t necessarily all that funny. It’s usually not “Ha-hah” funny, as they say. Yet when you see how all the characters’ lives intersect into one large tapestry, you get something that’s better than the sum of its parts. I didn’t laugh out loud once while watching this premiere, but am I going to watch the next one? Wild horse girls couldn’t stop me. There’s something addictive about Arawi’s ability to find the absurd in the mundane; once you start watching, you want to just keep watching his characters interact more.

On another topic, I normally watch everything subtitled with the original Japanese audio, but Amazon Prime defaulted to the English dub and I almost watched it that way. Now I’m wondering if that would have been superior, since reading the jokes instead of hearing them does impose a certain distance that might have made things less funny. Normally I wouldn’t bother watching the same show twice, but I think I’ll give CITY episode 1 another watch to see how it lands dubbed.

If you like animation– not just anime, but any kind of animation in general– you owe it to yourself to give CITY a watch.