Spoiling without warning.

When we look at 『Bocchi the Rock!』 quickly, it looks like any kind of slice-of-life anime: we follow a teenager girl and her friends through their highschool life and their happy and not-so-happy moments… Yet, 『Bocchi』 is way beyond this premise, and has in that regard encountered a popularity greater than its peers; this due to a few points that make the anime stand out.

As a YouTube video pointed it out, a neat accomplishment of 『Bocchi』 is the adaptation — that is, the translation from its original material to anime. 『Bocchi』 comes indeed from a 4-koma (yon-koma) manga, a Japanese comics genre where a short story is narrated through 4 panels. Thus at the basis, 『Bocchi』 consists merely of a succession of 4-panels stories. The great accomplishment of 『Bocchi』 was to succeed in filling the blanks between those 4-panel stories to create a story that was linear and flowing, making the effort go farther than what was done for 『Lucky Star』. This makes 『Bocchi』 enter the small pantheon of well- and artistically-adapted anime, next to pieces like 『Houseki no Kuni』.

Moreover, 『Bocchi』 is an anime that speaks to its audience, thanks to its main character Hitori Gotou aka Bocchi. Bocchi is an asocial highschool girl that has a lot of trouble with any social interaction, spending "preferrably" her time in her room and online — which is a phenomenon that has seemed to increase among youth, and thus among 『Bocchi』's viewers who may recognize themselves in Gotou-san. The girl also sets a nice example, as she tries a lot to overcome her social anxiety through diverse means throughout the anime: which is where 『Bocchi』 also stands out: that problem is not quickly resolved at the beginning of the anime like in too many other pieces: it sticks to Hitori throughout the whole piece, while it also caricatures the seishun dream of a sparkling youth that too many other pieces tell without it being believable — a point where 『Bocchi』 wins, except maybe for the beginning where Hitori meets by sheer luck Nijika 🥸

All in all, the main aspect where 『Bocchi』 stands out is its animation, which is great in a dual sense. It is not only literally great, like fluid and not jerky; it is also incredibly surprising, as it experiments a lot with its medium, trying out MANY new different ways of animating. Some scenes of the anime even display techniques of 3D-animation! Not only is this pretty exciting from a purely aesthetical point of view, it is also from a broader artistic one, as it conveys better the emotions felt by the characters and sets them metaphorically in another world, like when Bocchi is picturing some kind of "school judgement". By playing thus with its animation, 『Bocchi』 acquires the "experimental" label, just like 『Mob-Psycho 100』 did back then.

▶ Bocchi's "school judgement" (and other bits of crazy animations)

On a side but notable note, 『Bocchi』 has been compared a lot to 『K-On!』. It is true, both anime are very similar: we follow highschool girls playing music with the cute girls doing cute things trope. But 『Bocchi』's girls are very different from 『K-On!』's ones. While the latter would just enjoy their highschool life casually and play music along, the former would have meaningful goals and objectives for their music. Along with its characters, 『Bocchi the Rock!』 goes further than 『K-On!』, giving it more profound layers than just sheer moe.

I believe that 『Bocchi the Rock!』 is a very important anime. While it might not be a turning point in the genre, as what it shows had already been showed elsewhere, it compiles it in a new way, surpassing in a Hegelian way its predecessors. 『Bocchi』 is not only a cornerstone, it is a cornergem, whose radiance shall hopefully inspire future creators.