There’s something that’s just slightly off with Kakushigoto for me, even if it’s a comedy series I’m supposed to like. Its main ingredients – the story, the characters, the balance between its comedic and heartfelt moments – are solid and they all go well with each other. But the series, as a whole, just wasn’t clicking with me, so even if there were slightly more comedic hits than misses, I would still always end up waiting for it to kick into some higher gear.
Its entire premise is built around a mangaka father trying to keep his dirty gag manga a secret from his precious daughter, so you know that something’s got to give at some point. It’s a gag that can only be taken so far, so that’s what this show does. It takes the joke as far as it can – at first, in little bits and teasers scattered throughout its first eleven episodes, until finally bursting into one huge dramafest in the finale.
I guess you could say this was the higher gear the show was building itself up to, but it gets to a point where you start getting tired of the jokes themselves, which were mostly just variations on a theme. The theme, of course, being: working as a mangaka is disgraceful, let’s make sure my precious daughter never finds out, please? So from there, you already know that you’re in for a series of self-deprecating gags about the manga industry, self-deprecating gags about being a single dad, self-deprecating gags about working as an artist in general, and so on. To make it worse, the jokes are mostly one-off and don’t really escalate, so while this means the show doesn’t flatline, it doesn’t soar, either.
Kakushigoto, in the end, was just fairly average, which only makes the soap opera-worthy ending a little too much. You know it’s the father-daughter relationship that gives the story its core, but once the heavy drama starts to hit, you’ll get the sense that it’s here the show’s begun to overcompensate. Maybe it’s not as obvious and maybe it wasn’t done consciously, but you do get the feeling that it tries a little too hard to become something more than a gag series.
[This review was made for the Anime Lottery Game: Spring 2020 event. Want to be a mangaka? Watch this anime. Don’t want to be a mangaka? Watch this anime. Whatever, watch it or don’t watch it, man, don’t let me tell you what to do.]
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