Nicknames

Kemono Friends is a CG anime that aired back in Winter 2017 and turned out to be the sleeper hit of the season but, was it really that good or it just succeeded for some unforeseeable reason?

The show is about Bag-chan, a little girl who’s lost in the middle of a giant park and surrounded by anthropomorphic animals. There she meets Serval and then the duo starts an adventure to the library to learn what animal she’s supposed to be.

It’s kinda unclear what’s the target audience of this show. On one hand this is a cute animal girls doing cute things show, but on the other it airs at late-night and there are constant hints that everything may be darker than it seems at first glance.

Also this show is fairly repetitive. Each episode can be described as “Serval and Bag meet one or various animal girls (called friends in the show), helps them with whatever thing they need help, and then they leave to another biome”.

A fact that’s worth mentioning is the inclusion of an interlude about the friend of the week. They are really informative and add an extra educational value to the show.

Animation-wise it’s awful. As soon as you pay a bit of attention you start to notice how the mouth flapping doesn’t match at all, the characters seem to walk on the air from time to time, and sometimes everything is a bit laggy. Most of these issues get fixed in the later episodes, but then more issues arise (it’s going to be hard to forget that climbing animation).

Another thing that bugs me in this regard is how lazy the character designs are. Yes, some characters are easy to notice (like Shoebill) but there are others that look way too similar to each other to distinguish them (with Serval and Sand Cat being the worst offenders). There’s also the fact that the Japanese Black Bear lacks so many body features she looks like a black ink stain with a face.

Sound-wise it was ok. The opening and ending songs are the typical j-pop stuff you’d find in a show of this kind, and the OST is pretty much forgettable.

The most important part of the show is the characters. Even if they are plain and the supporting cast barely has more than 40 minutes of screentime they have enough charm to be memorable. Another thing that adds to their charms is that some of them behave like their real life counterparts (like Tsuchinoko being overly elusive or the beaver being way too focused on building stuff with wood).

All in all this show had all the ingredients to become a disaster of unknown proportions, but the charm of the characters turned this show into something tolerable. Some people might find the crappy animation and lack of a decent plot a huge turn-off and consider it a gigantic pile of crap while others might get entranced by the cuteness of the characters and call this show the greatest anime ever made. Should you watch it? It depends on the kind of shows you like. If you don’t mind bad CG and cute girls doing cute things is your jam then go ahead and watch it, but if you want your anime to have more substance then avoid it like a plague. If you're still indecisive then feel free to try it. The worse thing that could happen is that you'd hate it, but at least you can enjoy all the memes it spawned.