I’ve long abandoned the idea that every anime needs to aspire to artistic greatness. To think that they should is to be so consistently setting an impossible bar and inevitably getting disenfranchised, as well as to ignore that sometimes media can, in fact, purely exist for the sake of entertaining or distracting its audience for a brief time. There’s nothing wrong with that – media carries innumerable uses. Although, it does unfortunately mean that the phrase “turn your brain off” has become accepted as a default soundbite to undermine critique of a show that’s simply trying to entertain and, to the person in question, failing to even succeed at that level. Media does not need to “make a point” or “be about something” in order to function or even be considered good, but media also does not get a magical get-out-of-jail-free card simply because its aspirations are “lower.” Aiming low is, after all, still aiming and carries the risk of missing.
I bring this up because Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included is a show that dispels any notion of deep storytelling within its first minutes to let its audience know what they’re in for, and still manages to wilt like flowers in a basement with its bar being set so low. With its emphasis on the cute titular angel, the sugar-coated sweetie named Towa comes to Earth in order gain more firsthand knowledge about humanity. But thank goodness that she just so happens to land on the apartment veranda of Tokumitsu Shintarou, who is such a gosh-darned nice guy that he lets her live with him. And while she’s at it, why doesn’t she spruce up his place and cook him his meals? And why stop at just one supernatural creature coming into Tokumitsu’s midst when the show can throw at least another three on top of that as well?
The show’s presumption is that the inclusion of fantastical characters from varying myth or folklore is enough to carry interest. Let’s put aside any of the details concerning the differences between angels, yuki-onna, or any of the other myth creatures that find their way into the series since those are such a given. Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included has its distinctions between characters feel less like distinctions and more akin to reaching into the metaphorical hat and pulling out a character trait to assign them. It’s most evident in the material’s treatment of Towa; her inherent nature as an angel is less of a presence than one would expect, as it only ever manifests in rare moments of attempted comedy or for what is supposed to be tantamount to a big reveal. Instead, Towa’s nauseating adorableness is often trumped by her naivety of the eye-rollingly absurd variety (how else would you explain nearly getting lured by a suspicious man in her first day on Earth to a love hotel despite having studied some Earth behaviors). The other characters do not fair much better in this respect. Any references to their mythological origins are treated as window dressing rather than something that could provide more off-the-beaten-path variety to the show’s cheap vanilla taste. A blizzard being conjured or other such things make for trifles.
Tokumitsu isn’t treated much better either because he is not a person. Not really, anyway. There is virtually nothing about Tokumitsu that would instill any sense of confidence in his ability to provide anything of note within the material. He exists almost exclusively as a blank slate, lacking any singular “thing” aside from his niceness that makes the group of oddball women flock to him like flies to honey. That niceness he has might be a relief in the sense that he’s not acting like a prick and still manages to get a bunch of women to hang around him (as is sometimes the case in other properties), but it does not go a long way in making him appear like anything other than an author insert, even though the mangaka Matoba is actually female. The overarching sense that colors Tokumitsu, the other characters, and the scenario as a whole is just that of no effort, pallid personalities that do little more than take up space on the screen.
And that’s the show’s tragedy – there is no effort anywhere to be gleaned here. Whether within the writing itself, the character designs, or the overall aesthetic of the show, Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included does not succeed because it does not try. When it’s not using a phenomenally bland color palette or bare-bones storyboarding, it is constantly recycling or reusing settings and backdrops that have been seen countless times with no attempt to appear different, at least to any degree that anything matters. It does not cultivate its own mythological riches beyond the shallowest ways because it clings to its own moe so tightly. It thus comes to the detriment of essentially everything because everything else HAS to adhere to that cuteness overload. The unintended consequence is, ironically, the absence of anything warm. It all instead has the illusion of warmth, feeling so cold in its seemingly unapologetic and zombie-esque clichés.
I do not blame director Oonishi Kenta or main series writer Yasukawa Shougo for what transpired here – with how equally-unimpressive the original manga is, I doubt that anyone could have taken Matoba’s concept and done anything meaningfully with it. Between this material and Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu mama, it seems that Matoba has a fascination with tinkering with notions of mythological characters or creatures to reimagine them as cuteness incarnate. That’s not a concept without merit – in an entertainment age so suffused or overstuffed with irony and attempts at being meta or “meta,” something good is perhaps buried here.
But here’s the thing – good media, regardless of whether it’s trying to entertain or say something profound, does not make itself. Putting a bunch of characters in a room and having them occasionally do a thing or realize something is not, in and of itself, the same as creating fun. Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included seems to operate under the assumption that its characters simply existing and moving through pre-programmed motions of iyashikei / romantic comedy slice-of-life and the occasional moment of “development” is somehow enough effort to justify its creation and existence. Any such motions are too hollow to matter here. This show is an automaton – soulless and godless no matter how many angels you throw in.
To put it another way, it's not very good.
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