Ookami-san and her waste of Sakuga

Fuck it, it’s my blog and I can talk about whatever I want.

So for the summer anime season I’ve been watching Ookami-san and her Seven Companions (amongst other things). I wasn’t going to watch it as it looked like an ungodly Toradora rip-off, but after someone I know recommended episode one and I watched it my general feeling was “May as well, doesn’t seem to bad”. Seasons are slim pickings these days anyway. I’m not so hot on it now for various reasons, mainly because it’s just not very well written, but one aspect of it caught my attention.

Ookami-san is made by JC Staff: the division of JC Staff that did shows like Toradora and A Certain Scientific Railgun, not the division that did Taishou Yakyuu Musume and the Kaichou wa Maid-sama! adaptation that left various fans of the Maid-sama manga in despair. If you took anything from that last sentence it’s that Ookami-san is not a badly animated show at all and I can’t actually think of a part of this show I thought was animated badly. It does, however, have a gimmick that caught my attention: at the end of every episode it shows a couple of seconds of a clip from the show repeated like an animated gif. The first time I saw it it was kind of interesting and as the show progressed I found I was looking out for what could be the gif. I’m generally wrong and something I didn’t expect gets picked which made me start looking at the scenes closer than I would have otherwise. As I mentioned before Ookami-san is a well animated show that never feels sparse or out of place but watching the gifs of frames that are otherwise unremarkable it made me wonder how much work went into them. It’s possible that they’re chosen randomly from whatever amuses the production team and not animated specially. I mean, the fact that I often can’t pick it from the rest of the show certainly points to this. If not, though, there are certainly some spots where their key animation is much more badly needed.

One of the things I dislike about Ookami-san is how it tries to do self-aware Otaku pandering like two loli-type characters arguing about, uh, being loli characters. To be honest I don’t often find this funny at the best of times. I tend to term it “HA KONATA SAID TSUNDERE” syndrome after one of the worst offenders. Ookami-san isn’t that bad even though it can come close to being that bad. The gif seems to be a continuation of that, like JC Staff are trying to make something that will get posted all over the internet like that damn cabbage that will always come up when talking about dodgy animation except on purpose and smacks a little bit of trying too hard. Having said that there isn’t any reason why it shouldn’t work as omake. I do enjoy omake even if we very rarely get things like Leave it to Kero-chan or, dare I say it, the Gunbuster science lessons. Even so it still feels like a cop-out.