#####This review is spoiler free.

I enjoyed reading Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie. But I won’t pretend that it was a great manga. It just wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination. There were a handful of good arcs in it, but overall it’s… well, it’s just not anything to write home about. But I enjoy reading trashy romance manga, so I had a great time reading it. Sometimes I don’t want to think, I just wanna read a cute couple being a couple.

That said, I thought this anime was garbage. I may not be pessimistic enough to dismiss the whole thing as a cheap cash grab attempting to capitalise of a running manga that had a large enough following. But it damn well did feel cheap and it was poorly made. 

This god awful series made me question if I actually liked reading the manga at all. I am not going to go down the dreadful route of arguing that this was an unfaithful or poor adaptation (therein lies the death of criticism). And I don’t necessarily think it adapted the story poorly - it just wasn’t working with something amazing to begin with. Consequentially, the studio, Doga Kobo, had the frightening task of turning lead to gold. 

I think they certainly proved you can turn lead into something, as long as the something is worth less than both gold or lead. This anime is plagued by poor direction, editing and animation. This, on top of the weak story made for a truely dreadful work. Do not watch this show.

There’s this issue present in a lot of anime adaptations of faithfully adapting the wrong parts of a manga. By this I don’t mean the story, but narrative devices, tropes and particularly composition styles. 

By changing the medium by which a story is told, the way these devices work change greatly. For one manga, like literature, is a non-temporal medium, so while there is a sense time from each frame, what is written and drawn doesn’t actually move with time. Anime, on the other hand follows a constantly flow of time. There are seconds and minutes in an episode, while there are frames and pages in a chapter. 

When adapting a manga to anime, movement is being added to static images and the addition of voice acting, music, time control, etc., all effect how a story can be told. R2R discussed this recently, here. He argued how the lack of sound in manga necessitates a particular form of metaphorical writing in place of music, and how not adapting to the new medium (by changing this writing when music could speak for itself) let down an adaptation.

Shikimori is plagued by the same issues. The adaptation is faithful in the wrong areas. Like many adaptations at the moment (Komi Can’t Communicate, for example), it tries to adapt a manga/comic-book style. Yet in doing so it often falls back into common manga frame compositions that don’t work as well in anime. Take for example reaction shots. In a manga, a very common reaction frame will look like this:

With only a rough sense of time as to when each character says their dialogue (or performs their expulsions) this can easily be read as a collective reaction, said roughly together. Which is how people react to things. The same thing done in the anime, however:

#####May be difficult to tell, but this gif starts at "I look forward to it."

This feels clunky. Whether this is the symptom or the cause of the main problems with the anime is hard to say. But either way, it reveals the two chief issues I had regarding the production of the anime: the bad voice direction and the lazy animation. 

The dialogue was a huge issue. 

I would like to emphasise the voice acting itself was not at fault here. I think the actors did a fine job. They’re not going to be winning any awards, but it worked well enough. 

The issue was chiefly with the voice direction and editing. Frequently there were really awkward pacing issues between lines of dialogue. The result was dialogue that sounded like two voice actors had recorded some lines and they’d be haphazardly stitched together, rather than like two characters actually talking to each other. 

I thought this was especially evident in the first half of the show. One character would speak… and… then… the other would respond. It did not feel like a conversation. How this managed to happen is criminal. This is an animation studio – voice direction and editing should be their bread and butter. 

As the show continued into the latter half – particularly after the first delayed episode – I got the impression that this sound issue was largely ironed out. The dialogue wasn’t distractingly bad (although the writing of it often was), which gave me time to notice the next major crime of this hopeless adaptation. The animation was lazy as sin. 

Sure, the composition was dull but even the actual stuff inside the frame was… just not animated. So little of this show actually received animation. So, so much of this “animation” were stills with a moving mouth. The clip from above is a prime example. The characters who aren’t talking are just frozen, it looks so unnatural and strange. And as much as I feel that it’s unfair to take something out of context, this bizarre sequence of animation, well, speaks for itself… 

It truely felt like the minimal amount of work was done to make this show. I get that stills or only animating the mouth/face, etc., are done frequently to reduce costs. I expect it in almost all anime to some extent. Even Studio Wit has to make sacrifices in the name of the budget. 

But this is the fourth most popular anime of the season according to this website. The amount of cost cutting going on here is inexcusable. Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie looked like junk

And so we must talk about the story. As I said before, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie wasn’t a great manga. But I don’t want to discuss the general criticisms of the bland male main character. Nor the fairly lacking-in-development, but strong and attractive female lead. 

They’re both central to this sub-genre of shounen (à la Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible and others). Sure, it’s not the best writing. But I’m not gonna criticise something for doing what it’s communicated it’s going to do. 

I will say, though – most of the magna meanders around, which is natural of a long running serialised manga. While there are a few complete story arcs, as well as an overall character thread about Izumi wanting to be stronger or whatever, there isn’t all that much to bring together for a satisfying 12 episode series. 

The result was mixed. Some story lines were ‘good’, with the strongest being the cultural festival arc. I though the drama and development in these episodes was well done. But overall, this task of building enough cohesive story was a real issue and I think this becomes especially evident in a the final few episodes.

Episodes 9, 10 and 11 really struggled to space out the story in a way that would allow for a dramatic enough ending to conclude the show on. It started to push into an arc covered in the manga about Shikomori’s past, but overall these episodes just suffered with nothing gluing them together. 

I do extend my sympathies to Doga Kobo. Their production schedule was hit hard by the pandemic, meaning we had two delayed episodes during the release. How much this all impacted the final quality of the show is hard to tell, but end of the day poor dialogue writing, terrible voice direction and bad storyboarding plagued the series. 

And as the adaptation tried to keep in genre for a manga it failed to grasp the full features of animation to improve upon what is ultimately an average source material. The result is that Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie has next to nothing going for it. When it’s competing against the third series Kaguya-Sama and the second of Komi Can’t Communicate this season, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, much like our unlucky protagonist, falls flat on its fucking face.