High school student Chio Miyamo has adventures commuting to school every day. Chio runs in to problems both big and small, such as construction, a biker gang, a sudden urge to use the bathroom, and more. – ANN
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 12
Source: Manga
Episode 1 Summary: Chio Miyamo is a pretty typical girl, with an atypically-obsessive video game habit. Because she was up until all hours playing a video game the night before, she managed to sleep through her alarms and leave her house with barely enough time to get to school. To make matters worse, she encounters some unexpected construction which makes her normal route impossible. It’s then that she decides to take some inspiration directly from her video games and get creative, taking to the rooftops to bypass closed roads (and prying eyes). On a different day Chio happens to meet up with Hosokawa, one of the popular girls from her class. Though she tries to make an escape a couple of times, as it turns out Hosokawa is actually pretty nice and Chio might actually want to be her friend.
Impressions: Reading about this series prior to the start of the season, I thought it had some potential to be entertaining. While the act of walking to school isn’t usually noteworthy, leave it to manga and anime to turn it from a daily activity into a weekly exercise in creativity and escalation. Or so I hoped. I was unfortunately a little unimpressed by the first episode because I don’t feel like Chio is portrayed as a very sympathetic protagonist and there’s a reliance on gross humor and human awkwardness that hits me in the wrong way.
I think the question that needs to be asked here before anything else is whether the premise of this series is sustainable or not. I’m not saying that a TV anime can’t produce entertainment from unlikely sources, but I do think it takes good resource management and a sense for how to properly escalate a gag, and I’m not sure I see the groundwork for that yet. For example, the first half of the episode introduces Chio and sends her running and jumping over rooftops to avoid various obstacles on the ground. As an idea I found it funny, but in execution I wasn’t satisfied with how it was expressed. I would have expected her actions to be more dynamic and would have liked the inherent ridiculousness to have been played up a lot more than it was. The one scene that I thought was successful was where Chio hid beneath an open window to avoid being seen and has to suffer the shower of spittle coming from an old man brushing his teeth. The situation is sort of sickening and not really my type of gross-out humor, but it was effective in building some tension (and the weird roll move she made to get away from her hiding spot was amusing). The rest of the episode isn’t well-rendered and feels clunky rather than spirited and hectic which I think would have done more justice to what was actually going on.
The animators also seem to have a really odd (though unfortunately common in anime) fascination with large bouncing breasts. One of the “features” of the opening theme animation is a threatening girl or woman with really large breasts that seem to bounce on their own. The rest of the opening is fully of wacky imagery of many varieties, so I figured that part of it was also just an exaggeration. I’m sad to say that it wasn’t, since there are multiple examples of this in the first episode alone. In the first half of the episode, the bearer of a bountiful bosom is a mother whose son has lost his balloon in a tree. The woman is just a nameless side character who pleads with a stranger to help get the balloon back to her child, but all the while her chest is heaving around as though it’s supposed to be the focal point of the scene. It reminds me of that early scene in Hand Shakers (I’m so sorry). Chio isn’t immune either, as her chest gets unusually bouncy when she’s shown in flashbacks playing video games. I’d be willing to brush it off as cut-rate fanservice, but neither situation seems meant to be sexy in any other way; it looks more as if someone had too much time on their hands (not likely, this being a TV anime production) and decided to add a little extra flavor. It’s really distracting and doesn’t seem to have a purpose.
On the upside, something that I do think was captured really well was some of Chio’s exhilaration at being able to walk around somewhere off the beaten path. While I’d personally be terrified leaping across rooftops in such a hilly town (I’d rather just be late to school and face the consequences), the atmosphere and tone is such that it feels like a quiet reprieve from the rest of the bustling world below. Many things seem insignificant when you see them from far above; even just a couple of meters probably gives one a perspective on life that they may not normally have.
I also enjoyed the part of the balloon segment where a rude rich man lords the symbols of his wealth over the mother and her son, because then Chio kicks him in the face to make her escape. It’s just nice to see a classist ass get his comeuppance for once (because it doesn’t happen nearly enough in real life!).
One last thing I wanted to touch on was actually Chio as a protagonist. I mentioned earlier that I didn’t feel like she was portrayed very sympathetically, and the reason I feel that way is because I read her as having some kind of social anxiety but I feel the portrayal isn’t entirely realistic and it bothers me. I got the same feeling watching Welcome to the NHK, which was an okay show until it tried to write its own material; the protagonist went from being a believable carrier of mental illness to a goofy otaku with poor self-control when the resulting humor served the story, and I found that back-and-forth to be an incredible dumbing-down of what it means to have social anxiety. I think Chio has some recognizable traits – self-sabotage (getting engrossed in a video game until all hours when it’s obvious she can’t get enough sleep that way), a desire to fade into the background of life, and a disbelief that anyone she looks up to would want to have anything to do with her. She takes a flying leap into a pile of garbage to avoid making a social mistake. While I’ve never done anything that drastic, my avoidance skills are sharp and I spend a lot of time assuming that people don’t want to have anything to do with me, so those parts of the episode rang fairly true. I do get the feeling, though, that perhaps the creators don’t really know what to do with that, and the default is to turn it comedic since it’s out of the ordinary. So at the very least, I’m wary of the places that her characterization might wander.
Overall I’d classify my feelings on this episode as roughly neutral. There were parts that felt clunky and parts that shined, but overall I think it just remains to be seen whether or not the single central gag is robust enough to sustain an entire series.
Pros: There were a few exhilarating moments as Chio made her way across the rooftops. I’m glad the rich jerk got kicked in the face.
Cons: I’m concerned about Chio’s characterization. The gag might not be sustainable. There’s some gross-out humor. What’s with the weird boobs?
Grade: C