English Dub Review: City the Animation Episode 6

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Death! Rebirth! Goodbyes! Hellos! This has been your weekly synopsis.

OUR TAKE

We’re about halfway through the series and once again I am faced with the conundrum of trying to critically analyze about twenty solid minutes of joke after joke after joke. And I hope it’s clear enough by now that I don’t think these are bad jokes, in fact they’re quite charming and funny, though when the WHOLE SERIES is structured that way, the challenge comes from trying to talk about it without feeling like I’m overanalyzing or trying to overexplain something that is really simple. Take, for example, Dr. Aradata faking his own death in front of his son as a prank. This is not meant to be some multi-layered character piece about a dysfunctional home life leading to things being left unsaid before death. It’s just some guy who wants to prank his son and the prank gets out of hand. It adds some exaggerated drama to build on the joke, which has just been this author’s style since at least Nichijou, the other series like this that I’m aware of since that’s also been animated. It’s pretty much that kind of style and impact for everything here, and I DO LIKE IT. I would be watching this regardless of if I were reviewing it! But talking about that style once, let alone THIRTEEN TIMES and then for the SEASON REVIEW, is just very…cumbersome.

And yet, I’m going to need to do this seven more times anyway, so to try and pass the time, I’ll just talk about my fave segments from this episode. The opening sketch with the Aradata family was pretty good at showing the chaos such a big family would have simply getting up in the morning, as well as using some jokes from a few episodes ago to add some continuity and layers. I mentioned the Dr. Aradata faking his death sketch, but that too was also pretty solid without how it ebbed and flowed. And lastly, the segment where the manga editor tries convincing Wako to make a manga series but then interpreting her saying no as her simply being afraid of failing was also alright and ended where it needed to. Now, going into this second half, I hope that the future episodes give me a bit more meat to chew on, but if they don’t, I’m sure I’ll find SOME way to find SOMETHING to talk about here. Knock on wood, I mean.