Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei (the Tatami Galaxy) is a wonderful and weird anime directed by Masaaki Yuasa. I have always heard of the show being different to most anime and about Yuasa's unique way of directing anime, but I was not prepared for what I got.

The series is about a college student, Watashi, who wishes he could live a more worthwhile life by joining a college club that will give him that potentially for him to find a girlfriend. Each episode of the series follows a different path our lead character Watashi could've taken. It has a Groundhog-esque plot as at the end of every episode time gets reversed and the next episode starts with talking about what Watashi is doing in that life. The reason for this plot-structure is that our lead doesn't feel satisfied with his life, so each episode becomes a "what if" to the first one in his search of for the rose-coloured campus life.

This creates a strong episodic structure and the show is smartly written in a way that allows every episode to tell us more about the world that Watashi is in, because even though he changes what club he attends the rest of the world doesn't change. (There is some repetition but it's mostly shortened with the newer episodes) So with each episode we get to learn more about the wild college and its students and many clubs to the point that to keep track of everyone you have to make your own conspiracy style board. The other characters we meet are great and its easy to get invested in all of them as we learn more about their struggles and desires.

I will point out that at times the characters speak really fast, especially in the first episode, that it becomes really difficult to read the subtitles fast enough before they switch, so you feel forced to pause or rewind. But that's not a big problem. As I said each episode builds up on the previous and so even if you missed how Watashi describes his friend Ozu, the next episode might repeat that information.

A thing about Watashi that I am grateful for is that he wasn't written like a traditional audience self-insert loser main character that a lot of the time are big creeps. His struggles with finding worthwhile college experience are very relatable especially if you went through university like myself with an ending note that I wish I heard, while I was still studying. And him being an older character as he is a college student compared to the many high schoolers main characters is a welcome small change.

The animation of this show is phenomenal. Every scene of this show is beautiful to look at with great backgrounds with some really good blocking and different perspective shots of the characters to allow for the scenes to feel more dynamic. The character designs are amazing and simple enough and allow for both fluid motions and for small changes of the model for more "cartoony" expressions. Due to the Groundhog-esque nature of the plot, they do reuse some animation scenes, but they are so well animated that I don't mind that. The colouring of many shots will shift creating this expressionist style in the look of the show as the colour change is based on the mood of the main character. Notice how when he is meeting the fortune teller it goes red or when he is drinking shots of alcohol how the colour keeps shifting.

There are moments when they use, what I assume to be, real life shots with a smudged filter of the train passing outside of Watashi's home or shots of a boiling kettle or of food cooking. These are a common thing in how anime are edited and I wonder if part of why they are done with real pictures that is to poke fun of how often those shots are made to look as photo real as possible. Another thing is with how the filter is making the shots smudged helps showcase how Watashi feels disillusioned from the real world, due to him feeling he wasted his time in college.

This show is an absolute treat and I highly recommend it to even non-anime watchers with how well its story is written and its wonderful animations. I enjoyed my time watching the series and hearing that opening song by Asian Kung-Fu Generation always put me in the mood to see what shenanigans Watashi will face in each new episode, while in his search for the rose-coloured life.