Himouto! Umaru-chan

Umaru Doma has it all. At only sixteen, she’s one of the most beautiful and popular girls in school. She’s super smart, super athletic, and perfectly well-mannered and kind. She’s idolized wherever she goes, except for one place... Her brother’s apartment, where she is living in order to attend school. You see, Umaru has a secret... A dark, terrible secret that would tear her life asunder should anyone discover it. For you see, Umaru Doma... Is a gremlin. She maintains her facade in public, but behind closed doors, she drops the mask, pulls out the snacks, and lies around all day playing video games and taking liberal advantage of her brother’s saintly kindness. This hedonistic paradise might not last long, forever, as her developing social circle brings her two lives closer and closer together, and it would be all too easy for the complex web of lies she’s built her life on to give way and collapse. Will Umaru be able to maintain the status quo, or will she find out that her daily routine as a gremlin was just too good to last?

It always surprises me when I write a review that introduces me to a new anime studio... Most of the time, I don’t know who animated a series until I’m just sitting down to start writing, and Himouto Umaru-chan is only the latest in the trend. I’ve never heard of Studio Doga Kobo before, but they have done a few anime that I’ve seen... Even if most of them were shows that I liked just fine, but ultimately found kind of forgettable, like Love Lab, Luck and Logic, Majestic Prince Yuru Yuri. There are two titles in their resume that managed to leave a long term impression on me, and one of them was my subject today. With the exception of Majestic Prince, which looked like it was animated on a budget of hopes, dreams and spare change fished out of the machines at the laundromat, their output tends to look pretty damn good, with smooth animation, key frames used only where they won’t be noticed and framed as inconspicuous as possible.

Their work never looks particularly expensive, but they clearly did have a comfortable budget to work with, at least in almost every one of their projects that I’ve seen. They’ve rarely never let me down with anything, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that Himouto Umaru-chan is probably one of the best looking shows I’ve seen from them. Crisp visuals, a bright and vibrant color palette, and a spectacularly managed budget that employs just as much movement as is needed at any given time, saving money on key frames whenever possible without ever going too far with it. Much like most of Doga Kobo’s work, the character designs tend towards anatomical integrity, with only slightly cartoony faces that are normal enough to feel human yet exaggerated enough to be thoroughly expressive. There’s also a level of inspiration in the characters’ hairstyles, almost none of which feel cliched or tropey, and every character’s individual design informs a great deal about who they are.

Also in line with the best of Doga Kobo’s work, the backgrounds are downright gorgeous. They’re full of intricate details, and since this is kind of a show about otakus, that’s kind of an important note to strike. Most anime dealing with this kind of subject will either fill out the background with obvious media parodies, or the most generic garbage they can think of, but Himouto goes for something in the middle, and it makes the world of the story feel that much more immersive. I only really have one complaint with the visuals, but I’ll get into that later. I wasn’t a huge fan of the opening, but that’s really a matter of personal taste... I like how it alternates between two drastically different tones, going hyper and fast to represent Umaru’s Dork Side, and going slower and more fancy to represent her public persona. It’s a pretty smart approach, but for me personally, I found the hyper parts to be kind of annoying. I liked the closing theme a lot more, as it’s a really fun tune that involved the four main female voice actors of the series, and while I’m betting they all probably recorded their parts separately, it still sounds like they’re all having fun singing together.

The best thing about this anime, however, by far and away by country mile, is the English dub. Every single actor smashed it out of the park, from Adam Nobles’ supportive yet strict, long suffering Taihei, to Jason Douglas’s disturbingly good impression of Andrew Love, from Christina Kelly’s melodramatic overtures to Sara Ornelas’ goofy take on an awkward country bumpkin trying to hide an accent, everyone brings their A game... But there is one particular performance in this dub that I personally count among the legends. Emily Neves didn’t have the greatest start to her anime career... She started off as some failed American Idol contestant who sounded a bit awkward in Angel Beats... But she improved frighteningly fast, becoming one of the most in-demand names in the industry before she’d even been active for a decade. She has range, she has voice control that’s second only to Brittney Karbowski, and unlike a lot of the most prolific voice actresses in anime, her voice actually has a chameleonic quality to it, where you can’t immediately tell it’s her every time you hear her.

Umaru presented Emily Neves with the same opportunity that Akira from Lucky Star once gave to Stephanie Sheh... The opportunity to flex her skills by playing a duplicitous character who had two distinctly unique sides to their personality, and yet both sides still had to sound like the same person... Two sides of the same coin, if you will. Her public voice is soft, inviting and dignified, but without any sort of pretentious edge to it. Her gremlin voice is high pitched, childlike and extremely charming in the ways she mispronounces certain words. I’m not kidding, the first time I heard this show in English, I almost fell in love with the character just based on the way she said the phrase “Po-TAY-to chips and CO-LAAAA!!” Again, I don’t want to take anything away from the rest of the cast, I don’t think there was a single sour note to be found, but this is nothing short of a star-making performance for Neves. What makes it even more impressive is that she was pulling off a top tier performance, definitely one of my favorite individual performances of all time, while playing a character I absolutely despise.

I realize how ironic this is going to sound, but just like my favorite thing about the show, pretty much everything I hate about it draws back somehow to Umaru herself. As the title character, she does not make a good first impression, and that’s for two reasons. First off, she’s a parasite. For the first few episodes, she’s presented to us as this selfish, entitled, manipulative little troll who is just gleefully and shamelessly taking advantage of her brother, eating up his time and money with only the barest minimum of lip-service gratitude and no self awareness whatsoever. There were interactions between them that made me physically cringe, and while I don’t think it was ever clarified what happened to their parents(Are they dead, or did they just send her off to live with him for school?) I can’t imagine any decent parents would tolerate her acting like such a spoiled brat. I realize she’s technically a child and her brother is a legal adult, but just because you’re in a position where you wouldn’t reasonably be expected to take care of yourself or pay rent, that doesn’t mean you HAVE to be a freeloader.

The weird thing is, characters like her CAN work, it has been done. Haruhi Suzumiya is arguably just as difficult of a person, but there are a few key differences. Rather than hiding her true nature, thus acknowledging that she knows damn well how to behave, Haruhi is just herself, 24/7. Rather than being effortlessly popular, she is so outcast that it takes her mood swings threatening life on Earth as we know it for half a dozen people to hang out with her. She also has much more intriguing interests, as well as a backstory that explains them perfectly while giving her some much needed depth, while Umaru is just a gremlin who’s obsessed with consuming entertainment and junk food. Unlike Umaru’s weak-willed enabler of a brother, Haruhi has a foil with some degree of sarcastic wit who isn’t afraid to put his foot down. While I genuinely do like her as a character, even I felt immensely satisfied when she took a step too far in the second season, and Kyon snapped and tried to brain her over it. I would love to see Taihei try and do the same at least once. I’m not a fan of real life domestic violence, but a character like Umaru CAN be balanced out by some good slapstick.

On top of that, lazy characters only work if they struggle in some way as a result... In Naruto, Shikamaru has to stay vigilant to avoid being hassled. In My Heavenly Hockey Club, Hana worked her ass off to get into a school that was slightly closer to her house so she could get sixty extra seconds of sleep in the morning. In Lucky Star, Konata only applies herself when she’s bribed. In Saga of Tanya the Evil, Tanya’s efforts to live a peaceful life away from the front lines always backfire and drag her deeper and deeper into the war. Umaru doesn’t struggle at all. She’s naturally smart so she doesn’t have to study, she’s able to gorge on junk food without working out and she’s magically able to not only stay thin which a high metabolism COULD explain, but she's also athletic somehow. She doesn’t have to worry about being exposed, because her friends are all jaw-droppingly stupid. Following this character’s journey is like listening to The Lazy Song... Yeah, you might enjoy it at first, but halfway through you really just want to punch the subject in the face.

Hell, it's never even proven in the show that anybody at her school would give a shit about her Dork Side! Yeah, I know Japanese schools have a reputation for being conformist, but the actual potential consequences of this are never communicated to the audience! Who would fucking care if they found out she had gasp hobbies and interests? That might make her slightly interesting? I'm sorry, but how does she never get lonely over the fact that she has nobody to share her interests with who doesn't think she's a toddler?

My other problem is the sheer amount of cliches that were used to construct Umaru as a character. I’ve seen quite a few anime where there was a female character who was idolized by the entire school, and it never felt right to me... I may be asexual, but I understand aesthetic attraction enough to know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and no matter how attractive you look to one person, there’s someone out there who find you average looking at best, or even downright ugly. To me personally, Umaru looks relatively pretty(at least by high school standards) but just like the twins from Kiss X Sis and the protagonist from Good Luck Girl, I do not understand why the entire student body is obsessed with her. The character design issue I mentioned earlier is that while she’s worshipped in the show, she doesn’t really look like a main character... Or even the main character’s best friend, who you’d expect to be more tomboyish. No, in the average female-lead anime, I would picture a character like her as that third friend who tags along, is probably rich, and owns a summer house for the beach episode.

Another cliche she embodies is that whole “secret life” trope, which has been around at least as far back as His and Her Circumstances. You know the drill, there’s a pretty and popular girl at school who’s good at everything and loved by everyone, but is secretly either an otaku, or a former chuuni, or just a middle class girl who works her ass off to appear naturally perfect. What makes it especially weird is that this cliche is usually used as a shortcut to forming a bond between the girl and her love interest, who finds out about her secret and is thus drawn directly into her life. I’m not saying this CAN’T work between two sibling characters, but the only other example I can think of is Oreimo, and that's not a good sign. No, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing incestuous about this anime, don’t go putting THOSE words in my mouth, but it was still a questionable choice to use that cliche in a story about two siblings. Other cliches include Umaru having a pathetic self-proclaimed rival, as well as her brother having the same two friends every fucking male character has... An outgoing male friend who’s more overtly horny than he is, and a female childhood friend who’s hopelessly in love with him. Because effort is overrated, I guess.

I don’t usually outright hate these cliches, but the problem is that Umaru-chan does absolutely nothing new with any of them. The only cliche the series really uses in an unexpected way is one of the oldest cliches in anime history, chibi humor. Now, normally, chibi humor is used for the sake of artistic expression... Your characters go super-deformed to sell a joke a little better, and it’s pretty much a staple of the medium, but there’s a catch; Chibi humor can not cross into the text of the story. Yes, a character can shrink for a shot or two, but when he uses his small size to fit into a spot he couldn’t have fit into before, it stops being a sight gag and becomes a canonical super power. I’m sorry, this probably sounds like extreme nitpicking from me, but if I wasn’t willing to let Yuri on Ice get away with having Yuri’s fat gut magically disappear when he needed to dance, then I’m going fucking to say something when Umaru shrinks and pretends to be her own made up little sister. Again, you could just chalk this up to her friends being jaw-droppingly stupid... Bomber doesn’t recognize the face or voice of his own little sister when she’s right fucking in front of him... But I digress.

This all wouldn’t be such a big deal to me if the show was funny, but at least for me, it really isn’t. I mean I laughed a couple times at the rival character, who had a well placed joke here or there, but other than that, I don’t think the people who wrote this show really knew how to tell a joke in a story. Most of the humor is either too predictable, too stupid, or just missing a punch line entirely. Right in the first episode, the rival starts bragging to Umaru about getting a 99 on her test, and I’m not going to tell you what the punchline is, because you already know what it is, it’s literally the most obvious punchline you could possibly write for that joke. When Umaru is pestering Taihei to buy her a new game, he invites her friend along on their shopping trip to keep her in line, and when she snaps and goes chibi anyway, the friend misses this because for several seconds she was trying to hold back her natural accent from bursting out, and that apparently rendered her blind and deaf. Then we learn Taihei caved and bought her the game, but we never learn how she overcame his advantage over her, which could have been a funny punchline, but no, the whole joke was just “She won somehow, dur hur.” That’s almost as funny as the time her friend gave Taihei burnt cookies by accident, which I refuse to laugh at until someone explains why the fuck she bagged the burnt cookies in the first place!

You could make the argument that things get better as the show goes on, at least in terms of the relationship between Umaru and Taihei, and that is technically true, but it doesn’t feel earned. Umaru never learns anything, she never receives any comeuppance or suffers any consequences, and she’s never forced to confront the consequences of her behavior. Some characters become better friends, but nobody ever changes or grows by the end of the season. The writers just work around all that by giving you less frustrating material, but just dialing back their focus on Umaru’s entitled bullshit and showing us that she can actually get along with her brother once in a while doesn’t actually redeem her. We get more calm, pleasant moments that almost seem like they’re going for some kind of poignancy, but they all wind up feeling kind of meaningless. My favorite segment in the entire series is when Umaru makes a trip to the convenience store in the middle of the night for the first time, not because anything funny or deep happens, but because all the little emotions she goes through on that trip felt honest and relatable... It’s the peak of the fucking show, and it still pales in comparison to similar scenes in Toradora and Azumanga Daioh. That about sums it up right there.

Himouto Umaru-chan is available from Sentai Filmworks. I haven’t seen the sequel yet, but it’s available from the same company. Several manga series have been produced, and while two of them are available from Seven Seas Entertainment, it looks like the other ones... Alongside a Playstation Vita game... Were never picked up.

There is a lot to love about Himouto Umaru-chan... By which I mean the animation and the dub. Emily Neves does a LOT of heavy lifting to carry this show, which was otherwise kind of a chore to get through. It was really frustrating at the start, watching an insanely unlikeable main character constantly get her way with no consequences, and while it may have stopped being infuriating at a certain point, it mostly just wound up becoming boring afterwards, with it’s peak coming in moments that weren’t exactly entertaining, but were at least kind of vaguely pleasant. It used a ton of tired, derivative cliches that it didn’t even bother presenting in any sort of unique or creative way, with the only exception being Umaru’s chibi form, which is used in the dumbest way possible. I don’t know why this show is as popular as it is... I’m assuming people just find Umaru cute and enjoy her selfish antics on that basis alone... But I can’t see her as anything other than a terribly written character, and considering the fact that the show is based around her, that’s saying something.

I give Himouto Umaru-chan a 4/10.