Anime-Gataris

This review contains spoilers.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the top here. There is genuinely very little else out there like Anime-Gataris. Like most reviewers--amateur or professional--I tend to try to keep a sort of detached semi-objective tone when talking about the series I review. I will admit from square one that I do not have the chops to do that with Anime-Gataris. I’m not sure anyone does.

If you’re looking for your quick “is this good or not?” recommendation, close this review and go watch this show, preferably while knowing as little about it as possible.

It’s really hard to talk about a series like this for several reasons. For one, it spends over half its runtime effectively in disguise, pretending to be a reference-heavy comedy about an anime club (think a sort of Lucky Star for new 10s), and it’s actually very good at that! The first half of Anime-Gataris is a rock solid comedy series with no real major problems and fun characters that bounce off of each other super well, if you like that kind of thing, you will have no problems with episodes 1-8 of Anime-Gataris.

It is also not what I am going to spend most of this review talking about, because after it sheds that facade, the series then spends its remaining five episodes becoming one of the most weird and baldly ambitious pieces of metafiction since Grant Morrison's Animal Man. This series is a ride, from end to end.

Where to even start? Ostensibly, Anime-Gataris (that’s “anime talk”, incidentally, which, boy, is it ever) is the story of Minoa, an entry into my favorite genre of anime protagonist--peppy girl with a big heart who is kind of dumb--and her quest to make friends by re-founding her school’s anime club. Along the way said club clashes with the student council who seem weirdly hardline about getting it shut down (there’s a reason for that, as it turns out), they go to Comiket, and, the storyline that sets up the show’s complete 180, they end up making their own anime short as part of a school project. As an aside, said anime short is shown in its entirety in episode 8, and is god awful in the most beautiful way I think I’ve ever seen something be deliberately bad.

Their short is a hit. So much so, that the school’s other clubs start coming to them for advice, or more specifically, anime recommendations. Now that seems innocuous enough, right? Well, somehow or another (it’s never really explained, like all great anime, Anime-Gataris knows better than to sweat the specifics too much), the clubs using anime as inspiration material leads to the boundary between the “real world” (of the show) and fiction breaking down. This leads to such things as Minoa’s friend / b-character, a track runner, getting a pair of robot booster shoes, and the martial arts clubs banding together to build a ziggurat they can train on. It’s a lot, but if the series stopped there, we’d “merely” be in PaniPoniDash! territory, or Excel Saga at most.

Way back in the first episode, the impetus for Minoa getting into anime in the first place was to find a show from her childhood that she’d forgotten--a pastiche of RahXephon, Macross, and about a dozen other things, most of which I, as a comparative neophyte compared to whoever wrote all this, have never seen--this finally gets resolved in the 9th and 10th episodes. It turns out that the school’s principal (also responsible for the student council’s hard stance against the anime club) is in fact, a failed director, who directed that very same series. This plot wraps up, and you might think that the series is now finally done, but then you realize that there are still two more episodes left.

And it is at this point that still referring to Anime-Gataris as a “comedy” seems sort of, well, not quite enough? The final two episodes see the culmination of the reality/fiction boundary breakdown, as seemingly the entire cast with the notable exception of Minoa herself--down to her friends in the anime club--become very self-awaredly anime. This might sound, on paper, kind of funny. And to be fair, it sort of is, but it’s also around here that Anime-Gataris pulls double duty as the “Minoa slowly losing her mind as the world around her crumbles into madness” show. Parts of the 11th episode are genuinely unsettling, Minoa is being subjected to reality itself failing and everyone she knows lapsing into “anime-ness”. It’s deeply weird and pretty damn creepy to boot. It doesn’t help that when she tries to basically wake her fellow club members up, they not only reject her, but are outright hostile.

This turns out to be a plot by one of the club members (Aurora) who we learn is an escapee from the anime world, determined to….change his name, because ultimately this series is still trying to be funny. Mostly. Aurora also gives Minoa a pair of glasses that let her see that the world consists entirely of drawings and she screams quite loudly. Comedy!

Of course, because Anime-Gataris is an anime, and is made by people who are clearly big fans of the medium, it understands something very well, which is that there is no force in the universe more powerful than a determined high school girl.

The final episode consists of Minoa fighting back, winning back her friends, and dropping a Gurren Lagann reference for good measure--because not even this show can escape the long shadow of Team Dai Gurren, apparently.

The series ends with her using a magic beret to rewrite the entire world, effectively rebuilding the destroyed fourth wall, and placing herself and her friends in a fairly normal slice of life anime. The show ends where it began, as we get some recaps of scenes from the first episode, now with the characters slightly changed to fit the new reality.

This is all a lot to process, but it would be meaningless if Anime-Gataris wasn’t actually compelling. Thankfully it is. Even in the 8 episodes where it’s pretending to be a normal SOL, it’s a pretty funny one. And after that, well, as recapped, it’s a wild ride. It’s a hard series to really articulate the main good points of, because the two major ones are just “that it’s funny”, and all of the weird metafiction flummoxery. If you find the latter obnoxious of course you probably won’t like the series, but, if you have even a mild tolerance for it, it’s impossible not to recommend. There’s a million little things I can’t even begin to mention here, as an off-hand example: Minoa’s trackstar friend randomly shows up in scenes at the very start of certain episodes, seemingly randomly, and doing something quite unrelated to the rest of the episode. It is only by thinking about it for a moment that you realize she is a quite literal running gag.

Is it the most meta anime ever made? Quite probably not, but for sheer commitment to the bit, you really have to hand it to Anime-Gataris. There aren’t too many like this one.