In this frightening and uncertain time of global travail, the otaku’s heart is best soothed by one thing: cute girls.
Both of these shows, Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san and Tamako Market, have cute girls out the wazoo. They also have cute stories and cute art. Neither one is of exceptional quality, but both serve well enough as a salve for an otaku’s sickly spirit.
Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san: Cute Girls doing Vampire Things
Akari Amano loves dolls. When she hears rumors of a living doll stalking the woods at night from her occult-loving friend Sakuya, she runs off to meet the living doll and discovers a 360-year-old vampire named Sophie Twilight. Sophie’s not a living doll, but she’s close enough that Akari quickly fixates on her and inserts herself into Sophie’s life. After a few weeks she even moves into Sophie’s mansion with her, and introduces Sophie to her best friend Hinata. Soon after, Ellie, an even older vampire who was with Sophie in her early days, resurfaces after sleeping for 100 years. Sophie, Akari, Ellie, and Hinata start spending time together as friends, the humans learning about the vampires and the vampires about the humans.
I was pretty skeptical of Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san at first, especially when they showed us Sophie’s dakimakura cover and huge collection of expensive figures. Making characters otaku became such a lazy shortcut to fill out their lives in the 2010’s. And the rest of the setup is very standard cute girls doing cute things. But by a couple episodes in, I was enjoying it, even though it doesn’t bring much new to the table. Following the formula, they picked a fun theme, vampires and humans living together. They picked a beautiful setting, Sophie’s mansion and the cute little Japanese neighborhood around it. They chose an art style which is very colorful and bright, but fairly detailed, with normal proportions instead of chibi. They got some cute girls, some of whom are vampires, and picked the “everyone is in love with each other” dynamic. Then they put the girls together and let interplay happen.
But Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san works because all the pieces they chose fit together so well. The characters are all very adorable and quite lovable. Their personalities are pretty standard, but everyone has distinguishing elements and a great visual design to make her stand out from other characters of the same type in other shows. And there’s a spark, a chemistry to their interactions that not every cute girls doing cute things show manages to pull off. They have conflict and disagreements, but they talk it out and learn to understand each other. There’s just as many moments of friendship and support—real friendship built between different people who don’t always get along or understand each other, not superficial “of course we’re best friends!” moments. Even though the main four aren’t all equally close to each other, every pairing gets at least a small moment so we can see them interact. It always feels like everyone knows and likes each other.
Ellie was especially a pleasant surprise, because when she showed up, I thought she was going to be so annoying. She fights with Hinata at first when Hinata calls her cute and treats her like a child, so she could’ve been constantly causing fights and being rowdy. She also enjoys wearing skimpy clothes and sucking blood from young girls, so she could’ve been a source of never-ending fan service. But she ended up being neither of those. She and Hinata talk it out and Ellie explains that she hates being treated like a child because when she was human, she always looked up to her beautiful mother and awaited the day she would grow up and be equally beautiful. But she became a vampire before she had the chance to grow up, so her childlike appearance is a sore spot. Hinata understands, and the two of them actually become good friends for the rest of the series. It makes sense that she likes wearing skimpy adult clothing, and the series doesn’t really take advantage of it for fan service shots; there are a few, but they’re very tame and very infrequent.
And speaking of Ellie’s backstory, the series also uses the vampire stuff really well. The lazy version of this story would have taken away the vampires’ weakness to the sun and let them eat normal human food, and then somewhere around Episode 8 there would have been a joke where someone says “I forgot you were vampires!” and the vampires briefly feel shame for their unvampirely conduct. They didn’t do that; nearly every story touches on some way that being a vampire affects Sophie’s and Ellie’s daily lives. The vampires are in constant danger from the sun, but they still sometimes brave the danger to spend time with their human friends or go to things they want to do during the day. The classic beach episode ends up being a life-or-death affair for them, and there’s an episode where Sophie gets stranded under a tree without her parasol and has to wait for the sun to go down. And Ellie loves makeup because of her affection for the trappings of beautiful adult womanhood, but since she has no reflection, she can’t put it on well. So we get some funny scenes of Ellie sitting in front of a mirror and clumsily smearing makeup all over her face, and then a nice scene of Akari putting it on for her.
A lot of anime I’ve been watching recently have pretty forgettable opening and ending sequences. Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san is a nice surprise here too. Both the opening and ending song are really fun and accompanied by cute animation that captures the spirit of the series.
Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san is a nice, enjoyable, pleasant watch for fans of cute girls doing cute things (like me) and vampires (like me). It’s got cute girls in adorable goth loli outfits having fun together, drinking blood, avoiding the sun, and enjoying each others’ company. It’s not groundbreaking, but it does what it does well.
Tamako Market: The Base form of Kyo-Ani
It would be tasteless of me to talk about Kyoto Animation without mentioning the completely senseless arson attack they suffered last year. Many were injured, a few died, and the studio may never recover, so those who survived are out of a job.
Kyoto Animation made some of my favorite shows ever—Clannad, Kanon, K-On, Chuunibyou de mo Koi ga Shitai, Hibike! Euphonium. It made The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and though I’m still deep in oblivion towards that series, it occurs to me that I fell into those feelings when there was no more anime to watch and I was reading the light novels. It wouldn’t be the first time Kyo-Ani improved on their source material. Even shows of theirs that I find less successful, like Lucky Star or Beyond the Boundary, are always good enough for me to finish. This ANN column goes a bit deeper into what makes Kyo-Ani special among anime studios.
Unfortunately I also have to count Tamako Market among that second group of shows I find less successful. The show follows a group of characters running family businesses in an old-fashioned Japanese shopping arcade. Tamako, the main character, is the daughter of a mochi shop and beloved by everyone for her cheerful and hardworking nature. One day, a weird talking bird named Dera arrives in town and starts living with her. Dera comes from a mysterious island kingdom and was tasked by its prince to find his destined bride, but he ignores this mission for most of the series and the story just follows the characters’ daily lives.
Tamako Market has all the usual top-rate things about Kyo-Ani shows—the top-rate animation, the visual storytelling, the adorable designs, the full and lived-in world—but for me the premise didn’t have enough meat on it, the story doesn’t really go anywhere, and the characters are likable but not instantly engaging the way the characters in my favorite Kyo-Ani shows are. It’s slice of life in a very pure sense. It abandons even the thin pretense of stakes and tension that K-On maintains. Tamako is cute but not that interesting as a main character once you get past her superficial quirks, and most of the show happens around her. And interesting things do happen, but in almost all of them, Tamako mostly plays the part of a static object. Her childhood friend and neighbor, Mochizo, is in love with her and constantly trying to catch her attention. Shiori, a classmate from the badminton club, overcomes her shyness to become friends with Tamako. Tamako’s little sister Anko has her first crush on a boy. Tamako’s humming a song whose name she can’t remember sets off memories of her dead mother for her father. But Tamako’s involvement in almost all of these storylines is minimal. She doesn’t know Mochizo is in love with her, and she never realizes how much Shiori is struggling to make friends with her, and in the other storylines she’s usually a spectator instead of an actor.
Tamako is somewhat of a character with no arc, like Akari in Aria, the kind of character who changes others around her instead of changing herself. But the show’s storytelling is so subtle that it’s hard to even see how Tamako is causing these changes. So for me it ends up being a series of interesting slice of life vignettes without any connective tissue. In some of these vignettes the subtle storytelling worked beautifully. The show likes to upend expectations. It misleads you as to who Tamako’s friend Midori and her sister Anko are actually in love with. But it slips in little grains of the truth beforehand, using entirely visual storytelling, so that if you’re paying attention, you feel that the final reveal is completely logical and motivated. The subtlety also helps keep some of the cliched elements, like Mochizo’s crush on Tamako, from feeling tiresome. And it helps dampen how truly strange and out of place the final plot line, when Dera’s master returns for him, is in this nostalgic old-fashioned Japanese shopping arcade. But it also takes emotional impact away from a lot of the show’s events, which made me care a lot less than I might have about the characters and what they were going through.
I enjoyed watching Tamako Market. It’s a beautiful show with a ton of character, and its subtle visual storytelling stands out among anime, which often belabor their plot points and overuse exposition. But I was also kind of glad when it was over, and I don’t think I would ever rewatch it. I liked a lot of the characters while I was watching the show, but they also didn’t stand out in my mind after I was done, and the show lacked any kind of story or thematic continuity, even compared to K-On. There’s a sequel movie called Tamako Love Story that I don’t feel at all moved to check out, because I simply don’t care who Tamako falls in love with. Tamako Market definitely wasn’t a waste of time or bad, but it lacked something, and for me that lack puts it nearly on the same level as Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san, even though it felt so much more original.
