A couple times a month, the Fandom Post community suggests and votes on a new top five list about something in anime, most often from the current season. It’s our way of highlighting something fun or interesting or strange—or even meaningful—about what’s airing now, or about anime in general.
Comedy in anime, like that from most mature mediums, is well versed in parody. It’s always found things in popular culture, history, and anime itself, that are worth copying or referencing to demonstrate its place, to tie itself to something well-known enough to deserve parody, and to offer an entertainment shortcut by showering its love or ridicule on what has come before. (Parody is a form of satire, but satire is not always parody—satire does not have to be funny, but parody almost always is.) Most anime comedies have an element of parody in them, with very rare exception—it’s too difficult to come up with a joke that doesn’t take advantage of some prior knowledge in the audience. But there are few pure anime parodies.
Our voters came up with five shows that manage to span the spectrum, from unadulterated satire to loving tribute. (As usual our rankings are sometimes arbitrary: #5 through #3 were more or less tied, and in that show the greatest variety of the theme, and our taste for it.)
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#5: Cromartie High School
Cromartie High School, at its simplest, is a grand parody of old-school (60s and 70s, mostly) juvenile delinquent manga—the anti-social, or counter-cultural, youth that were fertile ground for Japanese readers curious, terrified, or part of tumultuous post-war generations. (Think Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One.) But Eiji Nonaka’s manga, beginning in 2001, and the subsequent anime adaptation, long past a time when such characters would shock anyone, knew Cromartie needed more than that, and they weren’t content to stop there, anyway. Enter random and eccentric parodies of music, wrestling, social caste, the existentialism of robots, fashion, school life in general, and comedy itself (a pining from one character or another for less sophomoric humor the story depends on). For a show about a bunch of dumb kids, it’s pretty smart stuff.
#4: Martian Successor Nadesico
Nadesico‘s a stranger fruit. At its heart it’s a genuine space adventure story, influenced by and paying homage to the space operas of anime’s past as much as it attempts, broadly, to send them up. But it can’t help cutting to the silly and absurd core of what makes those stories tick, even when it wants to show the serious side to any story about war. There’s a lot of specific, direct parody in Nadesico to its predecessors, from Macross to Space Battleship Yamato to Harlock, but it’s the nod of its show-within-the-show, Gekiganger III, to super-robot classics like Getter Robo that take the cake. When a story ties its parody into its characters or its setting, it can be amusing enough, but when its tied into the plot, that’s something else, and the most original and maybe affecting use of satire in our list.
#3: Wake Up Girl ZOO!
At one point in the very sincere (but still darkly satirical) idol anime, Wake Up Girls!, some members of the group are hired on by the local TV station for a weather segment, dressed for some reason in animal costumes. In WUG proper it’s meant to be a quirky nod to the ridiculous things up and coming idols have to put up with to gain attention, and a paycheck. After the season ended, some enterprising person decided that was nowhere to stop. Welcome to Wake Up Girl ZOO!, a short-form follow up that takes that animal concept to its natural extreme: the entire group are now animals, real animals, in fact—at least when they need to be, otherwise they’re not. (It’s not supposed to make sense.) The parody, however, is acute, both of idol-dom and various other bits of popular culture in their cross-hairs at the time, and Wake Up Girls! itself. This is the only finalist of a semi-popular slice of parody, of the sequel or spin-off that re-imagines the original in some very silly way, but usually cute and for fun. But WUG ZOO! is unique because it routinely and with hilarious cruelty makes fun of the pieties of its parent show, and its genre. The mark of good humor is laughing at yourself. (Just watch out for Mayu when she’s hungry.)
#2: Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun
And so, Nozaki-kun, another show sending up the pieties of its genre and influence, this time shoujo romance. For Nozaki-kun is a shoujo manga author who is also a tall, gruff, sometimes clueless male high school student. And around him are a number of eccentric students and friends and teachers who are ripe for adapting (if gender-swapped) to his very popular on-going series, “Let’s Fall in Love”. The parody in Nozaki-kun is always clever, but sometimes subtle, even when it seems so obvious on the surface. Much of it comes from shoujo tropes with characters who either embrace the schtick sincerely, or more often, don’t notice them as part of their personality at all, and in either case it manages to feel new. It’s hard to make fun of yourself and be very sincere about what’s so funny at the same time, but Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun manages it, no less than from anchoring the show around Nozaki-kun’s chief admirer, Chiyo Sakura, a short, daffy, energetic girl who begins her very shoujo adventure by confessing her love—only to be mistaken as a fan. And before ending up as a manga assistant.
#1: The World God Only Knows
TWGOK, by its affectionate and fun-to-say acronym, works similar to Nozaki-kun, but here its target is the dating simulation game, or gal game. Keima is known as the “God of Conquest” in the culture of such games, able to conquer with ease every path in such games, every 2D girl in them that is supposed to in the end fall in love with the player, if he’s played it right. No surprise, Keima is not like this in real life, but nor does he seem to care. But the demon Elise, as if in a game made real, needs his help in uncovering and capturing old demons who have possessed girls, feeding off negative emotions. To do so, naturally, he has to “conquer” each girl, opening her love to him and uncovering the possessor. This is the initial plot, at least. The parody of dating sims, and the harem genre of anime it shares qualities with, is easy picking, but is again done as much with a gentle regard for the stories and characters involved as it satirizes them. Parody in TWGOK, in fact, is sometimes sincere enough that it’s past the point of homage to even a celebration of its subject’s arcane mechanics and philosophies.
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And those are our Favorite Parodies. Join us next time for Favorite Soundtracks. To have a say in what makes it on that list, and the next list after that, check out the forum thread, read up on the rules, and join the Fandom Post Anime List Project today!
