The end of an extraordinary series comes far too soon.
What They Say:
Let’s have a birthday party for Nano-chan! Professor, what do you mean, “a little one?” Got it! I’ll take this ugly one away, too! Cake, cake!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the end of the series, My Ordinary Life goes for the sweet in general while still ensuring that there’s a lot of laughs and silliness to be had. Even the adults get some fun as we see from one of the earl gags involving the vice-principal and the principal over the statues that are at the school and the way they both try and play it up as pranks that the kids are playing when it’s really their own things that are the root of all the problems. It’s not often we really get the adults at play, but when they do come out and get involved, they provide for some good laughs even when it’s just interacting with each other and not the students.
The kids have the most fun here though, especially when it comes to Yukko as she ends up literally bumping into a lot of people and saving the day in small ways. She’s always been the most outgoing of them (when Mio hasn’t flipped her lid) so watching her trying to get to Nano and ending up causing a little great saves along the way is priceless. Of course, it goes over the top when she gets to Nano and ends up pulling her hand off by accident after doing so much good. And the girls do have fun in general, including a very well done sequence involving Yukko and Mio trying to smash open a pumpkin the way you would a watermelon and having to go to extreme measures. It’s all done without words but has great music attached to it and a sense of the epic that is wholly appropriate.
Sakamoto himself gets a really good sequence here as well as he’s out on the street just walking around and ends up coming across Nakamura, whom he ran away from awhile ago before he ended up at the Professor’s. We do get some flashbacks to what Sakamoto’s life was like when he was with him as a younger kitten and it’s really adorably sad. Also appreciated here is that we do get a segment that has the school girls all together at Nano’s place where they all get along with the Professor well in order to celebrate her birthday. It’s the kind of soft, sweet moment that really humanizes Nano even more but lets everyone shine in their own way. It’s very cute and fun but also has a quirky moment that is so entirely the Professor that you can’t help but to laugh and smile along with it. And that’s what this series is all about.
In Summary:
My Ordinary Life is the kind of show where I’m glad that 99.99% of the time I put in the effort on a show. The first half dozen episodes of the series was a real struggle to get into and connect with. To the point where I was ready to drop it. But I ended up making the effort to keep watching it and suddenly it all just clicked and became one of the best shows from the spring and summer season that made me look forward to Sunday mornings each week. While it wasn’t a perfect show and had segments that didn’t do anything for me, it had so much that was simply fun, outlandish and wild that you never knew what to expect with each episode. Between the large and diverse cast and the way it shifted through so many different types of animations, it really had something for nearly everyone. And the ending sequence will long remain one of my all time favorites. This is truly a wonderful, magical show that will delight the audience that discovers it and connects with it.
Grade:
Streamed 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.
