CITY the Animation – Episode 1

Content warning: force-femme sketch 

What’s it about? City is a crazy place! Tsurubishi runs a family noodle shop with his teenage kids Matsuri and Tatewaku, while Nagumo and Niikura muddle their way through college. And is everybody being monitored by some weird scientist? Every day is an opportunity for new shenanigans.

CITY the Animation is one of the most anticipated shows of the season for one reason and one reason only: it’s a Nichijou reunion. Bringing back KyoAni for another whirl at a Arawi Keiichi property is a guaranteed way to get people interested—I probably don’t need to tell you that Nichijou is one of the most beloved anime comedies of the last decade. And the team is fairly consistent show to show, with the director of CITY Ishidate Taishi having served as Assistant Director on Nichijou. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that CITY is largely more of a good thing. It maintains Nichijou’s general tone of whimsical overreaction to everyday occurrences and applies it to a slightly older setting, with more of its characters in college or working than in high school. Like Nichijou, its beautiful animation often elevates the comedy–one particular sequence involving a crispy noodle uses the camera in ways that recall the iconic fall of one octopus sausage in Nichijou, leaving me in stitches.

But what makes that sequence even funnier to me than any falling sausage, however, is the show’s attention to character. There is a greater sense in this show that these are characters with actual personalities, rather than simply whatever they need to be for the bit to work. The cook is both scheming and clumsy, Wako Izumi is utterly deranged, Matsuri loves to banter—there is a sense of actual character relationships happening here. Rather than trying to capture the emotions of everyday life in a way that is #relatable like Nichijou, CITY is creating comedy that is more character based and interwoven, and with so many characters to choose from, the combinations possible are endless. 

However, there is one minor annoyance: the use of queerness as a punchline in the show. It is strange that in both of the first two sketches, the idea that somebody might be gay or transfemme is treated as a joke. In the very first sketch Tatewaku is encouraged by his scheming sister and dad to wear a mini-skirt because, according to the horoscope, it is “good luck”–and they immediately laugh at him and try to send pictures of him to friends as soon as he does. Notably, he seems to take some delight in wearing it, doing a little idol pose as soon as he puts it on, but immediately is embarrassed at their reaction. This bit didn’t bother me that much, mostly because the little idol pose indicated to me that the show is not entirely laughing at him (and genuinely might think he is cute in it), but at his family’s ridiculous scheming to get him into the skirt to take blackmail pictures instead.

However, the show immediately jumps into a sketch where two girls jokingly pretend they are into each other and then “psyche!” into throwing each other down onto the ground. Again, in isolation these two sketches aren’t really offensive at all. But placed one after another, the show is playing with this kind of queer imagery without any intention to make queerness more than a punchline, which is a bit annoying. Regardless, it’s not unrealistic for the age of the characters, and didn’t really make me feel offended, so shrugs. On a scale of messy queer things in anime from Araragi being force-femmed in Monogatari (delightful!) to Yamai’s predatory lesbian bullshit in Komi Can’t Communicate (literally made me nauseous), I would place all of this much closer to Araragi being force-femmed—I didn’t mind it!

By the episode’s end, I was a bit tired, but that is somewhat the nature of these kinds of frenetic gag sketch comedies. I suggest watching it in short bursts, which I don’t think detracts from the experience much at all, as each sketch is fairly self-contained. I can heartily recommend CITY to any person who fondly remembers Nichijou, and any fan of anime sketch comedy.