Director: Atsushi Nigorikawa
Screenplay: Daisuke Ishibashi
Voice Cast: Miku Itō as Asami
Hoshi, Azumi Waki as Eri Higuchi, Eri Suzuki as Sakura Izumi, Kanon Takao as Yū
Hiraoka, Maria Naganawa as Shion Tachibana, Miyu Komaki as Shizuno Saotome
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
Adding to the bad thoughts about Anitore! is that I accidentally watched
the second season without realising so until halfway through. It really doesn't
feel like something is lost as a result admittedly. When I spotted this show on Crunchyroll and found it a) fascinating
as an idea and b) short enough to pique my interest, I wasn't expecting this to
be this painfully banal.
The series is interesting on
paper - a micro series where the idea is anime girls teaching the viewer how to
exercise. Sounds positive enough, letting otaku get healthy and buff,
especially as in 2019 a show called How
Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? runs with the virtue of exercise in
normal length episodes years later to popularity. What you get is something
else, a little bit exercise training, more ecchi where you ogle animated girls
bending over, and a peculiar first person harem work.
Let's get pass that detail. The
show is set up entirely from first person from a male character, harem genre
storytelling dictating that (unless a reverse harem with a woman/girl surrounded
by men/boys) it's a male character surrounded by female characters, usually
tickling fancies (i.e. fetishes) for the male viewer, and usually so bland it's
to the point that it feels like they're just cloning the same character, over
multiple decades, with the point of being a stand-in for fantasies only on the
surface but revealing an uncomfortable amount of psychological issues for men
in their quietness and extreme meekness. We never hear our protagonist but the
female cast address him and directly to us as well; the ideas is unmistakeably voyeuristic,
done alongside usual tropes from the harem genre of sec comedy about
compromising positions or a girl falling on him (us). The show has effectively
boiled down these bland, blander than white bread male character to the perfect
extreme - you, not you the reader, but the metaphorical (male) you. It's weird
in a bad way, and the show also breaks its own structural rules numerous and arbitrary
amounts of time, cutting to camera angles (like two girls sideways that clearly
aren't from a person's perspective) and thus making it an odd creative decision
not really implemented. Before you even ask if it's just crass, again I'd have
actually been intrigued if this had fully went with this experimental style of
first person if it had been more than just for titilation.
In terms of a show, it has the pretence
of being educational. When it is, there is a semblance of a fun show here,
covering basics as the best ways to do exercise stretches to even cool down
techniques, done by way of chiba representations of the cast, diminutive (and
cute) versions whose proportions are shrunk to a pocket size version, a trope
that exists here with the chibi addressing the audience. (In one of the few
funny gags, though it completely destroys reality itself, one chibi is squashed
by her normal sized version mid-exercise). Even if some of it, like exercising
on a crowded train, might seem absurd it nonetheless is of interest.
It becomes obvious Anitore! is meant to be more of a
regular fetish show when a lot of the exercise segments have the girls
literally orgasming from the final push of their exercise. I'm not suggesting
people don't experience this in real life sometimes, but when it's this
frequent, it's quite obvious which side of its bread the show butters. And its
continual, with pratfalls and near nudity, never actively placating the horny
viewer with actual nudity. It even goes as far as continue a trope I have
surprisingly seen a few times in anime to make this a trope now, of a mischievous
pet ferret, in this case one that's obsessed with burying itself into a girl's
cleavage or making off with underwear/swimming tops1.
I've never actually mentioned the
cast yet but the other issue is that this cast is bland. Your male lead is
literally non-existent, the final culmination of all the bland males whittled
down to negative space, and this is a rare case where even the female cast in
visual design is as generic as you can get. One is defined just by being meek
and wearing glasses, another just from having a significantly larger bosom than
anyone else has, and so forth. The exceptions are a Segway rider who collects
plush toys and lives in a fantasy realm within her own head, and also one
character who did redeem this show a little, that of a girl who wants to be the
occult Goth in contact to Eldritch Gods but is actually working at a convenience
stand and has a really sweet mother appear once to undermine her facade. The
picture of someone trying to live a fictitious self is a great idea desperately
needing to be rescued for a good show.
Nothing else is to be said as its
vignettes of exercise and the actual concern of cheap titillation, to perv over
the girls without any real sense of sexuality, just leering from a distance
that objectifies them and is just tedious to sit through. The only sense of a
real set piece through these episodes is when two of the girls go jogging for
one episode, and that the final one is a Christmas episode, a sex fantasy just
to see everyone in skimpy clothes. The show is pretty well made - colourful,
full of energy as each episode is only four minutes long, a poppy end song set
to characters entering doors in gravity defying reality - but it's so vapid and
questionable in terms of why it exists it was an utter chore to sit through. And
again, this was the second season I accidentally watched first, which works by
itself and leads to the question of what would sitting through the first season
be like...
========
1) Even censored hentai versions of Alien. Thank you Alien of
Darkness (1996), for unfortunately being stuck in memory over the years due
to that bloody ferret one of staff got included even if it was so tonally inappropriate
to.
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