Anime Tenchou

This is the Animation Store Manager!!

Anime Tenchou is a CM character for Animate, one of Japan's biggest retailer of anime, games, and manga. The character series was created by Shimamoto Kazuhiko for publicity purposes. Later adapted into a manga, a weekly radio drama and this OVA animated by GAINAX and directed by Anno Hideaki.

Anizawa Meito is the blazing store manager. He is a fireball who loves animation merchandise at heart. He takes over the dying wish of the former store manager, though still alive, who was attacked by the rival store and becomes a "store manager" of newly opened animation goods specialty store, Animate. The scarlet, "store manager visor" is his trademark.

(Source: AniDB)

Anizawa, Meito Main

Seki, Tomokazu Japanese

Anno, Hideaki Director

Imaishi, Hiroyuki Script, Character Design, Art Director

Seki, Tomokazu Theme Song Performance

Hoshi, Souichirou Theme Song Performance

Reviews

Dec 2, 2008

Retro8bit

Recommended

Anime Tenchou is undoubtedly one of the shortest OVAs I for one have ever seen. (2 minutes) Its actually pretty cool for its extremely short run.

Story: 6/10
Well basically the main plot involves Anizawa Meito (main) taking over his managers last wish (though actually alive) to take over his Animate store. From here we see him, along with the other workers shouting promotional advertisements for their story, and fighting their rival company by way of hand to hand combat. Their antics were quite action packed and entertaining, there definitely is a lot going on during it. (which might give some a headache) You might start to ... get the feeling that your watching some sort of Dragonball Z commercial. Which is what this OVA basically is.......a commercial! Its fun and amusing, though very very short, but you do get a nice farewell bow from the real life Animate store workers, which was kind of nice.

Artwork: 8/10
Very good considering its age, the on screen anime characters are blended in nicely with real life backgrounds from the shop and even Tokyo. All doing either crazy style martial arts, or over the top promotions. Their drawn in good detail, color and fluidity, though do show their age by today’s standards, and the animated backgrounds can be pretty plain, and just not up to standards with the well detailed characters.

Soundtrack: 7/10
After Anizawa thinks his manager is dead, he quickly puts on his uniform style apron, and is joined in conjunction with this pretty catchy 80’s style male sung j-pop theme. It plays through out the OVA in a nice montage. Though some may feel it to be too dated, it really compliments the on screen action antics well. The character voices they have their are well done, and range from deep male style voices, to the loud voices with the female co-worker of his. Though overall the voice overs are pretty sparse. Most of the time you'll just be hearing the announcer.

Characters: 8/10
Well you pretty much only get to see Anizawa for the most part, but he is joined with brief appearances by his co-workers jumping around on screen. I really liked their design and personalities. They come off more as a mix of exaggerated comical yet well proportioned characters, so it depends on your taste.

Bottom Line: 7/10
Overall its a pretty amusing run through, plus its short so there really is no reason to feel like you wasted your time by checking it out. Then again it is a commercial, and I know most of us don’t like those! Hahahaha!

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Nov 28, 2012

AnnoKano

Recommended

What do all good advertisements need?

Do they need to be informative and relevant facts clearly and concisely? Do they need to be original and distinguish themselves from their competitors? Do they need to be attractive and capture the audience’s attention?


No, No and No!

All a good advertisement needs is spirit!

How do you expect a man to sign up for a two year after sales warranty on his new dish washer if you can’t even ignite a fire in their belly with a sales pitch that even a Godfather wouldn’t be able to refuse? You can’t. You can’t even get him in ... the store, because while you decided to put out on some square in a suit, the competition splashed out on a fifty foot tall replica of the latest model with working water cannons! Purchase incentives? Don’t make me laugh; people want action, excitement.... and most of all, they want every statement to end with an exclamation mark!

Anime Tenchou is just such an advertisement, and it doesn’t simply ask you to pay them a visit; it knocks you to the floor and drags you inside by the ears. You like anime, manga, videogames and their related merchandise ventures? Great. You don’t? Well pansy, it’s time for you to grow some balls and start acting like a real man! No, don’t sign up for that gym membership; start watching anime! Don’t like it? What are you, a girl?


Oh, you are a girl? Well don’t you worry little lady; we’ve got all the manly men you crave, and there all right here... No, not walking around the store, they’re in the Yaoi manga section on the fifth floor. That’s right, a whole floor chock o’ block with cock on cock, where both the manliest and the most effeminate of drawn men get it on all day, every day. It’s what every Yaoi fangirl dreams of; a place where no one can hear them scream. Or squeal, for that matter.

(Customer Notice: Animate is not responsible for any loss of hearing that may result from travelling in or around the 5th floor.)

What the hell you waiting for? Why haven’t you watched Anime Tenchou yet? Are you telling me this literal reflection of the premise hasn’t given you an unquenchable thirst for GAR? You want me to tell you about the presentation?

The sound of Anime Tenchou is like that of a beast as it goes in for the kill; the sound of a battleship being taken down by a fighter jet; the sound of a man stubbing his toe against the leg of a table. In fact, it’s a sound so deeply masculine you can’t evoke with nancy-boy literary techniques. Such powerful emotion can be expressed through direct quotation alone:


“RAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!”

And if that doesn’t sound awesome to you, then it’s because you scream like a three year old girl.

Still not satisfied? Man, you’re one tough customer. But don’t you change the channel just yet, because I’ve saved the best for last; Anime Tenchou is so beautiful that it’ll bring a tear to your eye -mostly because you’re just a little wuss, but also because it’s nice to look at.

In fact, it’s so beautiful that it makes the Sistine Chapel look like a doodle. So beautiful that you’d think God himself was responsible for it; and he was. Well, not God exactly but definitely the next best thing; Hideaki Anno, a man already known for biblical productions like ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ and ‘Resurrection: Cutey Honey’

The character designs are so incredibly manly that the animating staff had to take anabolic steroids for three months before commencing work on Anime Tenchou, but it was worth it. The animation is smooth as greased Teflon and awesome. And lust look at those backgrounds, look how detailed they are, it’s almost like real life!... Know why? Because it is real life, dumbass! Know why they used the real world for backgrounds? Because otherwise, you wouldn’t believe a place as awesome as this could really exist!


As unbelievably manly as the artwork is, it does have a few problems. In particular the character designs, which are nicely drawn but are riddled with glaringly obvious proportional errors. Even the lead character, who’s head is visibly much, much larger than his testicles. Sure, getting the proportions exactly right would have been impossible, but come on Gainax, you can do better than that! But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on the staff of Gainax. After all, their hands were probably jittery from all the steroids.

And there you have it: that’s Anime Tenchou. Watch it, if you think you’ve got the plums for it. This review has attempted to capture the sensation of this commercial, but it’s little more than an essence- a little taster of what’s to come.
It’s difficult to describe something like Anime Tenchou with words. It’s much easier to do it with punctuation:


‘!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’

Watch it -if you think you’re man enough.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Mar 31, 2015

Shioxus

Not Recommended

This is a quirky little advertisement for the store called Animate in Japan. Anime Tenchou is their mascot, and this short features Anime Tenchou running an anime store with a cast of co workers.

The animation wasn't terrible, but the transitions from scene to scene were a little abrupt, even for a short. The sound quality wasn't great (at least where I saw it.)

This isn't the worst advertisement around, but I can't really recommend it since it doesn't do much except tell you that the store Animate exists. Since I've already done that in this review, the advertisement has even less to offer. Oops.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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