Would your friends and family use any of the following words to describe you: weird, quirky, wacky, zany, goofy, odd, kooky, eccentric? Are you not above watching an animated show?
It’s time to check out Nichijou, or My Ordinary Life.
I’ve watched (and recommended) comedy anime before. But Nichijou is unlike anything else that I’ve seen. Each 24-minute episode is made up of a series of shorter stories about recurring characters, including school-age friends Yuuko, Mio, and Mai, and an eight-year-old scientist, Hakase (literally “Professor”), who lives with her robot creation, Nano. A few stories continue from episode to episode, but overall each episode can stand alone.
Here are just a few of the things that make Nichijou so delightfully odd…
Mai
Yuuko, Mio, and Mai all have their quirks, but Mai is over-the-top quirky. She has a strange, slightly evil sense of humor and delivers her pranks, many of which are directed at poor Yuuko, with a completely deadpan expression.
This isn’t one of my favorite clips featuring Mai, and I would prefer to share a version in Japanese with subtitles, but it gets the point across:
Nano and Hakase
As perhaps the most serious character in the show, Nano wants to be thought of as human, a desire that Hakase willfully disregards. Hakase and Nano have an odd relationship: Hakase is brilliant, but she acts like the eight-year-old she is, leaving Nano to play the role of parent to her creator. Hakase constantly wheedles Nano for sweets and at one point even modifies her to dispense desserts. She also lacks empathy for Nano’s desire to hide her robot identity. The Nano-Hakase segments have a tinge of sadness not present in the rest of the anime, giving the show a depth it would otherwise lack.
Koujirou Sasahara
One of the minor characters, Koujirou Sasahara is a classmate to Yuuko and her friends. The child of farmers, he has styled himself as an aristocrat. He adds a jabot to his school uniform, rides a goat to school, and is often attended by a butler. Another classmate, Misato Tachibana, has a crush on him, which she covers by shooting him with heavy weapons. This is a part of the anime that may not go over well with an American audience — although these “shootings” are merely cartoon violence, we’ve had so many school shootings that I found myself disturbed whenever Misato pulled a gun out of nowhere.
You’ll see glimpses of Koujirou and Misato in the intro to the show.
Buddy
Buddy is a dog that melts my heart. When Yuuko is upset about something, he often appears to place a paw on her for comfort. It gets me every time.
The Bizarre Interludes Between the Main Segments
Each episode of Nichijou is made up of segments featuring recurring characters, but in between those are unrelated interludes. In one recurring interlude, two men whose heads are encased in daifuku turn a jump rope for various characters.
Another segment, “Short Thoughts,” ranges from serious, relatable observations…
… to completely random statements.
Finally, there’s “Helvetica Standard,” short stories that are in a different style from the rest of the anime.
I’ve only glossed the surface of the weirdness that is Nichijou. But where I just saw bizarre humor that appealed to me, one scholarly work saw much more. While I was doing research for this post, I ran across an excerpt from Kyoto Animation: A Critical Study and Filmography. The book devotes several pages to Nichijou, arguing that “the orchestration of the show’s dramatic fragments appears to be governed by a pervasive sense of randomness whose ultimate objective is to throw into relief–in a jovial yet uncompromising fashion–the fundamental absurdity of human life.” So if you won’t watch this anime because I’m recommending it, do it to see if you agree that it expresses an absurdist philosophy.
If you’re ready to watch, you can currently find Nichijou on Funimation. You’ll need a subscription to watch the whole thing, but you can watch the first few episodes for free.