Anime: Taisou Zamurai

Taisou Zamurai is definitely and oddball, it’s one of the most unique shows of the year and also one of the weirdest slice of life anime I’ve ever seen. The first two episodes are the divisive type that either hook you or alienate you to the point of dropping the show, which suffers from a serious identity crisis.

The premise make it seem like it’s just a sports anime but no, it’s also a drama about a man who has to take care of his daughter all alone by himself because his wife died, it’s also a comedy that keeps throwing random things at screen, from a fake ninja who is pursued by agents, to a weirdly drawn parrot, to a gyaru who changes her language at times, to an acupuncturist drag queen, to references to fictional action movies and the list goes on.

It’s also a coming of age story since there’s a noticeable time invested in developing the protagonist’s daughter and how she deals with her dead mother, her absent father, the kids at her school that makes fun of her dad, the ninja’s weirdness and all that stuff.

This weird blend of elements is what gives it an identity and makes it memorable but at the same time is what makes it hard to gain and define an audience. Everything gets its fair share of time but nothing gets enough time on screen before moving on to something completely different.

If you just want to chill and be moved by Rei’s character arc, you have to wait until some episode decides to focus on that because in the middle you’ll get weird comedy and basic training, yet if you stick with it, you’ll get the best and most moving episodes this anime has to offer.

She’s basically like Rin from Usagi Drop or Hime from Kakushigoto, only a lot more mature than them despite all of them sharing the death of at least one of their parents. Her character arc reminds me of some Simpson episodes dedicated to Marge or Lisa where they accept everything that happens around them concerning their families the best they can before they snap, then they deal with the consequences of their actions and grow because of those events, with the obvious difference being that her development is not undone because this is not an episodic comedy. She also gets to find what she wants to do with her life which is basically follow her mother’s footsteps.

If you want to see an inspirational sports series, Joe’s arc is pretty well done for you, not only he practices a sport which wasn’t covered much in anime (right now I can only think of Ganbarist Shun! as an alternative, and it was a completely different series), but the show spends a fair amount in building a fading star type of story around him. At first, it seems like it was all due to an injury but as later episodes reveal, it has to do with his own regrets and traumas he can’t leave behind, until he does because he needs to regain his former glory in order to take proper care of his daughter.

On top of that, Taisou Zamurai does the unthinkable thing of spending time in his training, showing concepts and rutines concerning his discipline and the ever present risk of not being able to perform ever again if he makes a wrong move or gets permanently injured because of excessive training, this is what other shows such as Iwa Kakeru lack and what I complained about in my review about it.

The downside is that the actual sport is not shown in a very inspirational way, the training is mostly skipped, the matches are shown quickly, and the CGI models used in them are poorly made and even more poorly animated, this definitely does not make the gymnastics to look exciting.

With that said, we see him recovering and training in order to make a new skill that will give him more points in his competitions and it’s partially thanks to his interactions with Leo, the fake ninja who’s actually a dancer. This guy is the weakest main character for me, he’s just clowning around for most of the time, and his own story is not that interesting nor explored much, but as his role of someone who has a positive influence on Joe, and at the same time gets influenced by him goes, he makes a good plot device.

I don’t have much to comment on the comedy, it’s the type of random comedy I just can’t bring myself to like, it’s not the type of over the top humor that I hate (Nichijou, Asobi Asobase, fucking Pop Team Epic, stuff like that) but for a slice of life anime, this just puts me off. Whether if this is a negative or not, it’s entirely up to each person. One thing that I have to give credit to the show is not mixing any of this silly stuff with the dramatic moments, I may not like these elements, but at least the show does not suffer from tonal whiplash.

As I hinted earlier, the first issue with Taisou Zamurai is that it’s poorly animated, leaving the sport aside, the artwork and the simplistic character designs are definitely lacking detail and the models get deformed from time to time, both the backgrounds and the effects are also simplistic and the motions, even outside the gymnastics, are rather poorly made.

As for the sound, the voice acting is ok when it’s serious and mature and kinda bad when it’s silly and comical (except for Kappei Yamaguchi as that parrot, what a guy), so it stands somewhere in the middle, the soundtrack is mostly absent or forgettable, the ending is alright, the opening is not. I don’t understand why they went with rap of all things and even having these three voice actors who are not really good at singing and one of the characters hate (or pretends that he hates) the other two so what is he even doing there. The sound effects are very good to the most part, in both the daily life moments and the sport competitions.

But down to it, Taisou Zamurai’s biggest problem is it’s biggest strenght, having this silly comedy thrown at screen and blend of different genres in just eleven episodes makes the pacing very uneven, constantly changing things and tones and dragging the plot down before forcing it to go really fast in the final episodes, thus making the show feel both fast and slow at the same time.

If you want something rather unique, here you have an aging sportsman, as he is trying to get over the death of her wife in order to improve himself and be a good father, a little girl realizing what she wants to do with her life, as well as what she does in her school and her home, a breath taking dancer who runs away from the pressure of being amazing and pretends to be a ninja while he’s chased around the world by other performers, I think? I didn’t really understand what the hell they are, they look like they belong in Men in Black rather than here. And you also get a look at a rather unique sport.

In the middle, try to deal with an acupuncturist drag queen, Kappei Yamaguchi destroying his lungs while voicing a south american parrot, a grandma who runs a bar and looks like she belongs in Gangsta or Black Lagoon that also drives the car of another person like Irisviel from Fate/Zero in a road full of traffic, from a stadium to an airport and back again to the stadium, mildly cringy and mildly inspirational monologues taken from fictional schlocky action movies, and an undeveloped romance between a guy who can’t speak normally and a gyaru whose words can’t be understood 95% of the time she talks, even when she’s not changing languages just because she feels like it.

If you don’t mind any of that as well as poor animation, you get a mostly decently made story with mostly decently written characters, that got completely overshadowed by Haikyuu! As for me, if the show had one or two more episodes, its events were paced a bit better, and it didn’t have these weird elements and comedy, I would have rated it a bit higher, but I won’t since that wasn’t the case, yet I can still say that it is among the best shows from this year, even if that doesn’t mean much.

As for some recommendations there are:

-Ganbarist Shun! the only other pure gymnastics anime that I know of, but beware for it’s a school comedy with some ecchi.

-Igano Kabamaru, horribly animated, among the craziest and weirdest school comedies anime ever put on screen, staring an actual ninja.

-Usagi Drop and Kakushigoto (the anime versions of both of them), slice of life anime about grown men taking care of a little girl by themselves, way more simple but also way more focused.