Summer proper kicks off with, as it happens, the very last series in the preview (though truth be told there’s usually not much difference in expectations with the “Modestly Interested” category). I’ve generally heard pretty good things about the Boku no Tsuma wa Kanjou ga Nai manga. And the anime has a pretty good director in Yoshimura Furihiro. But Tezuka Productions has become one of the most reliable producers of bland and cheap-looking anime, and sadly Boku no Tsuma is no no exception in that department. That’s nothing the story can’t overcome if the writing is good enough, but it does trim the margin for error.
If I’m being brutally frank here, my early take is that it probably isn’t. This premiere wasn’t bad but it was kind of clunky. And I mean, the premise – lonely loser guy falls in love with his robot housekeeper – is hardly a groundbreaker. That conceit can be emotionally impactful in the right hands, and we could still get there. But more than anything I found the interactions between Takuma (loser) and Mina (robot) predictable. And just a bit creepy, too. Maybe that’s just me, maybe not. If not, I’m not sure yet whether it was intentional.
In any event, Mina is a “second-hand” housekeeping robot who in theory can only cook from her preset recipes and wash dishes. Takuma is a youngish salaryman who seems not to have any sort of a social life. It soon becomes clear that Mina is taking cues from Takuma – offhand comments about her being his wife and such. She puts of a love love message in ketchup on his omurice, she forces him to stay hydrated (this actually seemed kinda dangerous) when he drinks too much beer. And when he drunkenly tells her to get into bed with him, she does.
This is mostly played for laughs at this early stage. But Mina being so childlike rather unsurprisingly casts an unsavory air over Takuma’s advances on her, even if he hasn’t done anything really improper. I don’t think you can really get a read on this sort of story in one episode, and this show in particular seems like it could go in a couple radically different directions. I’m not much impressed with the opening salvo but I’ll give it another chance to reset my perceptions of it next week.
Casey W
July 1, 2024 at 9:41 pmI’m a big fan of the manga but I agree with your take on the anime — I think the first episode was a serious fumble and it doesn’t make me optimistic that the production will do a good job with the material.
If this makes any sense, the opening chapter of the manga (and the manga overall) is pretty creepy in a deliberate way, but the anime seems to be unintentionally creepy, as if they thought it was a heartwarming and wholesome story right from the start. It’s not!
If you take away the science fiction elements, this is a story of a lonely middle-class guy who drinks too much, has no luck with women, and finds someone to do his chores for him; and he falls for this person, who has no citizenship, no rights, and no other options. So she marries him. This happens a lot in the real world. If Miina was a domestic worker from the Philippines or Vietnam, say, you’d have the material for a serious drama.
There’s at least one point in this opening chapter where the adaptation clearly tried to paper over the creepiest thing about Takeru. In the manga, when he mentions the one girl he ever dated, he tells us that they dated in middle school. Then he says that he’s not interested in women anymore “because they’re so annoying about their likes and dislikes.” The fact that he falls for a robot that looks and acts like a child isn’t an accident. The manga doesn’t ignore this, and it does play into the plot of the whole series.
I really don’t think the anime is striking the right tone for this material. The music is aggressively cutesy and cheerful, and the OP and ED just feel so middle-of-the-road romantic-comedy-style. I wish they’d followed the mood set by the covers of the tankōbon volumes.
Casey W
July 1, 2024 at 9:54 pmJust one more comment on this first episode. In the manga, Takuma drinks two beers, Miina makes him drink an equivalent amount of water, and then she pours ten more beers down the sink. In the anime, Takuma drinks about ten beers, Miina tries to make him chug that much water, and she pours out the remaining two beers. It’s a quiet (and kind of spooky) scene in the original, but they play it for laughs in the anime, and as you say, it’s not funny.
Guardian Enzo
July 1, 2024 at 10:58 pmThat doesn’t exactly fill me with hopium.
Simone
July 2, 2024 at 1:47 amAll I could think during that scene was “damn, robots much stronger than us that can on their own judgement physically force us to do things for our own good? How could that possibly go wrong”.
I’m not sure if the manga also goes into that direction, but yeah, the overall situation seems kind of messed up.
(which speaking of manga featuring AI, reminds me of the new manga Deep Raputa, which starts as “boy has cute gamer AI fall in love with him” and as early as chapter 8 has become Very Much Not That)
Nadavu
July 5, 2024 at 3:12 amSadly, this is pretty much where Humanity is headed for. I give us 10 more years, less for Japan, of course.