Hey there! You’re a first year, right? Have you decided what club to join? If not, then why not check out the girl’s soft tennis club? Don’t let the name fool you, there’s nothing soft about this sport. See that deep, scary looking gash in the ground? Last year’s team captain did that, and that was just practice. We work hard, we train hard, and when the mood strikes we play hard, and one of these days we’re going to Wimbledon! Or, well, one of our members thinks so, but they don’t actually have soft tennis there. Don’t tell her, it’ll shatter her dreams. We ARE going to win the soft tennis national championships one day, and if you have any interest in sampling the taste of victory, or even if you’re just hungry for some roasted japanese giant salamander, then you need to join the soft tennis club today!

Softenni was produced by a studio called Xebec, and if you know that name, you know it's not a promising one. Xebec had an extremely negative reputation for the two decades and change that it existed, and while they produced a ton of recognizable anime titles, they were almost all met with universal panning over their low quality artwork and animation. If you want to know how bad this got, well, just look what they did to Love Hina and the first adaptation of Negima. Less than a month ago, I tried to watch a series called Rio Rainbow Gate, and while the visuals weren’t the main reason I dropped it four episodes in, they certainly didn’t help matters. I’ve reviewed several of their titles before, and I don’t think I’ve ever had anything positive to say about them, but I think it may be time to break that trend, and while I have no plans to review The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye in the future, Softenni also looks pretty good.

That’s not to say it had a high budget, because it clearly didn’t, but for a cheap anime, it was really smartly directed. When you’re producing a comedy anime, it’s generally pretty easy to cover up a poor budget by developing a style that takes advantage of those limitations, and Softenni does exactly that. The interesting thing is that Softenni is the only anime that Ryouki Kamitsubo has ever directed on his own, with his only other main directorial effort being the first season of Hidamari Sketch, for which he shared a co-directing credit alongside Akiyuki Shinbo. Aside from that, he’s plied his trade consistently up to this day, working as an episode director, key director and storyboard artist for several different production companies, and at least from what I can tell, a good number of the projects he’s been a part of were not the best looking anime you’ve ever seen... Most of them having budget issues of their own... So if Softenni was his attempt to show off what he could do on his own with all that collaborative experience, then it’s a shame he hasn’t had a second solo gig.

The character designs are fairly basic... Color coded teenage waifus with varying body types, pretty much what you’d expect out of this kind of show... But proportionately, they are a blend of realistic and cartoony that makes for believable sports action, along with a ton of comedic exaggeration in their bodies and the perfect canvases for wacky reactionary facial expressions. The stiff animation that they use during comedic and conversational scenes, which are only barely recognizable as cut corners, are the perfect compensation for the more expensive and smooth-flowing action scenes, both on and off the court, which cleverly consist of both cheap and expensive shots edited together fairly seamlessly. The color palette is bright and vibrant, side and supporting characters are designed in a way that makes them distinctive and recognizable but not to the point of distracting from the main cast, and there isn’t a lick of CGI, so Xebec doesn’t have anything to overcompensate and tank the budget for. The only real complaint I have is the prevalence of cheek-talking shots, some of which are even more cursed than what I’m used to, and cheek-talking is already one of the most cursed anime tropes.

I don’t have a lot to say about the audio... The music is generic, but fun. There’s no English dub, and I’m not great at judging the acting of Japanese sub tracks, but it sounds to me like everyone was having a blast in their roles, and they had really strong comedic timing and chemistry with each other. That’s all I got for that, so, moving on.

In all the years I’ve been writing reviews, there’s one sub-genre that I’ve kept coming back to, and that my opinion on has been fairly consistent... That being, wacky random gag comedy. If you’ve been following my reviews then you know where I stand on this, but if you’re new to my work, here’s my basic opinion on them: Wacky random gag anime have an incredibly short shelf life. This is because most entries in the genre are going out of their way to be as random as possible, filling their episodes with wall-to-wall non-sequitors and consequence-free slapstick violence. The problem with this approach is that it’s manufactured, and it winds up becoming repetitive based on the conventions of writers and directors involved. The longer they go on, the more they expose the method behind their madness, making for an anime that starts out kinda funny, but loses its effectiveness and becomes predictable down the line, until it’s nothing more than a shadow of a once promising comedy.

There are very few directors who are able to keep this material fresh, but for most other directors, they tend to try and artificially inflate their series to a full and respectable length by flanderizing the characters as quickly as possible, pushing them to inhuman extremes so people won’t notice their lack of development or their repetitive usage, and using themed episodes in lieu of an actual plot or story. This can be different bodily fluids(Panty and Stocking), different shallow genre parodies(Excel Saga, Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi) or anything else, really. This is a pretty lazy tactic on its own, but for shows that don’t employ it, they can get real dull, real fast. For example, take Hare+Guu, an anime from 2001 that people today only really remember for its many AMV Hell clips. For a 26 episode show, Hare+Guu piles on so much wacky randomness right off the bat that within the first third, you’ve already seen the main girl inhale people into the pocket dimension within her stomach and nonchalantly spit them back out, and I’m sorry, but once you play the “Loli version of Kirby” card, you’ve officially peaked.

Hare+Guu hits diminishing returns so quickly that when I watched it, I accidentally did so out of order. I don’t know how my dumb ass managed to do this, but I somehow mistook episode 26 for episode 8, and I swear to God I didn’t notice anything was wrong until I got to the end and I was like “Hey, wait a minute...” So is there any way to avoid this fate? Well, yeah, there are two ways, and one I’ve already touched on. As I mentioned in my reviews for Puni Puni Poemy and Inferno Cop, one surefire way to keep a wacky random gag anime fresh is to keep its run time really short, so the series ends long before its effectiveness does. But there is one more far more ambitious tactic, and that is to approach your material with a sense of genuine insanity. In case you’re wondering, the difference between manufactured randomness and genuine insanity is that with all those previous shows I mentioned, nothing makes sense, because the directors are afraid they’ll become boring if they make sense. When insanity is genuine, however, everything reads like it made perfect sense to the person writing it, and in a way that the reader can just barely pick up on... There’s a noticeable line of logic, but it’s a logic that nobody with a sane mind would ever think of on their own.

To give you an example of what I mean... How many of you remember Azumanga Daioh? If the answer isn’t all of you, I’ll be sorely disappointed. It wasn't the first slice-of-life school comedy, but it was arguably the first great one. Anyway, the most iconic character from that show is probably Ayumu Kasuga, also known as Osaka by her friends, because she’s from Osaka, and teenagers are dumb. She starts off as just your average space cadet, but because Azumanga Daioh is one of those rare shows that actually gets better as its cast gets flanderized, she picks up a few more awkward quirks by series end, one of which is that she’ll sometimes say really disquieting things in the middle of a conversation. Like, there’s this one scene where her class is trying to figure out what to do for the cultural fest, and the debate is between a haunted house, a cafe and a petting zoo, so she suggests, “What about a haunted petting zoo cafe?” And when her classmates express confusion, she explains “There’ll be lots of cats and dogs in the cafe... And they’ll all be dead.” You can probably see where her train of thought went in order for her to arrive at that solution, but you wish you couldn’t, right?

That’s the kind of insanity that I’m talking about. It’s not just random nonsense, it connects in a logical way. A character like Osaka isn’t necessarily smart or dumb, she just has her own unique... And pretty fucked up... Way of thinking. This kind of logic exists right at the very edge of a deep, dark rabbit hole, and the more you come to understand it, the deeper down you go, until you’re pretty sure that one day you’ll be deemed unfit to stand trial. The reason I’m bringing this all up in connection to Softenni is because, in my mind, the best way you can possibly describe Softenni to someone who’s never seen it is to say that if Osaka from Azumanga Daioh were given the opportunity and resources to make her own anime, Softenni is the anime she would make. I say that because the way her mind works is disturbingly similar to the way the world of Softenni works. Softenni is a very weird comedy, and it goes to some extremely bizarre places, but at no point does it ever feel like it’s trying to appeal to people with ADHD or the same kind of lolsorandom Hot Topic market that Invader Zim used to dominate. It doesn’t feel like it’s throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. It feels natural, organic and genuine, and while that’s not the only reason I find it so gorram funny, it does create a pretty strong comedic foundation.

It’s really hard to talk about a show you find genuinely funny without spoiling a ton of jokes, but I think there’s at least one really broad series of events that I can use to establish my point; Around the mid-point of the series, the tennis club hikes through the mountains to get to a training camp. On the way there, they come across a natural hot springs, so they stop to bathe. While they’re bathing, a giant bear approaches them menacingly, so one of the first year members engages in a naked martial arts battle against the bear, which ends with him acknowledging her as his equal, and offering to let the entire club ride on his back the rest of the way to the camp. See what I mean? Not only can you see a very clear thread of logic connecting these bat-shit crazy story beats, but can’t you just picture Osaka herself hunched over a laptop, outlining this whole story thread? There’s nothing realistic or believable about the way these stories progress, but there’s always some kind of connection that keeps it from feeling like ‘stuff just happens’ story-telling, and in the long run, this pays off in viewer investment. When you know for certain that the writer of a gag comedy isn’t going to let themselves get away with pulling random bullshit out of their pocket, but they’re also not retraining themselves to the boundaries of reality, it creates a very real sense of anticipation over what’s going to happen next.

There’s a ton of fanservice in this show, which is probably its biggest selling point with first time viewers, but it’s very unusual fanservice. Characters are constantly shown in some form of undress, ranging from underwear shots, panty shots to full-on uncensored nudity, but the weird thing about all of it is how bizarrely innocent it all feels. You can only really call it ecchi by default, as it’s fanservice that seems entirely uninterested in servicing fans. The reason I say this is because out of all the fanservice that’s present in this show(minus the specials), it’s fair to say that over ninety percent of it is used as part of a joke, and the remainder is just incidental. There are some scenes where it honestly feels like the series is making fun of you for finding bare breasts sexy, or that just flat out spit in the face of the very idea of female nipples being the subject of censorship. You wanna know what the first nude scene in this series is like? In episode 1, the oldest girl on the team, and thus the captain by default, is wading nude into a nearby lake. When the other girls find her, she bursts out of the water all glamorously like the little mermaid, the sunlight glistening on her body... Until the camera cuts to a few yards back, and we see the reason she was out there in the first place.

The camera cuts back, and we see that she’s wrestling a Japanese giant salamander out of the water, and as we find out later, she had intentions of the culinary nature. You see, one of her quirks is that she has a really weird appetite... Not only does she crave exotic meat, but she likes to hunt her prey with her bare gorram hands, hunting them in the nude like fucking Beouwulf. What the fuck are you supposed to do with that, other than laugh? I won’t spoil them here, but with the exception of maybe the blonde foreigner, every character has their weird, highly distinct, and remarkably consistent quirks, none of which ever feel repetitive even when they become running gags. On top of that, the slapstick is also really funny. I know what some of you are thinking... It’s a tennis show, what kind of slapstick could they have other than people being hit in the face with balls? And yeah, that does happen, but with comedic timing that’s more than sharp enough to justify it, and beyond that you would be surprised just how inventive the comedy can get, even on the court. One of these jokes was spoiled in the opening, and it still had me in stitches over how well it was timed and executed.

There are plenty of references, but outside of a few Evangelion nods(mostly surrounding one girl’s partial resemblance to Rei Ayanami), they’re used sparingly and they don’t feel abrasive if you don’t get them. They’re even explained pop-up style on the DVDs if you care to pause and read them. I can’t say in good conscience that every joke works... For example, they introduce a new character towards the end who only made me laugh like once... But the jokes that don’t work aren’t cringey or annoying, or at least I didn’t think so. At worst, they’re just kind of there, and you let them pass by while waiting for more of the good material. Beyond the comedy, I’ll admit this isn’t the strongest sports story or character piece, but it does enough with what it has. There isn’t a whole lot of character development, but what we do get for about half the cast is still complex enough to support them. There isn’t much in the way of sports drama or tension, but there are still situations where you’ll be rooting for the characters to win. It’s light on substance outside of the comedy, but for a pure comedy show, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

Softenni is available from Sentai Filmworks. This release comes with a collection of shorts, which, to be fair, are the only bits of fanservice in the show that are just there for the sake of more fanservice. The original manga is not available stateside.

As I’ve mentioned before, humor is extremely subjective. What one person finds funny might not work for another person, and vice versa. It’s also important to point out that, at least in my opinion, critics do not exist to decide what’s good and what’s bad. It’s our job to state our opinions as clearly and concisely as possible, so that people whose tastes relate to ours can use us as a basis of what they most likely will and won’t like. With both of those caveats in mind, I really like Softenni. This show fits my brand of casual weirdness and surreal humor to a T. It’s one of the most consistently funny pure comedy anime that I’ve ever seen, and while I can’t recommend it to anyone who’s out there looking for some actual depth or emotionally resonant moments, I can whole-heartedly say that if you’ve agreed with my takes on anime comedy in the past, I’d recommend giving this show a try.

I give Softenni a 7/10.