Review of Bakemonogatari

Filled with gorgeous shots of underaged women, inventive fourth-wall breaks, and highly detailed PowerPoint slides, Bakemonogatari single-handedly redefined what it meant to be a pretentious anime at the time of its release in a way that no anime since has been able to capture the essence of. It is an incredible feat that a harem anime manages to get across so little humor and emotion with so much ostensible effort. Perhaps if I was steeped in Japanese culture, I would understand that the tsundere girl talking to the viewer about being tsundere was actually a post-ironic meta-commentary reference about the overabundance of meaningless fourth wallbreaks and not just a waste of time so that SHAFT could save a few extra yen to work on another frame of Zetsubou-Sensei. Alas, I do not have time to live in Japan, so instead the fansubs written by people who probably didn't get half the jokes will explain to me in translator notes that it's common to joke about being a lolicon around a loli, and then draw her in sexually suggestive ways as to completely undermine the very criticism it seems to be making. Very funny joke! Really shows a level of thoughtfulness and effort that's only seen in things like people who smoke at gas station pumps or bundles of rocks.

It is a show that has its cake and eats it too, and while there can be a trashy fun to shows like that, most of the fun of Bakemonogatari is squeezed out of it like a snake that squeezes out scene after scene of suggestive underaged girls in short skirts and tank tops. Sorry, I promise I'll stop talking about the whole loli thing, but can you imagine taking a show like this seriously when it "ironically" sexualizes little girls? Anyway, the reason why this show amounts to nothing more than a slightly unintelligible fantasy for Western NEETs to beat off to is because the parts of this show are very weak on their own.

The story is extremely formulaic, with the plot of each character arc being more or less the exact same. That within itself is alright and often a playground for character studies, as we get to see how each character reacts to the various highs and lows of that plot's structure. However, when the characters are these ironic caricatures, there end up being these very flat scenes where instead of learning about the characters' motivations or their feelings or what they've gone through, you get the feeling like you're learning about the director's knowledge of popular character tropes in anime. This ends up making the characters not feel like characters at all, but rather these weird symbolic stand-ins for ideas that, ultimately, make you feel this weird emptiness when you watch because you're not actually watching people but rather ideas, and ideas make me feel nothing without a human representing them in a natural way. I can't explain it exactly, the closest I've felt to this is by watching the live action Western comedy Community, but that was a lot more clever of a show than this, and it had a lot of different plots (divergent and varied situations that cause the flat caricatures to maybe reconsider their typical responses to thinks and thus become more round; something this show sorely lacks) to boot.

The art, beyond being softcore lolicon hentai a third of the time, is impressively drawn, with most impressive being the lines given much weight and detail. When Araragi starts to laugh because he got some thought in his head, there's some over the top reaction he shows that's done in meticulous detail, and there's a lot of examples of that throughout the show. This works because of SHAFT's ability to draw small/medium/large lines for character models and within their bodies for color detail, then how they give them depth through their shading. On another show, a character may just put their hand to their face to hide laughter in that situation, or you'd see a thought bubble with chibi heads giggling. These details that show without telling can be found throughout the art of this show, which is all the more strange when the story of this show feels almost like the opposite as it tells instead of shows. Bakemonogatari exudes an undeniable style from its art, and that alone is worth the price of admission for many people, me included. I feel like the various characters' designs were mostly boring (seeing as though they were often kinda trope-y or ironically sexual in nature, they ended up being a bit plain), but I did quite like Araragi's and Senjougahara's character models, although the latter's look gets muddled when new girls are introduced into the show with similar color schemes/body types.

What is really jarring about the art is the direction the show was given. I honestly do not mind the PowerPoint slides like many people might. I think it's a shallow, lazy artistic choice if done more than once, which it was. But okay, it is forgivable in and of itself, it adds a little bit of humor or flavor, fine. Yet when scenes are placed a kilometer away from the action for artistic effect, then zoomed in close to the face, then there's a jungle gym, then a shot zoomed only half a kilometer away and you can see half the character's body in the shot even though it's the other character that's talking...there's a pointlessness to everything that is going on, and the slides seem exceedingly lazy. When you "break the rules" of what makes a scene well shot, you should do so on purpose, with reason. When Tatami Galaxy shows the main character in a kaleidoscopic and impotent hellscape, it's because the main character is losing his mind since he can't get any. It makes sense why the director would choose really weird, wide angles for those shots. When I see the floor and ceiling of a house with dialogue and quick shots of characters interspersed throughout, I don't think it has any meaning or purpose for the story than beyond just being different or weird. So then you have to judge it by how pretty it looks, and since the REAL purpose of those weird shots were to save costs, it makes the anime seem a lot less beautiful. This made a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes feel like a total drag, unfortunately.

Ultimately, when you combine the show's self-congratulatory use of irony that it did not earn the right to congratulate itself on, the often meandering direction that comes across as someone trying to act really cool, and the very forgettable character motivations and story that are done up in an opaque way on purpose (instead of a more traditional harem story of a boy meeting a bunch of girls at school and they do normal stuff with each other or fight things with them etc, which this could have easily been, there's supernatural elements mixed with plodding repetitive plots that the characters never fully realize themselves within), you get this empty shell of an anime, a real waste of beautiful art, a show that if any other studio produced, would be a trashy mid-level anime that would be totally forgotten. A comedy that takes itself seriously when it wants to in order to seem as artistically cunning as possible, while in reality it's less deep than Oreimo, Bakemonogatari is the prime definition of a pretentious anime, and as a result I find it hard to connect with on any level beyond some empty anger I feel for having my time wasted.