Wednesday, 19 February 2020

#134: Anitore! XX - Hitotsu Yane no Shita de (2016)



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...

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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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