A slice-of-life high school anime…with cows, horses, and beheaded chickens.
What They Say:
“Welcome to Ezonoo”
The vast Ooezo Agricultural High School (AKA Ezonoo) is home to many animals such as cows, pigs, and horses. Hachiken is a student there who has ostensibly chosen to enter the school because it is a boarding school. During the campus orientation tour, he becomes lost in the woods after chasing a calf on the loose. Just as panic sets in, he is accosted by a mysterious figure…
Content: (please note that the content portion of a review may contain spoilers)
With the ending of the release of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, I’ve been itching for a new Arakawa story, and while we’re still waiting for someone to release the Silver Spoon manga in English, catching the anime fills that space nicely. Yugo Hachiken enters his first day at Ooezo Agriculture High School with obviously no clue about what he’s doing, emphasized in the very first scene when he tries to catch a calf by chasing it, rather than easily leading it with food, getting the both of them lost. Shocked by the background and goals of his classmates (it seems like each of them knows exactly what they want to do with their lives upon graduation) Hachiken still feels he can rise above the rest with his superior academic skills — after all, he went to a prestigious middle school — until he hears them talking about current, college-level science, and he realizes that while he’s smart, it might not be in the right things. He spends the rest of the episode (which turns out to be one day of school, overwhelming when you think of how many things they did) being shocked by the origins of food and worn down by the athleticism expected of the students. It’s pretty evident that this isn’t the school Hachiken would have chosen for himself, but a mumbled reason for his decision, that this is a boarding school, makes it clear there is a personal, rather than professional, reason that this was the school he settled on.
Pretty straightforward about farm life. Sometimes it’s a little overly blunt, like when a teacher, straightfaced and without warning, lops off a chicken’s head, splattering Hachiken with chicken blood and holding the flailing, pixelated headless chicken body. It’s a little shocking, but also pretty funny in a morbid way. It’s this tendency to not dance around things, and also Hachiken’s ignorance of farm life and animals, the breeds much of the humor in this show. The big joke of the episode — and the way the anime chooses to show his character growth — is Hachiken’s utter disgust at discovering where eggs come from (“the anus”, as he says over and over). Eventually he does eat an egg, it being the only food that can be scrounged up after he and his group miss dinner, but I hope that overreactions, followed by acceptance, isn’t the main joke in every episode.
On top of Hachiken, there’s a wide cast of characters. There is, without surprise, the cute girl, Aki, who Hachiken probably has a crush on, but also the group he’s bunched with for his farming practicums. We get small introductions to each of them, learning their names and their reasons for attending the school, and small bits of their personalities start to shine through. Aikawa is a gentle guy who handles blood worse than Hachiken, and Tokiwa is an energetic guy who is not shy about admitting his shortcomings in regular school subjects (“Don’t underestimate how dumb I am!” is probably the best line in the show.) No one has a lot of depth right now, and I worry that some, like overweight, stern-faced Tamako, will rely overmuch on stereotypes for their personalities, but right now the characters and relationships show a lot of promise.
Character designs are distinctly Arakawa, and while I worried that some might appear to be clones of FMA characters, everyone has enough differences and is infused with enough of their own personality to prevent that from being the case.
Animals are drawn a little more realistically, but are sometimes anthropomorphized just enough to give them a little emotion in their expressions — and probably so we can share in Hachiken’s horror when one of them is killed. There’s not too much action, but the animation is fluid enough, and the backgrounds — trees, barns, a pathway on a misty morning — are very well detailed, giving a continuous sense of place.
In Summary
Being the first episode, nothing terribly exciting happens as the setting and Hachiken’s external issues are made clear. But there’s still quite a bit to uncover here, with Hachiken’s still mysterious reason for attending an agriculture school when he has no practical experience or goals attached to it, and the decently-sized cast that still have to be fleshed out. There’s quite a bit of humor, though so far the show overdoes it by hyper-focusing on one issue, so it slides just past being funny and into just wanting Hachiken to get over it. Despite the slow start and overblown reactions, Silver Spoon seamlessly combines two of my favorite things — slice-of-life high school story and Arakawa — and this first, introductory, episode is enjoyable enough that I can only see it getting better from here.
Grade: B+
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
13″ Apple Macbook set to 720p
