Arakawa Under the Bridge – First Episode Review

Episode Summary: Kou has lived his life in such a way as to avoid incurring debt with anyone, so when some hoodlums accost him, steal his trousers and hang them at the top of a bridge, he feels perfectly capable of retrieving them himself.  When things go awry and a beam from the bridge detaches and threatens to drown him, he's surprised and later horrified to find that his life has been saved by a girl named Nino. Indebted to her for his life, he's frantic to find a way to pay her back.  Nino is homeless, so he offers her a house; unfortunately for him she's content to live along the riverbank.  After much thought, she decides that she'd like to understand the human concept of love (since she claims to be a Venusian, this idea is foreign to her), so asks Kou to fall in love with her. And, faced with an opportunity to erase the debt, he tries to oblige her.

Of course, learning to live with such an odd girl is difficult.  Kou must first decide whether he wants to stay in her home or her "villa" - when he chooses the villa, it's revealed to be a cold, windy spot underneath the bridge's central support.  Kou also needs to make nice with the river "chief"," a kappa.  At least, he pretends to be a kappa, though Kou can clearly see a zipper behind the creature's head.  The kappa provides Kou with a new name, "Recruit," which he reluctantly adopts, before touring Nino's "house" and finding out that her scavenging way have provided her with some nice things.

Thoughts: While billed as a gag comedy series, so far the show seems to be eschewing the laugh-out-loud antics of something like Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei and settling into a pattern of pure weirdness.  I was never really compelled to laugh audibly while watching the episode; in fact, I don't think I even chuckled much.  However, despite that I still felt entertained.  While not everyone will find this series pleasurable - there are plenty of people who are geared more towards uproarious slapstick-style comedy that's completely different in tone from what's found in this series - I enjoyed the odd, conversational sense of weirdness that this episode presented, and think that I may be in for the long  haul.

I should get this out of the way before anything else, though.  Despite generally being pretty tired of Akiyuki Shinbo's directorial tricks of the trade and general visual goofiness, I find that I just can't avoid liking the looks of some of his series.  This one in particular seems to draw some of the best visual elements from Bakemonogatari, including the use of multi-layered foregrounds and backgrounds and judicious use of more fluid animation at certain points (Kou's near-drowning being one of them).  The style of the dialog seems similar as well in that it relies on cleverness and interplay between the characters for its humor.  Once again Shinbo uses Hiroshi Kamiya in the main character's role, and while it's energetically-acted, his voice is getting to be just a bit too easy for me to pick out of a crowd (the voice he uses here is painfully close to that of Itoshiki-sensei and Araragi-kun to the point of being distracting).

Aside from Shinbo's influence, this show's appeal is aggravatingly difficult for me to pinpoint. I think that the one obvious element so far is simply its inherent weirdness.  Other than Kou, the other characters who have appeared thus far have done so in incredibly bizarre manners and with little satisfying explanation.  Nino's deadpan insistence that she's a Venusian leads one to question her truthfulness.  I've actually seen arguments online regarding the circumstances behind her belief and whether it might be related to some sort of traumatic experience, but at this point  I'm tempted to take her words at face-value until the internal workings of the show indicate her true motive.  And the kappa, well, despite claiming to be the Japanese creature of legend and seeming to truly believe himself as such,  his facade is quite thin.  This stuff might be addressed in the show, but just as likely it might not.  Much like Cromartie High School never really spent much time bothering to explain the presence of Freddie and the Gorilla at the high school, the quirky characters of this show might just exist for the sake of existing within the show's world, a constant source of puzzlement but never a plot point.

While having some weird characters isn't something that bothers me personally, I'm a bit afraid that the show may find itself buried beneath them with nothing much to show for the trouble.  Kou and Nino seem very "one-note" to me thus far, and while this type of show isn't typically known for having super-deep character development I'm almost afraid of growing too bored of a joke which promises to repeat itself ad nauseum while the camera zooms in on someone's eye (oh, Shinbo). Knowing that there are more bizarre characters to come only adds to my apprehensiveness; if those types of characters aren't reigned-in by an appropriately sharp script,then they become to represent nothing but shock value incarnate.

Rather than spend too much time speculating on the show's direction, I'll simply say that the first episode entertained me, though the type of humor truly isn't for everyone.  It trades bombastic visual gags for character dialog that isn't so much intended to elicit guffaws as it is to convey the strangeness of the characters uttering it.  The visuals make up a good part of its appeal for me, but my hope is that the characters will be able to hold the rest of the show up as they engage in more adventures (if one can truly call them that).

Pros:

• The visuals are again worth checking out, as they often are with Shinbo pieces.
• The humor is based more on dialog than visual antics.

Cons:

• The characters feel very one-note and will really need to undergo some sort of development to keep the show from feeling stale.

Recommended? Yes, although to be clear the humor isn't for anyone looking for something that's going to make them roll on the floor while giggling furiously.