Akebi’s Sailor Uniform

 This is just some general impressions on this  show. I have watched a fair amount of slice-of-life anime over the years, but I have not watched much of the sub genre pertaining to "cute girls doing cute things" in the most inconsequential-sense in recent years (really the last 10 years). I watched Azumanga Daioh and Aria: The Animation back in the day. Watched a few episodes of Lucky Star, but found the Seinfeldian comedy too boring for my taste. As a result, I have mostly missed the newest generation of these specific type of low-stakes sol shows (for example the DIY-themed shows like Laid-Back Camp or Sound Euphonium and it's music variety). Akebi's Sailor Uniform is part of this contemporary CGDCT slice-of-life anime. When I first heard of it, I dismissed it because the premise seemed to not have enough of a hook to keep me watching, but I watched it now and will give my thoughts on it.

So let's get the more salacious-stuff out the way. It is an extremely well-animated foot fetish show. I know the fans  of the series might get mad at me saying this, but it is true. This show likes "gazing" at feet more than anything else when it comes to these girls, but it does tone-down in the second-half of the season. Water is also very highly animated in as well, like all the time. These are really the most "out-there" uses of fanservice in the show. Compared to 90% of all other anime out there, this one is on the more tame side―even when it has perfect opportunities to sexualize these girls, it avoids doing that (it has all the ecchi-ness of My Neighbor Totoro). So if you can deal with the feet focus for the first 6 episodes, then you will not have anything to really offend your sensibilities here. The character-designs very intentionally harken back to the 2000s moe aesthetic so that might be another point of contention to some. Also, as this has not turned up in most conversations about this show, but what noticeable to me is the yuri-baiting. The show takes place at a rural all-girls school and the girls "innocently" flirt with each other in nearly every episode, But if there are any lesbians in this show they are under tight-wraps as no hint of real romance is to be found on this show (few shows in this day and age keep the yuri-subtext as subtext as this series). This show is also really well-animated for a 12-episode tv anime, will come back to my theory on that later.

So the whole gist of the show is Akebi is a middle school girl who lives in rural Japan (in an oddly -out-of-place Bavarian-style house) and decides to go to the same middle school as her mom in order to wear the sailor uniform her mom use to wear. Over the course of the show she makes friends with other girls. This all-girl school is in the country-side, but just close-enough to Tokyo to have a lot of Tokyo girls living on-campus. Though the demographic-category is seinien, it is such a low-stakes type of show that you can expect virtually no drama to speak of as it abides strictly by the Mary J. Blige anti-drama protocol . This show is a solid continuation of the Iyashikei tradition of anime like Aria. 

Ok, I do have a hypothesis for why this show is as well-animated as it is...and it may not be for a good reason. The studio behind this show is CloverWorks and the show premiered during the Winter 2022 season. Many may have forgotten, but this was around the same time the animation studio had just been in the news for less than stellar reasons after the chief animation director of another CloverWorks show, Tokyo 24th Ward, went to Twitter about the working conditions/practices at the studio. Of course, I am not saying that this definitively had anything to do with the animation quality of this show being so high, but it could have contributed. We can hope that the animators were not being severely pressured to make the show look this good on their limited-pay.

All in all, this is a pretty in-offensive show about a girl making friends in middle school. The most plot you will find is in the second-half of the show when they are getting ready for the sports festival, and even that is low-stakes. The most angst-driven drama you're getting here is a girl learning to play the guitar and another girl almost losing her favorite bookmark. So if you have an overly-stressed life and want an anime with almost zero percent stress, have I got a feet-loving show about middle school girls for you.