The only show I watch just to see a cat’s performance.
What They Say:
Why do magnets attract each other? God is dead! The baby is coming! I’m going to draw an awesome man!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Having been kind of harsh on the series so far, I keep trying to go into each episode with a fresh mind to see what it will offer up. It’s not that I want to keep giving it chances or anything, but there’s always shows that really take some time before they hit their stride, especially ones like this where it’s adapting the already kind of awkward manga material where it’s sometimes a four panel piece, sometimes not. It reminds me of how awkward it can be to take years of Peanuts comics strips and adapt them into a TV special and make it work. Sometimes it flows well, sometimes it doesn’t. And there have been pieces to the show that I have enjoyed.
With four episodes behind us, I continue to really find appeal in just two characters. The first is the Mohawk kid who has had some great understated moments, including in the last episode when he combed his Mohawk down and created a normal cut that completely freaked his mother out. Here, he’s on something of a quest that has a very serious feel to it that goes kind of surreal in a way that’s kind of hard to explain. When you invoke Bob Hope repeatedly, can you expect normality? The other character that continues to work for me is that of the cat, both when it’s out in the world just going around and when it talks, much to the surprise and acceptance of the people around it. The cat has such a great voice to it and a sense of confidence with it that you can’t help but to smile as it talks with authority.
When it comes to the main characters, it’s filled with a lot of fluff that I have to admit is really hard to pin down what it’s about. One of them does well at drawings and she ends up very mildly pressuring the teacher into including some of her stuff on the next test since the teacher is easy like that. There’s a cute segment with the professor and her robot where the professor dons some cat ears and everything she does is quickly labeled as moe. Moe, moe, moe and more moe all in the space of just a few seconds. What I keep finding with the show is that the “stories,” if you can call them that, are all so superficial and the comedy so bland that I’m more interested in just looking at the animation itself, which has its appeal both in its simplicity but also the great detail that’s in a lot of the backgrounds at times. It’s an interesting contrast and the show has a very different style that sets it apart yet feels familiar.
In Summary:
As a whole, My Ordinary Life continues to be just that, ordinary at best and decidedly uninteresting. It has a few glimmers throughout that I like, but the humor for it continues to suffer a disconnect for me as it only rarely elicits a smile or two and just barely that, and even then it’s mostly with the couple of supporting characters. I can appreciate the way it operates and what it’s trying to do, but it simply doesn’t connect for me. It’s not exactly a chore to get through, I’ve gone through shows like that before and this is not one of them, but it feels more like just passing the time than anything else. It’s the kind of show where you start to feel that it’s for an audience that’s smarter than you in a way, that will appreciate the humor, pacing and execution more. Regardless, it has a certain beauty about it that I can definitely appreciate and that is one of the things that draws me back week after week.
Grade: C
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
