(Video includes audio. Be sure to unmute)
I had a long conversation with a friend over Discord voicechat two days ago, and I said something during the course of it that seemed to catch him off-guard. When we were talking about our favorite anime of the year up to this point, I made the point of mentioning CITY THE ANIMATION and, more specifically, that while it didn’t always make me laugh, I’d readily call it one of the best things that had been released in 2025 thus far. My friend took issue with this stance, saying that it was ridiculous to say that since, for all its aesthetic prowess—and even he admitted that there was plenty to be had—a comedy’s first and foremost job is to make us laugh. If it doesn’t do that, a comedy isn’t doing its job properly. He didn’t find its humor funny, such to the point that whatever other potential gifts that lay within just weren’t worth calling it a show worth watching. I understand why this mode of thinking exists. The word “comedy” is supposed to carry with it the inherent implication that it should make us laugh, and if it doesn’t, we more-readily say that it’s a bad comedy.
But over the years since I started watching anime regularly, I feel as though I’ve undergone a personal reshuffling on two fronts that are relevant for talking about CITY THE ANIMATION: one, that my sense of comedy is less about making me laugh and more about having fun overall, however it manifests. And two, that the anime is, like lots of Kyoto Animation work, part of a larger pattern that I’ve become more aware of both by watching and learning more about anime and anime production specifically.
(Credit to Ishidate Taichi, the series director. From its first piece of animation, the anime moves with palpable energy and zest, transitioning smoothly from 3D to 2D through its use of the raindrop as a cover. The anime’s world is colorful, and it wants you to know that immediately)
I’ll talk about the latter later, but let’s start with the former and a simple question: did CITY THE ANIMATION make me laugh? Yes, and no. In its crazy, noisy, bizarre town, there’s no telling what kind of crazy, noisy, bizarre oddity will arise from somewhere within it, making its residents have to deal with that something. And in a place with so many people from so many walks of life, who’s to say what will cause what to transpire? Whether it might involve Naguno being recruited to run like an absolute madwoman and make a soba delivery and chase down a thieving cat, Captain Obina having the football team standing at attention like in the army while remarking that they’re borderline useless without their star player, or Makabe and Ecchan having a conversation about eternally transforming money into counterfeit and then traveling home in-montage while avoiding a giant bear as part of the journey, the underlying philosophy is always the same. Do what you can to be wacky, and if in the process you make someone laugh, then that’s a happy consequence! There is no “plot” in the more all-encompassing sense because the overall sense of mood is the plot and the point.
(Credit to Satou Tatsuya, routinely one of Kyoto Animation’s most-talented animators, and often the one tasked with some of their most striking moments of beauty)
The mood can be glanced by just casually looking at what’s going on. Essentially any episode at any timestamp will give the impression of a manic energy suffused throughout the anime. Because each vignette generally speaking is anywhere from about 8-10 total minutes, every small story within the superstructure requires a flow of motion. That doesn’t mean that it’s always screaming itself red or having a magical explosion of animation at every given time (that would be closer to something like Dead Leaves or similar), because there are indeed many times where it calmly lets the mood set before flipping the table and letting all hell wonderfully break loose. Everything was so tightly composed that laughing as a reaction to a thing that was happening somehow felt irrelevant. It was always offering something brimming with confidence and abandon that I couldn’t help but love. It’s a circumstance where, both on the technical front and the comedic front, the fuse is always waiting to go off, and when it does, it never feels out of left field even as it pulls a gag or a non-gag moment that could be taken as out of left field.
(Unknown credit, adapting a gag from chapter three of the manga. The adaptation honors the visual and comedic sensibility of Arawi Keiichi’s original manga, while often adding new perspectives or movements that would reasonably exist based on the source gag)
But what is definitely of left field is just what exactly went into this from the production front. According to an interview with Ishidate (special thanks to kViN for providing some details on the matter), he had hoped for an adaptation of CITY THE ANIMATION back in the summer of 2022, and was surprised at the near-immediate approval of the work. Kyoto Animation already had experience with Arawi through adapting Nichijou, and likewise, Arawi couldn’t contain his own excitement as he eagerly jumped at his editor’s suggestion to adapt CITY into Kyoto Animation’s hands. Ishidate and Arawi apparently laughed like idiots at a writing camp as they shared ideas about how to make the anime realized on the small screen, and Arawi directly worked at the studio rather than speak through an editor or proxy. The process was so infused with vitality that showed a kind of communion between creator, creative staff, and creative product. It’s why talented people like Ishidate can direct something like CITY THE ANIMATION after having worked previously as director on Violet Evergarden, a series on the clear opposite side of the spectrum to CITY THE ANIMATION, and why the studio’s staff handle both types of aesthetics and moods. Ideas, and the people who make them come to life, thrive in an environment that can actually accommodate them.
(YouTube video includes audio. Be sure to unmute. Unknown credit for animation clip. Episode 5, directed by Oota Minoru, is a masterpiece of both ideas and execution, making for an aesthetically dense wellspring of expression)
And the anime industry needs more stuff like this happening.
This may be a bit of a revelation or shock to any relative newcomer to, or more-casual fan of, the medium reading this (hello there! Tell me what you like!), but if I may take a quick second to be rather uncouth, the anime industry is a fucking terrible place. As animators and studios find themselves descending into ever-thicker and more unpleasant webs of production issues, tight deadlines, and now the encroaching reality of AI and how it risks putting out of work all those people in the ED credits who do thankless / seemingly-invisible work that we don’t learn the names of (assuming they get credited at all, which is another problem altogether), anime is a business enterprise concerned about getting content out the door moreso than making any artistic statements. Especially in the current climate of the Reiwa era, seasonal listings are flooded with shows we won’t remember within a couple of months, or shows where the titles are more than enough to make someone think twice about tuning in to the first episode.
CITY THE ANIMATION may not be the funniest thing under the sun, but its existence is a symbol that sometimes, there are more-significant macro-level concerns and understandings of how an artpiece orients itself into a grander design than whether a bit involving takoyaki in episode three had me laughing my head off (it did, for the record). But isn’t that a navel-gazing philosophy? I don’t think it is. Kyoto Animation is one of the last bastions of giving its ideas the chance to not only develop gradually, but also see their realization while actively trying new boundary-pushing and active training, as has been their longstanding tradition. They, and CITY THE ANIMATION, are an odd duck of the best variety, one which helped the studio codify their moe aesthetic through the 2000s, wildly influenced the moe aesthetic of the early 2010s, etc. And here in 2025, they haven’t come close to exhausting their creative juices yet. They didn’t need to make a physical diorama for episode five and have these practical non-animated moments, but they did it anyway – the idea of “Let’s try it just because we can, and let’s see if it works” is beautiful as a thing in and of itself that I can’t help but be thankful that it exists, even if I found it an unfunny husk begging for death (it wasn’t, for the record). When a piece of media vibrates at just the right frequency, it radiates warmth even in its moments that affectively “don’t work.”
Why does this matter? One of my university students asked me at the end of an academic year what’s the point of praising something, however “new” or “interesting” or “ingenious / ingenuous” it might be, if it doesn’t move us personally? Why praise that which doesn’t reach all the way? I couldn’t help but remember this in light of the conversation with my friend from a couple of days ago. Years later, and with a lot more media consumption and instruction under my belt, I have a better answer (I hope). To that, I say that it is important to recognize that there are, at times, greater perspectives to consider than one’s own ego for whether “thing funny” or “thing not funny.” It is more about one’s own ability to understand that a different mode of thinking is sometimes required for watching something you realize on some level is truly special, even if it doesn’t completely coincide with what you want or like. It is about making YOUR effort to reach the creative energy on its own terms rather than waiting for it to “reach you.” It is actively broadening your own horizons into territories you didn’t dream of or didn’t think you’d ever chart or learn, and how through that, you will be remade into something newer and more beautiful, even if you still come out the other side not actually liking the thing in question.
Is that not worth celebrating?
(Unknown credit)
But let’s also not overstate the case – this anime will be, as it is in the here-and-now, endlessly compared to its earlier progeny Nichijou (and arguably even Lucky Star within the Kyoto Animation canon), both stylistically and structurally, and elsewhere with other comedies of similar swagger. It also is likely not going to rewrite any book anytime soon, both in terms of how to create comedy-centric anime or industry practice. The anime industry will be as problem-laden as it was before this anime existed, if not moreso as it lumbers into its (un?)certain future as Kadokawa prepares to adapt whatever is going to be its next Long Light Novel Title with a Highly-Specific Gimmick That Might Involve Reincarnation in Another World While Maxing Out My Vigor Stat.
(Credit to Ishidate Taichi)
But for thirteen Sundays over the summer and into the beginning of autumn, a kind of unrestrained vibrancy, happiness, and joviality shined. And it was called CITY THE ANIMATION.