A-Channel

Does a good anime need to have a good plot? The answer is: NO! Take a certain over-the-top mecha-robo anime with plenty of drills (and thus male Freudian artifacts) for example; it's plot wasn't the most original storytelling, but that didn't stop the anime from being explosively entertaining.

But does good anime need to have ANY plot? The answer is undoubtedly: NO. If otherwise, the slice-of-life genre of anime wouldn't exist; and hits like K-On, Lucky Star, and Hidamari Sketch would never have gained the popularity that they did.

So is A-channel like Lucky Star, K-On, or Hidamari Sketch? The answer is still: NO. The latter ... three anime, although plotless, have some extra premise or setting in which the contents of the anime revolve around; K-On has the pretense of forming a band, Hidamari Sketch has the setting of an art school, and Lucky Star has an otaku as the lead. A-Channel, on the other hand, has nothing.

But is that a bad thing? NO! That just means that A-Channel is a slice-of-life in its PUREST form.

A-Channel portrays the easy life of four ordinary high school girls. The main focus if this anime is undoubtedly the characters and their interactions with each other. The biggest concerns or conflicts that the characters have are simple things like their weight, jealousy over different body proportions, or being over-protective of each other. The characters do ordinary things together like going to festivals, walking home in the rain, eating at fast food restaurants, singing karaoke, or playing in the snow together. There is no storyline at all, major, minor, or subplot; all A-Channel portrays are the sweetest moments amongst the smallest actions found in daily life. It's like someone cut out the most boring 23 hours and 40 minutes of the characters' days and turned the most lively 20 minutes of each day into a show.

The characters are what drive this show; they are indeed a good group to be friends with, being diverse and varied and yet not straying too far from the norm. We have Tooru, the clever troublemaker, Nagi, the ordinary one, Yuuko, the nice-bodied scaredy-cat, and Run, the airhead of airheads. Taken individually, these character may not seem like the most interesting ensemble. But when put together, it their interactions that make this anime shine. Character development doesn't come from the growth of the characters themselves, but rather that the viewer learns more about the characters as he or she continues to watch them, just like in real friendships. The diversity and depth of the interactions are astounding, and often it's the littlest of interactions that can send the viewer the biggest signals. (i.e. Yuuko showing slight interest in the idea of Run not wearing any panties.)

Being a slice-of-life, the production value of the show need not be very high. Most slice-of-lifes can get away with mediocre animation with a lot of still shots and mediocre sound with just an opening, ending, and a handful of background tracks. A-channel does exactly that. The animation is fine; the four girls look satisfactorily cute from most angles and distances, and the sound is alright, with an upbeat opening, a winding-down ending, and BGM that doesn't find itself to be to obtrusive to the ears. There is one praiseworthy aspect of the production, and it's the number of insert songs sung by the seiyuu. Often times, when wanting to show a collections of events, the producers would display a montage of clips accompanied by an insert song often times sung by the seiyuus themselves. This technique was most apparent during the karaoke episode, and I thought it was a nice way of letting the episodes flow rather than trying to directly tell the story. Voice-action, however, is a totally different story; this is the area where slice-of-lifes absolutely cannot skimp, and A-channel here delivers what it must. Each of the seiyuus for each of the character does a splendid job of delivering the right performance at each given situation.

So is A-channel something you should watch? Well it really depends. If you want something action, drama, romance, story, plot-twists, thrills, chills, or the like, then look elsewhere. But if you're into cute girls doing cute things from day in to day out, a light hearted slice-of-life comedy for a few laughs, I suggest you give A-channel a try.

Questions, comments, criticisms and compliments are welcomed whether you found this review helpful or not.

I’m a little angry with how A-Channel ended. I thought the series had its ups and downs, which is fine, but why did it wait to the very last episode to be at its absolute finest? I’ll have some thoughts about the finale, mixing in my overall thoughts and observations about the series.

That being said, the show didn’t always try to emphasize the slice of life part of the show. Specifically earlier in the season, when the fan service took just as much priority as any character or plot development. It was almost as if they didn’t want to alienate the slice of life fan, ... while they also tried to appeal to the fan who wanted to see loli-style girls in school swimsuits and bloomers.

Overall, I’ll be sticking with my initial impressions of the show and call it mostly ok. It was sometimes good, but never great, but most important for me, it was always easy to watch.

The show looked good, but the color palette and backgrounds always seemed to overwhelm the simple and at times limiting character designs. I mean, how many ways could they animate Run being confused? Not too many, and throughout the entire series she spends about half the time with that same blank eyed (stupefied) look on her face.

I would say the same about the voice acting. The main foursome were always ok. I don’t think I ever noticed anything horrid, but at the same time, I can’t remember ever marveling at their performances. In contrast the supporting cast, Kamade and Kitou sensei along with Yutaka were a lot more colorful.

The music. If you’ve read any of the previous A-Channel reviews, you know how I felt about the creepy inserted songs throughout the series. The lyrics have always creeped me out. It was as if they were written by a fat 52-year-old otaku describing how high school girls should feel. Creepy! In particular the song while they were cleaning the pool in episode 4. I really imagined the otaku-writer, writing that song while peeping through some middle school fence somewhere in Japan. I still haven’t gotten over it. The authorities should put that guy on the must-watch list.

I have always enjoyed the opening song along with the whole opening sequence, but the marketing push of the singer and song title in the OP left me keeping my hand on my wallet. The jokes on them though because there’s no money in there.

Ultimately, I’ve enjoyed watching A-Channel, but in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind way, the show will probably fade from my memories. Especially with the new season starting as it always does. This includes the characters themselves, who were done pretty well in the show’s environment, especially my Yuuko-angel, but honestly, they aren’t very memorable.

I’ll repeat what I said in the opening line of this post. This finale made me a little mad as it, by itself, lived up to the show’s potential. It’s just too bad it wasn’t completely representative of series as a whole.


[Thoughts about final episode removed due to spoilerish tendencies: go to http://moemonster.com/2011/06/24/a-channel-episode-12-finale/ for full unedited review]

A-Channel is like K-ON! or Azumanga Daioh if the characters sucked and there was no comedy.

It starts off well enough. It has a really nice OP to pump you up for the antics to come. Fukuhara Kaori is back in the fold voicing a character much like her Tsukasa from Lucky Star. Kotobuki Minako of K-ON! fame is here too. They've even got Madoka. This is a nice cast lineup. Four girls in a high school slice of life with a cast like this, can it seriously go wrong?

The major falling of A-Channel is that it isn't funny. It isn't a slice of life with ... a gimmick, so you can't latch onto one. Most of it isn't moe, so you can't just D'AWWW at it. This is an Azumanga Daioh, where the characters are the driving point and the *only* driving point and they need to play off each other. When all of your characters save one are this uninteresting and simple, that leads to some serious problems.

You have Run, who's ditzy and spaced out. You have Nagi, who's literally an inferior Yomi from AzuDai. You have Yuuko, who gets scared easily and has big boobs. You have Tooru, who's shy but aggressive.

For each of those characters save Tooru that's all there is to them. Tooru gets a little bit more to her in that she really likes Run, she has this conflict where Run and the others are a year older than her, and she's moe. And she's the most interesting character in this show.

Ugh.

This wouldn't even be so bad if the show was actually funny. But it isn't. It makes some awful attempts at comedy every now and then but they all fall flat. Oh, Yuuko has big boobs so Tooru flips them up for some reason. Oh, Nagi's qq'ing about her weight. Oh, Run's talking to guys so Tooru's coming to scare them off.

Hilarious.

The show couldn't stop there though. Bad characters and no comedy? They had to take it one step further. On top of that, they force insert songs into every episode. EVERY. SINGLE. EPISODE. And each time except literally once, in one of the later episodes, it's shoe-horned in so jarringly that it just feels completely out of place. And awful. With lazy animation. Most of the time it's just the music played to stills.

The best that can be said of this show is that some of the music is ok, the OP is good, and the characters at least look nice.

A-Channel is awful.