Kemono Friends is part of a multimedia project also titled Kemono Friends.
Hoo boy this is an ugly show. Gonna be honest, I only picked this show up because I heard there was a Serval character and Servals are my favorite animal (and luckily the character got an amazing voice actor so I’m happy with the portrayal!) If you don’t know what the show is, this may sound strange, but uuuh… This is a show all about anthropomorphized animals in a giant Zoo. Following a couple main characters, we go from zone to zone learning about different humanized animals living in different climates with an end goal of leaving the park.
Kemono Friends is very weird in many regards. The thing that’ll stand out to most is the 3DCG. It sucks. The show’s CG looks like something I used to watch when I was 10 or something, nostalgic but not up to par with modern standards. The weird part about this is that the background art is some of the best I’ve seen this season. Very pretty environments and landscapes that feel almost ruined by the CG characters walking about. An even weirder part is that, while the CG sucks and doesn’t blend well with the background, the actual detail given to model animation is ridiculously good in comparison. The models all animate to the traits of the animals they represent, so for example Serval’s ears will twitch ever so slightly when there is noise near her.
Looking at more good, the voice acting. The main characters have voices that are very clear and easy to understand, different to most anime, even those aimed at kids. There’s a ridiculously large amount of other characters, but most of the voice actors manage to capture the spirit of the animal they represent. Very well done for such a large cast.Also, speaking of sound, you gotta check out the ost for this show. BGM doesn’t play too often in the show, but when it does, it is really pretty. There’s a sense of wonderment to each track, adventurous almost. Reminds me of the big explorey video games I’d play as a kid. Digimon World vibes y’know? The ED is amazing too, almost got my ED of the Season award. Beautifully chilling visuals and some gooooood music.
The thing I’m most thankful for out of everything is that the show dodges the biggest pitfall for children’s TV. Early into the show a race of weird evil slime things named Ceruleans are introduced, and they are said to be a dangerous presence to all. Most creators would have every episode (or most of them) end with a fight against the monster! Kemono Friends doesn’t do that. Instead it has a really nice and simple structure… Travel to a new zone, meet the animals there, hear of a problem, fix the problem, and repeat. There IS a dangerous presence in this world, but not everything is solved by those dangerous things existing and being fought. The Ceruleans are just another part of the world, like everything else, and I think a focus on fighting against a threat would have stripped this show of its charm.
This show isn’t anything new or crazy, but it is definitely a top tier show intended for younger audiences, and speaking as a common watcher of children’s anime, this is the best I’ve seen in the past 15 or so years. I can believe in a future where Kemono Friends is to anime what Adventure Time was to western animation. Hopefully we get more stuff of this quality.
After thoughts: I want to take a bit of time to explain the background to this show, for those who haven’t seen it, and for those who didn’t hear of Kemono Friends’ origins. This was initially a mobile game, a fairly generic one at that. Standard gatcha rpg thing. You were put in charge of collecting “Friends” and fighting the Cerulean threat. Well, the game didn’t do well, and it shut down, along with the companion manga, but somehow they got an anime adaptation greenlit, albeit for a terrible timeslot past 1am. With 10 staff members and 500 days of work, this anime was created as a continuation of the game’s story. The first episode aired to horrible reception solely due to the CG animation, and by the time the show had finished it was the second most watched anime on Nico Nico Douga and the biggest topic trending on Japanese Twitter. It’s nothing short of a miracle. Previously I have given positive words to short cheap shows that fail in areas every show is expected to succeed by the masses. Million Doll is the first example to come to mind. These are shows that care so much despite not having the same luxuries as the popular anime, and they always go overlooked. So it’s nice to see, finally, appreciation for one of these shows. I’m happy to know that there is more to popularity than pretty pictures.
