Kaede Shiranui was just an ordinary teenage girl. One night, while diligently absorbed in her studies, she finds herself distracted by an unexpected guest. Clad in a bright pink gi, a hapless kunoichi named Shinobu breaks into her bedroom, and begins to rifle through her underwear drawer. Believing herself to be invisible, Shinobu is shocked when Kaede confronts her, and confesses that she’s only trying to complete a task assigned to her by her sensei, simply known as Headmaster, and is being overseen by the real pervert of the outfit, a large yellow ball with a face named Onsokumaru. Faced with all of this extenuating information, Kaede befriends her intruder, and is consequently drawn into the bizarre world of Onsakumaru’s hidden martial arts dojo, where Shinobu live alongside a horde of identical male ninjas all named Sasuke, a sentient alligator, and Onsakumaru himself. Will Kaede be able to balance her everyday routine with the complications of her blooming friendship, or will her life be changed forever by all of this Ninja Nonsense?
And while we’re at it, does 2X2 REALLY equal Shinobu?
At first glance, you might think I’m joking when I say Ninja Nonsense was produced by Ufotable, and I can’t really blame you. Thanks to its affiliation to certain anime properties like Garden of Sinners, Demon Slayer, God Eater and several highly acclaimed entries in the Fate franchise, Ufotable has a pretty solid reputation when it comes to their sophisticated character design style and slew of critical darling titles. This reputation wasn’t something they had from the start, however, as their style was a bit more random at the start. Even their first production, a Weiss Kreuz title that they shared production duties with Magic Bus for, had a slightly cartoony edge to it. With Ninja Nonsense in particular, the designs were obviously carried over from the manga, but the animation and visual direction kind of feel like they were trying to do something similar to Excel Saga... I don’t have any evidence to back that up, it’s just a theory I have, but we will be revisiting it a few times.
The animation is pretty decent, with a few caveats. First off, this kind of animation is strictly reserved for random gag anime titles. The kind of fast pace, constant visual gags and hyper quick cuts that this series employs are usually considered the ideal way to save money while throwing out a joke every other second, and when it’s on point, it works commendably well... Unfortunately, when it slows down, you can tell just how cheap the production really was. It doesn’t happen often, but when the series finds itself in an extended cut where characters are having a conversation, it’s unnerving how long everyone but the current speaker just sits there on screen, not moving, not blinking, just waiting for their chance to unfreeze and detach from the background and show some sins of life. This doesn’t happen the majority of the time, but the series doesn’t do nearly a good enough job at avoiding them.
The character designs are kind of a mixed bag... Onsokumaru is the mascot of the series, and yeah, having a yellow Geodude flying around being a pervert is at least one memorable, iconic design choice. The suke ninjas aren’t much to write home about on their own, but as a group, they’re well designed for the kind of comedy they lend themselves to. On the other side of the coin, we have the female designs, which are kind of confusing? With characters like these, you can usually stick to either relative anatomical correctness or straight up cartoony super-deformed chibi, but the female characters in this show are stuck in a weird, uncanny spot between the two... Anatomical bodies with large breasts, with a cartoony roundness that makes them feel half chibi, and these big heads that look like exaggerated blushing moe faces were slapped onto head sculpts from Sergeant Frog. The human ones, not the frog ones. While the facial designs across the cast are rarely ever off-model, the bodies often are, with crooked outlines and abnormal proportions whenever they’re seen from a slightly unconventional angle.
It’s fairly obvious this is supposed to be an ecchi show(well, a PG-13 one, at any rate) and the characters of both genders are often shown in skimpy attire... The ninjas in their loincloths, and the girls in the occasional swimsuit/towel situations... But their anatomies feel so off-putting with their plasticky shininess that I can’t imagine the aesthetic having an effect on anybody other than the desperate Onsokumaru. The most realistic looking character is the dojo’s resident alligator, which is a problem in and of itself. Take a lesson from The Princess and the Frog, a friendly and intelligent alligator shouldn’t look like a realistic alligator. I’ll give them credit for being really creative with Onsakumaru’s shapeshifting, and he does get the funniest facial expressions in the series, but other than that, it feels like they either didn’t have a solid grasp on their own sense of visual direction, or they were unable to figure out the right way to bring full, colorful motion to the designs from the manga. Or both. It could be both.
There aren’t that many songs in the soundtrack, and the ones we do get are fairly repetitive throughout the series, but much like the animation style, the music also feels like it was inspired by Excel Saga, albeit to a much smaller scale. The series is mostly quiet when it lets the comedy do the talking for itself, but with the occasional themed track to denote a tonal shift... So, again, like Excel Saga but without the genre parody themes. The English dub is serviceable enough, but the names attached might surprise you. The deep and gravelly voiced sex fiend Onsokumaru is played by Sean Schemmel, AKA none other than motherfucking Goku, in his least recognizeable role ever. If Shinobu’s charmingly sincere overacting feels familiar to you, that’s because her voice actor Emily Bauer has also enjoyed a long and fruitful career as Dawn from Pokemon, as well as other various roles. I didn’t love Meredith Zeitlin as Kaede, I feel like Kari Wahlgren could have performed her a lot better, but just to balance things out, Veronica Taylor plays Shinobu’s precocious little sister, and Taylor just improves everything she’s cast in, no cap.
At this point, I’ve reviewed quite a few random nonsense gag comedy anime, and I’ve made my thoughts on them clear. This particular style of comedy has a very short shelf life, and while it’s not impossible to keep them fresh for the length of a full series, it’s really easy to lose steam and become dull. The longer a gag anime goes on, the more familiar the audience becomes with its schtick, and the more obvious the method behind the madness becomes, making the series predictable. There are some shows that can pull this off, knowing exactly how long to exploit a joke before killing it, and knowing exactly when it’s the right time to shake things up and/or break reality, but we can’t all be Nichijou. When you’re expected to throw out jokes at a breakneck pace, it’s hard to balance the humor of the material, and while there’s always going to be an audience for shows like these, only a niche fanbase is going to have the right set of standards and tastes to stick around for the long haul. There’s also a slim possibility of long term financial success and longevity, which once again brings us back to Excel Saga.
If you’re not familiar with Shinichi Watanabe, not to be confused with Shinichiro Watanabe, he’s an anime director whose MO is to take a manga that features a bizarre premise, start out loyal to it, and then veer off into various forms of non-fuckery with a set of pre-established characters who can be flanderized for maximum comedic effect. This is kind of genius, as it takes well-written characters who still have leagues of development to go, and exploits them to sell a far more casual and brainless product to the consumer, as long as the manga itself isn’t popular enough to spawn a massive backlash (cough*Hayate*cough). I don’t really like Excel Saga, but even I get the appeal of taking established and distinctive characters out of one creator’s work and forcing them to deal with the absurdities of another creator, the possibilities are absolutely salivating. Nabeshin wasn’t involved with Ninja Nonsense, but it does feel like he inspired its production on some level, as Ninja Nonsense does seemingly try to do the same thing.
Right from episode one, we have a normal girl being dragged out of her normal life by a chance encounter with a ninja, and that ninja also comes from a sympathetic background, as it’s made pretty clear she’s being scammed and manipulated by a bogus martial arts dojo. I’ll be honest, it’s a damn good first episode. It sets up a lot of interesting conflicts and asks several intriguing questions. Will Kaede save Shinobu from her manipulators? Are Shinobu’s feelings for her genuine, or a product of her sexualization? Are there secrets behind the dojo that are waiting to be uncovered? The answer is who cares, because none of this is ever going to be brought up again. And sure, Nabeshin’s work is similar in that regard, but at least he occasionally sprinkles in material from the manga here and there to keep the plot relevant. Ninja Nonsense can’t do that because, and I can’t believe I’m actually listing this as a negative, it’s way too faithful to the manga. Unlike all of Nabeshin’s financially successful but critically questionable output, there’s no unused or forsaken potential in Ninja Nonsense. These aren’t fleshed out characters being placed in a nonsensical gag comedy, they’re nonsensical gag characters with nothing special to add to the comedy they were primarily written for.
The comedy in Ninja Nonsense rarely ever feels like it had any thought put into it, and instead of being detached enough from the bullshit to react to it in unique ways, Shinobu and Kaede are pulled helplessly this way and that by the random whims of the writer. They add so little to the material that their actions often make no sense. Like, twelve episodes in, I still can’t wrap my mind around the reason Shinobu and Kaede are friends. Don’t get me wrong, I know why Shinobu hangs out with Kaede... She’s clearly gay and has a crush on her... But why is Kaede so close to Shinobu? She has other friends at school, we know that. Why does she start spending all of her time over at the dojo, when there’s nothing there she likes? When it’s hot out, wouldn’t she stay home in the air conditioning, or invite Shinobu to an actual pool, instead of accepting an invite to swim in a fucking kiddie pool outside the dojo? Do they have anywhere else to play badminton than on the dojo’s baseball field? What is she missing that draws her to a world she doesn’t belong in where she’s just going to be the resident tsundere? You could argue that she’s tying to protect Shinobu from her pervy fellow ninjas, but she’d be a lot more active if that were the case.
There is no characterization behind the comedy. The gags are largely random non-sequiturs, which is an approach that really only works in small doses at the best of times, and outside of over-acting and random acts of violence, character interactions have almost no diversity behind them at all. Remember in Strike Witches, how the characters were so distinct that you could put any two of them together and they’d have an interaction that made perfect sense but only specifically between the two of them? There’s nothing like that here. You’ll occasionally get a well timed joke, but for the most part, the jokes in this show are either too brief to register a response, or they drag on for so long that they go from beating a dead horse to opening a glue factory. If you’ve ever had a pun war with your friends where something just happened involving an egg, and you each take turns making some kind of egg related statement? “Let’s get cracking!” “Thanks for helping me come out of my shell!” “That was egg-zillerating!” “Why are you so egg-stra?” And the bit goes on so long that it just becomes egg-zausting? There are so many extended bits in Ninja Nonsense that are like that, and they do not fit the pace of the animation one bit.
The comedy can be more overwhelming than funny whenever Onsakumaru and the Sasuke ninjas are involved, with pervy jokes and random references flying past you too fast to register them, but it does get slightly better when it’s just Kaede and Shinobu, and maybe with Onsakumaru with them. They have a pretty familiar dynamic... An earnest and sincere teenage girl and her spunky, protective best friend, and a hormonal male sidekick. If iCarly were about becoming ninjas instead of internet stars, and it didn’t have so much gross foot fetish crap, it would be pretty similar to Ninja Nonsense. The only real difference is that despite their differences, it’s easy to tell why Carly and Sam are friends. They are dynamic, defined characters who learn and grow together, and yes, I realized that I just praised fucking iCarly in an anime review. If that doesn’t tell you just how little this classic anime comedy has to offer, I don’t know what will, so let me jut leave you with the only good thing that came out of this show... A thirty second clip from AMV Hell 0.
Ninja Nonsense was originally available from Nozomi entertainment, and after it spent a few years out of print, it would eventually be rescued by Rightstuf, who still have a blu-ray edition available for a pretty decent price. The original manga is available stateside from Mediaworks, and a sequel manga is available from Kadokawa.
Before I drop my final score to this series, I’d like to very explicitly point out that this is all just my opinion. Humor is extremely subjective. I found this show pretty funny when it first came out in the mid 2000’s, and while I find it mostly unfunny now, I still laughed a few times, which is more than I can say for Shimoneta. Hell, if I watched it again in a year I might find it hilarious, I mean that’s what happened with Ebiten. I have no trouble imagining someone binging Ninja Nonsense in a single setting and finding the whole series hilarious, but that person isn’t me, and I’m pretty sure I get the humor. I guess it’s possible that the comedy makes a lot more sense in Japanese... They have a lot of jokes in that language that don’t translate very well to English, hell, the original title of the series is all the proof you need of that, but my instincts are telling me this show is full of randomness and non-sequiturs down to its core, with characters that just aren’t strongly written enough to stand out against an aimless story.
I give Ninja Nonsense a 3/10.