Anime-Gataris - Reviews

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Rascal's avatar
Dec 28, 2017

*spoiler-lite review*

Give yourself to the anime

Animegataris is a series that's going to get swept under the rug. You know by watching it that it's a boring slice of life about an anime club and that's all it needs to be with its underacheving artstyle and animation. By all means there's nothing special about it so there's no real need to watch it, besides its reference-heavy narrative for those of you that like shoutouts and its commentary on the anime industry every once in a while. Besides that it trips over every trope imaginable into a pool of muddy grey. 

The situations in the story the characters get into aren't intreguing in the least so the only thing keeping the story scored where it is is the weirdness. Just imagine you're looking at the most boringly shaped cloud in the sky you've ever seen. Then right as you're bored and are about to look away the could shifts into the shape of a burger king logo for a second then disperses. That's animegataris, but less entertaining and completely forced.

I won't spoil what happens but basically it tries to do something different and WEIRD too close to the end and falls completely on its ass trying to do it because there's no reason to care about the characters or what's going on even remotely at all, but you've gotta give it props for trying all the same.

The animation is consistant, that's all i'll say. It's not noteworthy at all. The Sound is charming as long as you're just listening to it but it's nothing to the show itself. The opening is ok and it's very self-aware.

References are another thing. Like, I get that in a show about anime itself you want to callback to popular anime but it seems like this show doesn't even want to stand on its own as its own seperate thing because literally every other line is a reference to another, probably better, anime.

the only funny joke the anime has.

A few of the characters had potential but none of them stepped up besides the weird glasses guy. Then there was this godforsaken stuffed rotten peanut that they said was a cat, talking like it knows whats going on all the time and they think its SO funny they shove it into the camera every second and make it say some stupid shit that you never wanted or needed to hear. It does nothing for the story at all and it's the stupedist fucking thing of all time, it makes no sense, but then again neither does the resolution so fuck it why bother.

Mediocre 4th wall breaks, pointless characters, unconvincing story, In the end it's not even worth watching for its insane story twist and i'd reccomend avoiding it altogether if you don't feel like sitting through 10 episodes of lameness only to get 2 episodes of outright cringeworthy stupidity.

3/10 story
6/10 animation
7/10 sound
3/10 characters
5/10 overall
krofire's avatar
Apr 5, 2022

Wao World’s 2017 comedy-fantasy is an Otaku’s dream in being one of those rare animes that is actually about anime. Typically, otaku-anime focusses purely on the culture, generally, or manga artistry, specifically. This is not surprising as manga artists and writers focus on their own personal experiences and most animes are adapted from manga. “Anime-Gataris” stands unique in that it was spawned from a series of shorts to be shown in the intermission for other animated films. The 2017 series served as a prequel - the shorts were set in a University anime club. This show concerns a High School anime club. Unbelievably there is some kind of story buried in this madness. In fact, there is a story arc buried within a story arc like matryoshka dolls. Outwardly it looks like the tale of the anime club’s continual battle just to exist against the Student Council’s attempts to shut it down. By episode ten the reason why the club is threatened becomes clear leading us into the climax episodes eleven and twelve. These last two episodes are batshit crazy as the “real” world bleeds into the anime universe as one starts to take over the other.

This all sounds like it would be a blast. Sadly, it is not. It is, by no means, a disaster but the writing leaves a lot to be desired and your view of the outcome is largely a matter of personal taste. As you would expect the show is littered with numerous mentions of real-world anime shows and films all disguised with small alterations to the title. Examples include “Girls and Tanks” (for “Girls und Panzer”) and “Autumn Wars” (for “Summer Wars”) So if you love anime, you can play spot-the-title. No doubt your favourites are all buried in here somewhere. For those of us not brought up in Japanese it is also interesting to get some insight into how anime culture crops up within the Japanese tourist industry. There is a lot to learn in the show. The downside is that it is dragged down by cliches, stereotypes and random madness in lieu of anything entertaining. It just gets tiresome as it tries to wring as much out of the few ideas it has. This is a shame as the core premise of all this is sound. Given that the action takes place in a High School the show seems to completely ignores the opportunity for irony. It just doesn’t poke fun at itself. The whole business with the talking cat was meant to be a clue about how anime was bleeding into the real world but it is such a blunt instrument. As such the show lacks subtlety preferring instead to bang the audience over the head repeatedly with big dumbarse robots. Since this is slice-of-life why are there no jokes about this sub-genre? The delivery confuses repeating the same jokes, more and more loudly, with something clever. It is not and the audience stops watching. We wanted to like this but it got spoilt. Go back and try again.

3/10 story
7/10 animation
7/10 sound
5/10 characters
6/10 overall
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neetaku's avatar
Dec 24, 2017

Anime-Gataris is a series that I found similar to Welcome to the NHK. The only downfall is the Otaku Culture is hit or miss a lot like the story. The story was too simple to really carry through 12 episodes as we see that after a while you start to wonder if there is a story. I'm still wondering that myself to be honest. We get that Minoa liked anime but only remembers part of one and as a anime novice she is forced to join the anime club. Not really a spoiler as this is the first episode. Over time the story starts to fade and it really becomes a series of random stories complete with random time jumps. One moment they are in school, then they are on summer break, then they are 3 months away from the school festival. All of which are 3 episodes in a row.The an

The story would have been better if they did what they did in the better episodes give us some anime information. Such as they did with explaining about how airing anime doesn't really generate profit and why more than one studio is in the production credits at the start of every anime series. Thats one thing I for one always wondered.

The characters well they feel incomplete. We get small hints here and there about them but never anything solid. None more than Yui who is just in the series for fanservice with an almst upskirt shot  and god rays. The characters are really stock images really as the design and elements of them are the run of the mill generic characters all the way to Minoa being the typical clumbsy moe character. I don't think the series skipped out on anything that wasn't run of the mill.

The sound this series could have used more music, I'll just say I don't think there will be an OST anytime soon that is more than the OP and ED. The sound I would have liked to hear would have been in a lot of scenes where the cene could have been more touching with background music to add lyaers of dpeth to it. Music is important in series to add the feeling of the scene to draw emotion from the viewer. Like the end of Angel Beats watch the ending with no sound, not as impactful without sound right?

The Animation is one part where the series really did well with the character art really popping out with vivid colors and great design for most part like the dancing secene in episode 8, granted it was more CGI like and not animation by drawings but still really stood out more than any scene in the series. I would have liked the animation to be a little better for background and other charactesr or stayed really near the same bar that we see in the series. Some scenes the animation looked really great such as the anime expo episodes and then others the animaiton seemed to take a dive two fold.

Overall this could be a great series if you don't mind random ecchi moments from a worthless character who adds nothing in the series but a few seconds to start every episode no matter how pointless and if you don't mind being a run of the mill nothing great series. I would really say Anime-Gataris is only worth watching if its one of the few new series you haven't watched yet and you are just waiting for a good series from the Winter 2018 series to start to air. I went into the series enjoying the first few episodes and then the steep cliff dive after the novety wore off and we started to get random events and an ever changing story for the episodes that made me have to try and remember what the main story was about.

It took me 5 days to finish this series most of the time that I should have been watching I was asleep waking up episodes later and having to remember which episode I was on before I fell asleep watching.

2/10 story
7/10 animation
4/10 sound
2/10 characters
3/10 overall
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Dubfan's avatar
Jul 21, 2020

This show was bad. There were some funny jokes, but thats pretty much it. The anime naming schemes to avoid copyright violations was troublesome.  For example Instead of "Death Note" they used "Death Tone" or instead of "Summer Wars" they used "Autumn Wars", however this can be very confusing for non-hardcore anime fans. Later they abandoned the naming scheme to simply use different art and music styles to represent other animes, making it more problematic for non-hardcore anime fans. The character deleopment outside of Arisu was nonexistent. An interesting plot point was abandoned. There really wasn't an start-to-finish timeline, felt like everything was just thrown together at the last minute. Bluring the lines between fiction and nonfiction is never a good idea. Animation and audio were average. Unless you're really bored, look for another show.

3/10 story
5/10 animation
5/10 sound
4/10 characters
4/10 overall
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alexmcgilvery's avatar
Feb 10, 2018

Very interesting premise, but it gets very meta toward the end, and perhaps goes a bit too far in that direction.

6/10 story
7/10 animation
6/10 sound
7/10 characters
7/10 overall
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