Sunday 24 April 2011

Nichijou - Episode 4

Another week, another twenty minutes of me staring at an episode of Nichijou wondering whether I'm genuinely supposed to be laughing at this stuff.

I'm honestly not too sure what to write about the series any more - even in terms of an episode synopsis there isn't really a lot to discuss other than "some random stuff happens which is clearly supposed to be hilarious but entirely fails to live up to that billing".  Once again, the only remotely noteworthy moments of this week's instalment feature talking cat Sakamoto, whose battle between his demand for respect from his relative juniors is almost shot to pieces by his natural instinct to play with anything that moves or even looks vaguely interesting to play with.  It's cute, it's a great examination of the feline mindset, and it's actually kind of funny to boot.


Aside from that, everything is as you'd expect, with Mai being weird and playful in an indecipherable way thanks to that monotone, Nakanojo (he of the mohican hairstyle) having some hair-related dilemmas (which I confess were quite funny too) and so on.

I really, really should drop this series by now - one or two full-blown laughs out of five episodes (including the OVA) is an incredibly poor return on the time I've invested into the series thus far, and that depressing scoreline doesn't look set to improve any time soon.  Yet, despite that for some reason I still find myself wanting to check out the latest episode every week - perhaps its the well-crafted animation (although even aspects of that are beginning to become repetitive), or maybe I'm just desperately clinging on to the fact that it can only get better and that surely it'll pull itself out of this bottomless comedy ravine at some point.  Either way, I think I'll call it a day after next week's episode unless something spectacular happens.

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