It’s been a hell of a summer for anime: We have The Summer Hikaru Died, Dan Da Dan, New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Call of the Night, and so much more. But both Isaiah and Chris have been floored by one show in particular: City the Animation. We sat down to talk about the ambitious slice of life anime from the Kyoto Animation.
Isaiah: Upon your very glittery recommendation, I finally took some time away from watching and writing about shonen anime to check out City the Animation on Prime Video. I'm glad I did, because the show is one of the most ambitious and comfy shows I've seen, well, since Nichijou.
Chris: I'm glad! And with good reason!
If readers have never seen Nichijou I'd highly recommend it. Like City, it was also based on a manga by Keiichi Arawi, and animated by Kyoto Animation.
Isaiah: And for more background, we should probably say what the show is about. So, while Nichijou is basically about the slice of life misadventures of middle school girls and all the kooky folks who make up their small town (including a robot lady), City the Animation is about well...a whole town of people as they go about their lives. Episodically, the show, alongside Trigger's New Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt, does a whole assortment of short stories within its episodes. Only unlike Panty & Stocking, there's a bit more consideration in having its little adventures have a sense of continuity with one another. It shouldn't be remarkable for an old school, cool studio like Kyoto Animation bringing back a throwback to anime conventions like this, but that's what makes the show such a fun watch.
Chris: Right, a lot of the joy in both City and Nichijou also comes from the contrast of how goofy and lighthearted the topics are coupled with some of the most high effort, impressive sakuga that you have ever seen. Even the tiniest thing is given obscene amounts of love and attention.
Isaiah: And its art style is the kind of vibrant bright colors within every frame with the kind of warm, inviting energy of flipping through a Little Golden Books children's story or some of a throwback Disney hand-drawn animated short (which the show plays a nod to with the typography of its logo). I usually perk up whenever the show swings to its resident dad and ramen owner Tsurubishi Makabe trying to become a cool regular at other restaurants to the point he can waltz through the door and say, "I'll have the usual," on some peak old man shit I'm also close to cinching in my own neighborhood. I also adore whenever the show focuses on its middle schooler duo of Eri Amakazari and Matsuri Makabe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-ing their way through the show as its resident dumbasses with jester's privilege. I'm also partial to the show adapting around the manga's apparent yuri ship of tomboy Midori Nagumo and Niikura as they butt heads throughout the show as its main trio alongside Wako Izumi whose documents their every misadventure with her trusty camera.
Chris P: Midori has such a sick look. I love the hoodie and shorts combo.
Eri and Matsuri's plotline also gets much more complicated as time goes on, and I got very emotional at the end of the 6th episode. There's also an ongoing arc of the publishing of a 4 panel (four koma) comic called Mr. Bummer about a guy who sucks and is always having horrible stuff happen to him and the drama of the creators having to deal with its continued publication.
Many of the plotlines in this are fairly lighthearted shaggy dog stories, but Kyoto Animation will wring so much out of them. Like there is a kinda nonsense bit in episode 7 about Tsurubishi trying to make fried rice, and he's on a train ride and they animate the living hell out of the wind catching his mustache. It's this TINY detail that clearly was a huge pain in the ass to get right, but it stuck with me.
Isaiah: I was trying to surmise what makes City such a breath of fresh air to my friend yesterday, and I went on a tangent about how a single episode in an anime winds up being the thing you show off to folks as a display of what the show is cooking. Ironically, in my example being Kill La Kill's fifth episode where Ryoko and Mako rush to get to school without being tardy, City's fifth episode is one of the most awe-inspiring things I've seen committed to animation in a long ass time. The best way I can describe it is that the show goes nut nut mode with a live action diorama of a tower it animates its story around that suddenly shows up in the middle of town. Somewhere down the line, Midori and Wako battle their way down the tower in a reverse Game of Death scenario. While all that is a bunch of fun with most of their foes defeating themselves, the show combines the rest of its other characters’ plot threads in one of those picture-in-picture sportscast ads that TV sellers pitch to football dads so they can watch more than one game at a time. But here, the show animates what everyone is doing in upwards of nine tiny squares on your television, swapping out the most essential storyline to take up the biggest square on the screen as everyone wanders through their little misadventure.
As if that wasn't impressive enough, the show ends on a little water bubble animation where all of its cast walk to an impromptu city-wide BBQ. But because Kyoto Animation doesn't skimp, they do like a bazillion bubbles outlining every character walking into frame, combining, until they make an entire mural of the town.
Chris: It's bar none the most elaborate, high effort piece of animation I've seen all year. It's the kind of thing you end a season on, and it's in episode five. One of the biggest flexes.
Isaiah: It was so good, I immediately started rewatching Nichijou episodes to feel something again and to remind myself if they were cooking on this level way back in 2011.
And what's funny about that is whenever anime fans online talk about older shows, they treat the feat of its animation the same way gamers would a graphical update in a game, as if older shows couldn't possibly have the same quality (if not more so) than modern anime. As if time and resources versus production demand over the years means new shows should look better, when the case tends to skew the reverse with how there's more shows being made now than there were back in the day. Needless to say, me nearly doubling over laughing at a gag about Yuuko trying to eat her little bento box hotdog octopus only to drop it in a cacophony of hijinks, Nichijou still holds up.
Chris: That conversation always annoys me because it always sidesteps an analysis of material conditions in anime production and what underpinned a lot of these production budgets. Like, anime has its good and bad eras (a lot of early mixed CGI and the transition to digital was a little rough, for example), but there's almost always someone willing to put the extra effort into it. That's why Nichijou holds up so well.
And both City and Nichijou as anime owe so much to Keiichi Arawi art, because he also puts so much work into it and to do either manga a disservice would be mortifying.
Also the manga are both very good!
Isaiah: It's also a testament to how much of an industry darling Kyoto Animation is. Coming off the tragic arson fire, which Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto referenced in Look Back, it's been gratifying to see the studio remain a tour de force in the industry. Be it with sprawling steampunk period pieces like Violet Evergarden, gripping dramas like A Silent Voice, sci-fi epics like Beyond the Boundary, or slice of life gag manga like it's made a career of with shows like Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. With City, I realized I'd been yearning for more shows where characters float toward the smell of delicious bread, sleep with giant snot bubbles, or put more effort than none at all with niche delights like the art of eating ramen raw from the packaging.
Chris: Ghibli Food is an annoying meme but they absolutely sell food so well in this. Like they convey the shame and joy of midnight snacking on a raw block of ramen and sticking your tongue into the soup powder packet as a cycle akin to samsara.
Isaiah: It's a real delight to watch with every episode not just how hard they'll go on its animation to sell a joke or which wrestling move its cast will break out (as they're wont to do) sporadically--it's to see what your friends in City are up to today. Kyoto Animation really nailed the same kind of feeling we're currently celebrating with James Gunn making Superman feel like a buddy you want to hang out with for everyone in their cast. And in a season where its only slice of life competition is King of the Hill, it's not even close with all the good vibes City has. I mean, even its eye catches for commercial breaks in between short stories are a vibe.
Chris: It's been an incredible season for anime (including King of the Hill) that just gives you a warm feeling inside.
