Review of Dagashi Kashi

tl;dr: An anime that isn’t driven by plot nor really by it’s characters, but rather solely by a girls obsession with snacks, and somehow it’s really amusing. This is a manga based entirely on snacks. It starts off with some semblance of a plot with there being some conflict about the protagonist wanting to follow his own dream of being a manga artist instead of inheriting the family snack shop, but that pretty much never comes up after the first episode. I think his manga is mentioned twice after that and only in passing, and no one really tries all that hard to persuade him totake on the snack shop either. In terms of character development there is literally nothing. There are only really five characters and they stay exactly the same for the whole season. In terms of relationships, there’s a bit fleshed out, but just enough for it to be kind of annoying there isn’t more. There’s somewhat of a love triangle where the side heroine Saya likes the protagonist Kokonotsu, but Kokonotsu is too dense to notice at all, and Kokonotsu shows signs that he may like heroine Hotaru, though these signs are pretty minimal and furthermore she’s so obsessed with snacks that I can’t even begin to image what romantic development with her would look like.

Though that last part is pretty much what carries the show, Hotaru and her overtly energetic obsession with snacks combined with her naive oujo-sama like personality. She’s pretty much the snack princess and she’s awesome. The show is pretty much entirely dedicated to Hotaru discussing what makes snacks awesome with each episode focusing on a few specific ones. These snacks are Japanese and thus as someone who is not Japanese they are completely unfamiliar to me, but the general principles behind them are still relatable. And while the trivia relating to the snacks isn’t something that’ll ever come up in real life, trivia in general is pretty useless so the trivia being interesting is enough to make it feel worthwhile. But even more than that, once again going back to Hotaru, the show manages to capture how passionate she is about them very well which is adorable and the rest of the cast act as good straight men for her craziness so it’s also hilarious. I also felt that the pacing was pretty good, in that each episode is composed of two distinct halves that are essentially mini-episodes, which allowed the pacing to be fast enough that it felt like it was always showing something new and amusing. The ending seems to try to be one that dives a bit more into the plot that was originally setup at the beginning of the show and then pretty much ignored, but it’s largely too little too late and not really enough to make the plot worth getting invested in.

The art and animation are pretty solid. Both Hotaru and Saya look pretty weird by heroine standards, mostly due to their eyes, but their respective looks fit them very well and Hotaru manages to stand out despite her design actually being mostly pretty normal. I also thought it was interesting that characters were shown wearing different clothes each episode as I think that’s actually pretty rare in anime. Beyond that in terms of design it’s an anime taking place in the modern country side so it’s pretty normal to the point of not being particularly memorable. They did make the snacks look appealing though, enough so that I ended up eating a bunch of random snacks while watching. Also, there are lots of eye-catches that generally look pretty good I’d say, but they move way too fast. The OP and ED are decent enough and fit pretty well. The soundtrack wasn’t particularly memorable.