Do It Yourself!!

Do it Yourself!! is so unassuming that one would be inclined to come away with the initial impression that it’s not anything more than just cute girls doing cute things: the woodshop edition. And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong; on the surface, it plays the formula in much the same way as it has been employed in countless other anime before it. Niche hobby, relaxed atmosphere, low stakes, the whole nine yards(tick). Why should anyone walk into a show like this and expect something different, or different enough that it would become one of the more-pleasing anime of the season?

Even if someone was willing to take a chance on it, goodness knows that the show also had its own uphill battle to climb. Fall 2022 was, to put it in one term, top-heavy. Between the highly-anticipated juggernaut Chainsaw Man and desired sequels Bleach: The Thousand-Year War, Mob Psycho 100 III, and Spy x Family Part 2, a show like Do It Yourself!! stood no chance of etching itself onto the landscape at-large. Even when Bocchi the Rock! managed to do it, that was an unexpected dark horse. A happy one to be sure, but an exception nevertheless. Do it Yourself!! thus seemed condemned to be lost in their wake, suppressed by the sheer extent of their mark.

But that reality, in truth, is why the show managed to succeed so well. Whereas other shows announced their presence with boisterous explosiveness or an unexpected comedic jolt to the senses, Do it Yourself!! started more gradually. When we’re introduced to the anime’s world, its aesthetic is markedly cutesier and more juvenile. That is not an insult in this case; rather, it’s a perfect visual sign that the show will kick back its feet and let simplicity take the reins. The aesthetic of the show, when it’s not adopting its musically jazzy time in montage or its delightfully-catchy OP, feels fresh out of a children’s coloring book – the color palette employed is simple, but it propelled by its splashes of beautiful lighting and animations. It is not the type of animation that will be immortalized forever, but the level of care gives its simplicity more verve and spunk.

Serufu is likewise a charmingly-simple protagonist, klutzy and always seemingly with her head in the clouds rather than her feet on the ground. There’s a disarming appeal in how she always takes misfortune on the chin (sometimes literally given how often she’s covered in Band-Aids), allowing herself to be impressed by others around her or have her friend Purin’s insults bounce off her like rubber, much to Purin’s consternation. She coasts on by, often right into a telephone poll. She meets Rei, the senpai of the show, who introduces her to the world of DIY crafts after helping fix Serufu’s bike, and one clever little pokingly-fun pun later, the show sets itself into proper motion. Coming to stop by the club include the shy-but-capable Takumi, the self-confident and obscenely-rich Juliet Queen Elizabeth VIII (which, yes, that is her name, and it is glorious), and the energetic and ninja-like Shii, all while Serufu’s old friend Purin watches the oddball group from afar.

“Oddball” not only defines the group as a whole, but it similarly characterizes the humor. Do it Yourself!! does not rely nearly so heavily on setups and punchlines; if anything, the way I described the pun earlier as “pokingly-fun” is the most-appropriate descriptor. Given the sometimes-weird nature of the characters, both individually and as a group, any time is prime time for a little barb, a little cutoff, or a little moment for someone to be temporarily fascinated with someone else. Scenes therefore have a little spark that allows comedy to come from any direction and from essentially anyone. They have their moment arise naturally out of the dialogue and dynamic, then gradually fade away into the background. So when Shii scampers up a tree like Spider-Man or Rei and Takumi obsess over a mutual love of manga, the scene carries on seamlessly when the moment is done like no pause had occurred.

But when it decides to pause, it works well! DIY is not just a little framework to make the show fit into some kind of mold. Do it Yourself!! wisely takes the time to let us know how exactly the various goods and crafts are made, which is more than can be said for other shows around niche hobbies in its genre. I’ll confess upfront that I have never been blessed with good hands for DIY. I am not a woodworker, handyman, or anything closely resembling that nature; putting together a chair this past summer was more hassle than I’d like to admit. Not all of the crafts are immediately feasible—I wouldn’t know where to get my hands on a decent UV light for hardening gels—yet I didn’t care. The show treats its audience like it treats Serufu, a newcomer to this type of craft that might need help knowing what to do and when to do it. The show, in essence, takes it upon itself to be the teacher. I cannot say that I remember how to make everything the show demonstrated, but I enjoyed seeing the process at work and play out into finished objects.

The care in showing the crafts be made step by step is not the only way the show shows its cohesiveness. It’s made clear throughout the narrative that the club members are not just a hodgepodge of girls hanging out together and doing whatever is in the anime’s name. Rather, they are and actually function like a team, actively seeking to help one another when something either goes wrong or needs to be worked on. Especially as the increasingly-apparent competence of the other DIY Club members makes its presence known, Serufu is notably left behind. Jobko, Rei, and Shii are all good with their hands, but even early on, newcomer Takumi works to create the colorful mosaic to hang outside the school’s clubhouse. Serufu bumbles about trying to do something as plain as work an electronic screwdriver correctly. This does beg the question of why let the narrative focus so much on Serufu.

The show, fantastically, has an answer. Serufu is a walking accident waiting to happen—put the hammer down, Serufu!—but her contributions to the club are not limited to simply making things. I remarked before that one trait to describe her was “disarming,” which each character at various points in the story comes to experience for themselves in her wake. Even when the show operates under the veneer of giving the other characters their time in the sun, Serufu is always right beside them, encouraging them with unapologetic, sincere positivity and getting them to admit or realize something about being in the club that they might not have either understood or wanted to admit, or perhaps even wanted to try.

To put it in terms the show would use, if the other club members are the tools in the shop (the saw, the screw, the hammer, and the straight-edge), Serufu is the superglue that keeps it all together. Serufu’s usefulness to the story is only insubstantial if one limits their understanding of the DIY Club and DIY as a whole to the things that are made and how finely-polished they are. If Serufu were out of the picture, it’s fair to say that everyone’s lives would have been a lot lonelier. Because she’s so enthused, there’s a mutual admiration that is collectively shared among everyone in a way that comes across as so earnest and sweet that it makes the mundanity meaningful. Serufu’s handiness comes not in the house for Meat—it makes sense in context, I promise—nor the charms they make. Her handiness is in talking with Purin on the boat, cute nicknames, always trying to make new friends, and letting the good times roll. The DIY Club, with all its members smiling and enjoying themselves, is her masterpiece. It may have been forged from incongruous parts with the instruction manual thrown into a paper shredder (after getting jammed first because, let’s be real for a minute, it would happen if Serufu did it), but hold their form they do.

Do it Yourself!! never could have wrestled with the larger monoliths that the season had, but it didn’t need to. What the show did was adopt something plain with just enough of the right blend of sugar, spice, and everything nice. It needed no high-fantasy; it just needed a saw. It needed no bloody splashes; it just needed a lot of Band-Aids. In setting itself apart from everything surrounding it, it carved its own cozy little corner handicraft in my anime season, and whether one wants to observe from a distance to see the overall shape or get in close to see the times Serufu accidentally screwed in something incorrectly, it was wholly its own.

In that sense, the show “did it itself,” which is so beautifully poetic in its own way.