Can Yukko make her friends laugh? The world may never know at this rate…
What They Say:
I’ve got an explosive desire to visit an air-raid shelter! Everything you own is garbage! Just let me take it off when I’m ready. He made a snot bubble. A masterpiece.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The more we get into Yukko’s head, the more she seems completely self involved and disbelieving that anyone else can actually get her kind of humor. The show opens with her making some gags and jokes with various wordplays, but neither Mio nor Mai react to it and she just thinks that they weren’t smart enough to actually get it. Her overreactions to it all are pretty cute as she does lots of pratfalls and the like when each joke goes over like a lead balloon and the other two girls just keep walking along, straight faced and emotionless. Yukko can’t believe it in the end though and works up this idea in her head that the pair is simply trying to get her to go to new levels with her jokes. In the space of two minutes, she goes from thinking she’s telling them jokes that are too obscure or hard for them into jokes that are far beneath them, enough so that they wouldn’t react. Suffice to say, Yukko’s mind is not a place you’d want to live.
Unfortunately, a lot of this episode turns out to be fairly uninteresting. There are some short gags and a Short Thoughts section as well, and we get a nice bit about out favorite robot at the start of it, but a good chunk of the middle has our main trio of school girls in a room together with the lights essentially off and we only see them through small blocks on an overall black screen. It’s very mild and quiet for a lot of it as they talk in monotone and all, but eventually Yukko and Mai end up being consumed by laughter which is cute, but it’s the kind of gag that goes a long way for very little payoff.
The soccer side figures into things a couple of times with some regular stories dealing with one of the boys, and Helvetica Standard does on as well as one of the players is doing his best to tear the shirt off of another one in order to “celebrate” his retirement. It’s cute with the style used, but it’s a piece of kind of pointless fluff. Thankfully, as the episode gets closer to ending, my favorite cat makes his appearance and in the midst of cleaning himself, he becomes endlessly fascinated by the movements of his own tail. Sadly, it’s a very brief piece but it’s almost worth the price of admission alone for the whole episode. Add in a little story with the professor and her kind of over excited gestures for a bit where it seems like she’s more the child than the adult in the room with her robot and you have a cute ending, but endlessly fluffy.
In Summary:
Nichijou has a pretty content light episode once again, but that’s par for the course here. Some of it works pretty well, such as the opening segment and the sequence with the kitty and I even liked the extended piece with the three schoolgirls with Yukko trying to get a reaction out of her friends. There’s a lot of material here that doesn’t work though, or ends up going a long way to try and get to a laugh that it doesn’t feel worth it. I do continue to really like the animation style here and it’s what draws me back, but some of the structural aspects of the show simply leaves me cold. I know lots of friends who adore Helvetica Standard and the Short Thoughts but they really do almost nothing for me most of the time. My Ordinary Life continues to be one of the hardest shows to watch as it’s not a show about nothing, though it is, but it’s a show that is simply very hard to connect with.
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.
