At only sixteen years old, Sasami Tsukuyomi has already had a more eventful life than most of us ever will. Born to a religious cult, possessing the power to remake reality with a thought, and inheriting the role of a priestess from her mother, there were only two things ever expected of her... Dedicate her life to religious service, and eventually grow up to mate with her older brother and produce the next priestess in a tradition of inbreeding that has apparently gone back generations. As fate would have it, however, this plan was not to be. Her chronically ill mother was unable to complete her training, and the temptation of the outside world drew her away from the rest of the Tsukuyomi cult to live in solitude as an otaku shut-in, wasting her days away in bed surrounded by anime and video game merchandise while her older brother, still romantically obsessed with her, dotes on her every will. It’s a life most people would look down on, but compared to where she came from, it’s a life she treasures, and she won’t give it up for anyone... No matter what the forces of heaven and hell have to say about it.

For over 20 years now, Studio Shaft has been releasing some of the most distinctly directed anime in the history of the medium, but there’s one man in particular who doesn’t get enough credit for his role in that output. When you see a female character glancing backwards over her shoulder at a particular angle, this is commonly referred to as “The Shaft Look,” but that’s not entirely accurate. That pose isn’t a signature of Studio Shaft, but instead, it’s more specifically the work of Akiyuki Shinbo, an auteur anime director whose work could even be compared to Osamu Tezuka on the grounds of how instantly recognizable it is. His aesthetic is very deliberately off-kilter, looking nothing like you’d expect an anime to look. Sure, the character designs are more or less normal, falling into the more anatomically correct category of proportions like most of JC Staff’s works, but his artwork and visual direction are a category all their own. His style is largely avant-garde, employing obscure angles and framing devices, constantly switching between off-center long shots and close-ups showing either zoomed-in faces or full body shots.

It’s pretty typical for his work to go overboard on background designs, and whether that means drenching everything in shadows or jamming every corner of the screen with references and visual gags that you’d have to pause to even have a chance of noticing, well, that depends on the genre of the title in question. He can make such simple motions such as a character tilting their head into a spectacle all its own, and in a lot of cases, you genuinely don’t know how he’s going to present something until it appears on screen. He also has a tendency to frame female characters in skeevy voyeuristic poses, even if there’s nothing even remotely sexual going on at the moment, pushing the concept of the male gaze to its absolute limit. He can render certain bodily details to appear sexually suggestive even if the character in question is wearing pajamas or a baggy hoodie, and if there are two female characters on screen, he will go out of his way to try and trick you into thinking you’re about to see some hot girl-on-girl action.

His work has a massive fanbase, and even the members who don’t know too much about him and think his style is all the work of Shaft itself are still really into this particular approach to art direction, and I don’t want it to sound like I’m trying to invalidate their tastes or anything, but for me? If I’m being completely honest? It feels really hit or miss. There are plenty of titles where I think it works, to be sure, but when it doesn’t work, it can be distracting to an outright detrimental degree. I feel like it works best in the setting of a wacky gag comedy, like Negima ‘06, or Pani Poni Dash. I feel like it works in really creepy and spooky settings, like in le Portrait de Petit Cossette. Then you have titles like March Comes in like a Lion, an insanely popular and beloved series that I couldn’t get into, because the absurd visuals rubbed me the wrong way, and I felt like they were completely at odds with the somber, mature subject matter the series was trying to explore.

So where does Sasami-san@Ganbaranai fall in this equation? Well, I think I can say without hyperbole that it is the most singularly ugly title that Shinbo has ever worked on. That’s not to say it looks cheap... Honestly, it’s generally just really hard to tell what kind of budget ANY of Shinbo’s projects have had, and this one is no different. Motion is smooth, the occasional CGI is breath-takingly well rendered, and it never looks like the director had to compromise over a lack of funds. Rather, Sasami-san’s cardinal sin is the fact that it is over-produced and garish, with a headache-inducing watercolor aesthetic, a pukey color scheme and so, so many weird decisions that just feel so out-of-left-field that they border on trolling the audience. For one example, Sasami’s older brother constantly hides his face from the camera... Yes, he specifically hides his face from onlookers who could see it from the direction of the fourth wall, even though nobody in this series showcases any kind of awareness of said wall. Other than that, it’s business as usual for Shinbo, as pretty much everything I said in the previous paragraphs applies equally to Sasami-san.

The music is fine... You likely won’t notice any of it outside of a particular end-segment theme that sounds like it was stolen from His and Hers Circumstances, and the opening is pretty fun. They also went the Lucky Star route of having Sasami reluctantly do terrible karaoke over the credits. There’s no english dub, but the original sub sounds perfectly fine, as ignorant as my monolingual ears are? I don’t know, I have nothing really important to say about the audio and I kind of just want to skim past this segment and get right to the meatier part of this review, but in order to set up what I have to say, I’m going to have to take my life into my own hands and say a few words about Shinbo’s most popular work, and what many consider to be his magnum opus, the extensive Monogatari series.

I should point out before I go any further that I do like this series, but I’m kind of afraid to admit, I don’t personally see it as the masterpiece that everyone else does. To be clear, I haven’t seen all of Monogatari. I watched it nearly a decade ago, and all that existed at the time were Bakemonogatari and Nisemonogatari, and while my memories aren’t the strongest, I remember getting a very unique vibe from it... A vibe that was sleazy, but somehow also comfortable. Watching it felt like hanging out in some seedy underground night club where everything just feels wrong, but you don’t care because you have a good buzz going and things like morality and common sense just don’t exist. It was a fucked up show about fucked up people doing fucked up things in a fucked up world, kind of like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia but without the perspective of the outside world to keep things in check. Shinbo's weird, outside-the-box aesthetic works really well in that regard, as it gives the series an other-worldly atmosphere.

Monogatari approaches it’s subject matter slowly, taking it’s time to introduce you to it’s bizarre reality and the characters who live in it. If you’ve ever heard that old expression about a frog in boiling water, you’ll know what I mean when I say that by the time Monogatari starts to creep into what should be considered morally reprehensible territory... And whether you admit it or not, there is no shortage of incest and pedophilia in this show... You’ve already been conditioned to confront it on the show’s terms. Even when the protagonist crosses the kinds of lines where he molests a little girl on the street, or very nearly goes to second base with his fourteen year old little sister, it’s difficult to take offense to any of it... Not only because you were given more than enough time to know what you were getting into, but because like most of Shinbo’s work, these characters never do or say anything remotely like what an actual human being would, so you’d have to go pretty damn far out of your way to see them as people. Again, I don’t remember what I saw being a masterpiece... That’s going to piss a lot of people off, and I’m sorry about that... What I do remember is a thoroughly engaging, and frighteningly addictive, guilty pleasure.

What I’m basically saying, at least based on what I’ve seen and what I can remember, is that if the Monogatari series wasn’t paced and executed as well as it is, it would be a total trainwreck. Or, to put it more bluntly, it would be Sasami-san@Ganbaranai. Which is a trainwreck.

Sasami-san represents the absolute worst qualities of Shinbo’s body of work, with almost none of the upsides. The worst thing about Shinbo’s style is that there’s really no reason for it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first person to say that art is a matter of expression, and not necessity, but art usually has something to say, or some purpose, however large or small that purpose may be. Art can communicate ideas, and speak to people on a deeper level than mere words, but there is a fine line between inspiration and manipulation. Every Akiyuki Shinbo anime looks largely the same, with the only significant differences being design choices that were taken from the source material. Across his entire body of work, the only important contribution his style has added to any anime is in his light novel adaptations, where it distracts the viewer so they won’t recognize how dialogue-heavy the material is. This last technique was used sparingly in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but when Shinbo uses it, he goes wall-to-wall with it. Sure, it adds extra gags and references to his comedies, and it gives his horror titles an extra creepy and unsettling tone, but you don’t have to go so far off the wall for that.

The only way his aesthetic elevates his material in a meaningful way is that it occasionally makes long dialogue and exposition dump scenes feel less boring. Other than that, none of his work needs to look the way it does. In spite of this, he takes the same approach with every title he works on, and why? Well, because it sells, obviously. Can’t argue with results, right? His style makes him look deep, which helps him get away with shameless otaku pandering so he and Studio Shaft can make bank off of merchandise and ridiculously over-priced DVD sets. No matter how shallow the material may be, if he keeps using the same arbitrarily experimental visual style, people are going to look at it and think it’s profound, all because it’s different from what they're used to. He has nothing to say, he adds no depth to anything, but in the long run it doesn’t matter because the whole point of his style is to HAVE his own style that makes him look smart and keeps his bank account full, and I know it’s considered tacky to throw around the term pretentious, and it may not apply to everything he’s worked on... For example, he may have directed Madoka Magika, but that was always more Gen Urobushi’s baby than his... But using art to create the appearance of depth where there is none is textbook pretentious, and the fact that his filmography is diverse but his style isn't is a dead giveaway.

The sad thing is, I’d be willing to bet he knew this about Sasami-san. I'll bet you anything he took one look at this script and knew, right off the bat, that this story was going to require some serious heavy lifting, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Akiyuki Shinbo anime that was so front-loaded with distractions, overwhelming the viewer with some of the most obnoxiously dense cinematography I’ve ever seen. Every single shot in the first four episodes is trying so hard to grab your attention in a way that’s so desperate that they might as well be jangling keys in your face. I don’t think Shinbo would have tried this hard to bombard you with visual stimuli if he didn’t know his aesthetic was going to have to overcompensate for something... Like, I don’t know, how completely unlikable and unsympathetic all the characters are, and how desperately the material tries to pander to otakus by jamming itself with the most fetishy anime tropes imaginable? Like, in the Monogatari series, it took two seasons of conditioning to get people to accept some blatant incest teasing, and Sasami-san jumps that shark in the first episode!

Throw in a lolicon teacher, a deadpan robot girl, a buxom blonde with the brain of a toddler, a literal futanari girl and an otaku hideaway that’s so chock full of merchandise and computer software that viewers will be too busy having their wishes vicariously fulfilled to wonder how the FUCK Sasami is able to afford all of this luxury while living on her own and hiding from her cult family. Oh, and because this series came out in 2013, of course it rips off Haruhi Suzumiya, because that series made all the money in the world, so why not try to snag a piece of the pie? Specifically, what they do is called an inverse deconstruction... Where Haruhi Suzumiya was a girl who had reality altering powers that she would totally abuse the fuck out of if she knew about them, Sasami is a girl who knows she has reality altering powers but wishes she didn’t, yet they both draw supernatural beings into their orbit to clean up the messes they inadvertently cause. If you think I’m reaching with this analysis, Sasami’s brother literally DOES the Hare Hare Yukai dance in the first episode, how could you possibly be more blatant than that? The only difference is that while Haruhi as a character can be interpreted as a parody of main characters in general and how they influence the world around them, Sasami-san can only be interpreted as shut the fuck up and buy our body pillows.

These first four episodes are a chore, alternating between incoherent actions scenes where three goddesses deal with the effects of Sasami’s powers, boring mush-mouthed exposition dumps about Japanese mythology and the show’s own lore that are an assault on the attention span, and like I said before, otaku pandering that seems to go out of its way to glorify and justify the hikkikomori lifestyle. Having said that, I will confess, it gets a lot easier to watch after that point. Episode five shows Sasami finally going to school and trying to make friends with one of the goddesses... Which is fine, and I like the lighter tone, even if it's dumb and chock full of lazy slapstick... And then episode six actually manages to improve things by introducing a new wrinkle to the story that pays off with a pretty damn effective plot twist, as well as a pretty damn threatening antagonist who does the unthinkable by actually making you sympathize with the show’s useless louse of a protagonist... Until the whole matter is resolved via deus ex machina in the next episode, and then barely ever brought up again.

So that was the peak of the series, which means it’s all downhill from there, right? Well, I wish I could say otherwise, but yeah. In the final third of the series, everything that was initially set up has been resolved, so they just introduce a few new characters right the fuck out of nowhere and just abandon any hint of plot or story to focus on more fanservice... And when I say fanservice, I mean that Shinbo goes out of his way to showcase the female cast naked from every possible angle he can get away with, at least without showing the audience any nipples. Because that is another bizarre trend in Akiyuki Shinbo's work. I don’t know if Shinbo is sexually attracted to Barbie dolls, or if he thinks the audience is sexually attracted to Barbie dolls, but SOMEONE in this equation peeled off a few too many tiny red lifeguard costumes when they were children if someone actually thought that this was how you made good fanservice. Anyway, a forgettable side-villain from the good episode reappears, she talks to Sasami in a scene that’s drawn to look like they’re both 8bit video game characters(because why the fuck not) and roll credits. Every single thing about this anime was a mistake.

There could have been something here. In fact, I can promise you, there was something here at one point. I think one of the reasons I saw so much potential in the middle stretch of episodes is because it came really close to subject matter that I wish we could see more of in media; That being, toxic families and how to escape them. Now it’s true that very few people actually have the kind of upbringing Sasami had... I doubt anybody reading this actually grew up in a cult where they were expected to mate with their blood siblings... But when you have a protagonist running away from a parental unit who cares more about their plans for said child than about their actual well-being, and you show them adjusting to a new life while fending off gaslighting and manipulation from said parental unit... That is going to hit very close to home for more viewers than you could possibly imagine. Sasami-san flirts with this idea early on, albeit in ridiculous and stupid ways, before finally hitting the nail on the fucking head for about an episode and a half before losing touch, then losing interest, then ultimately moving on because the themes that I just described were just an unintentional byproduct of the message this show actually wants to send: That it is perfectly fine to be an entitled parasite who doesn’t work for anything and contributes nothing to the lives of anybody who loves them. In other words, exactly what hikkikomori and other basement dwelling otaku want to hear. Fuck this show.

Sasami-san@Ganbaranai is available on DVD and Blu Ray from Sentai Filmworks, and since nobody but me has watched it in the last five years, you can find it pretty cheap online. The manga and light novels are not.

Look, I didn’t wake up this morning and choose violence. I love writing reviews, and when I have a particular title stuck in my brain and I have a lot I want to say about it, I like to sit down, start typing and see what happens. I’m not afraid to receive backlash for my reviews... On the contrary, I’m kind of an attention whore, and since Anilist is a remarkably non-toxic web site, it never goes too far. I know there are a lot of people who enjoy Shinbo’s art style no matter what it’s attached to, and I am sorry if anything I wrote here came off as insulting, but the simple fact is that no director, no matter how much of an auteur they may be, gets it right every single time. Sasami-san is Akiyuki Shinbo’s worst anime. It’s obnoxious, it’s ugly, it tries way too hard to cater to every popular otaku trend that it can, and unlike so many of Shinbo’s other titles, it’s too incompetent to not be transparent about how manipulative it is. It tries to deliver these puddle-deep messages about friendship and self-actualization like it has anything meaningful to say, all while pandering to the lowest common denominator, which is both pretentious and downright insulting. It doesn’t matter what your taste in anime is, you deserve better than this.

I give Sasami-san@Ganbaranai a 2/10.