What Makes Slice of Life Anime so Special

This post is by guest writer Liam O’Loghlen.

Let’s talk about slice of life anime. Yes, that slice of life. That same genre allegedly responsible for the fiery death of the industry. It’s no secret that many anime fans cringe at the thought of slice of life shows, and as someone who was ushered into anime as a full time hobby by some of these works, I found that confusing and challenging. For a while I felt self-conscious, that to be a truly engaged and intelligent anime consumer I had to stop liking my cutesy everyday stories and start calling them out as the results of a cynical vapid trend that was threatening the Masaaki Yuasas and the Kunihiko Ikuharas and their ability to make good anime.

As I got older, I started to think more about why I liked these shows, and eventually I started listening to others and what they liked about slice of life. After some soul searching, I reached the conclusion that I still liked my cute stuff. Sure I could probably never in a million years sell a series like Is The Order A Rabbit? to anyone who isn’t typically into that kind of thing, but maybe, just maybe, there’s something else here worth genuinely appreciating.

To begin this analysis I want to start with the “typical” slice of life series, the 4-koma manga adaptation. 4-koma manga is very similar to newspaper comic strips, usually defined by a series of brief panels that lead into a quick punchline. They deliver easy chuckles, although rarely being outright hilarious. This is the popular format for slice of life manga, and tends to be good at carrying the cute, light-hearted tone of these works.

The “innovator” so to speak of this format was Azumanga Daioh by Kiyohiko Azuma. Azumanga Daioh, as with many of these works, centers on a group of teenage girls and their slightly quirky but ultimately mundane everyday life — although it tends to lean a little more into quirkiness than its ostensible imitators such as: Strawberry Marshmallow, Hidamari Sketch, A Channel, Yuyushiki, KINMOZA!, Is The Order A Rabbit?…the list goes on and on and on.

Every so often you’ll find the bones of the 4-koma format sticking out.

The general issue with adapting these works is expanding these very simple punch lines into an extended form, while also accounting for the multimodal aspects of anime like color and animation and sound. Ultimately, the anime form is simply incapable of delivering the snappy timing that a lot of manga gags demand, given every scene is busy with all those other elements that need to go into an anime. JC Staff’s Azumanga Daioh, directed by Hiroshi Nishikiori. is a mostly competent adaptation, but like with many of these shows, every so often you’ll find the bones of the 4-koma format sticking out.

In episode seven of Azumanga Daioh, Sakaki, a lover of all cute things, meets Chiyo’s dog Mr. Tadakichi. We get a funny sequence where Sakaki is allowed to pet Chiyo’s dog and becomes overly infatuated with it to the point that Chiyo has to intervene, which unfortunately doesn’t pack the same punch in the adaptation as the source material. Whereas the manga only dedicates one comic to the punch line (which only takes a few seconds to read) the anime expands it to around a minute.

Long, uncomfortable silences aren’t necessarily a bad platform for comedy, and they can sometimes be incredibly funny, but being used with a joke like this that isn’t inherently laugh out loud simply doesn’t work. It’s chuckle-worthy, and indeed very cute, but given this much space the joke feels slightly tedious. It reveals just how light these source materials are in content, often so light that adaptation is incredibly difficult. In spite of this, these works continue to be appealing just for the fact that they’re simple and cute. I consider myself one of these fans, but they’re the kinds of “personal taste” shows that I wouldn’t go to bat for.

So why would I imply that there’s secretly something more to this? Well, my answer is two simple words: Kyoto Animation. I believe that Kyoto Animation (or KyoAni for short), who’s widely deemed responsible for the popularity of these anime, is actually a prime example of how much more the genre can do. But before I get into that, I want to give a brief anecdote.

I was sampling some anime with a casual but interested friend, and did my best to cram in the widest range of shows possible. One of them was KyoAni’s Lucky Star, their initial foray into slice of life anime, which was met by my friend with complete disinterest and ridicule. After that I was hesitant to show her KyoAni’s later slice of life series, K-ON!, but to my shock K-ON! was a hit. I knew for myself that these were two very different shows, but I didn’t expect someone who wasn’t savvy with the genre to discern it. When I asked what was so different, the simple answer I got was that “stuff actually happens”, which is actually true and which I don’t think K-ON! gets enough credit for, due to how subdued its conflicts are.

Yamada’s K-ON! adaptation puts an emphasis on filling the space between gags.

But to elicit such a sharp contrast in reactions means that there’s obviously something more at play here. What I’ve found with Naoko Yamada’s K-ON! adaptation is that there’s an incredible level of nuance in its execution. In essence, what Yamada does, besides adapting the gags, is put an emphasis on filling in the space between the gags that can’t be reached by a 4-koma comic.

This can all be seen in Yamada’s K-ON! in its sense of visual space and the way it frames the body language of its characters. In the first 30 seconds, we already have a firm grasp on our main character, Yui, and the space she occupies.

K-ON! begins with a shot of a girls’ middle school graduation photo, as a ticking clock and chirping birds faintly echo in the background. The alarm clock goes off as the scene pans across various objects in the dimly lit bedroom. A peculiar doll, a high school uniform, a pair of leggings sloppily draped on a chair, and a bag sitting on a desk. We already know that this is an oddball girl on her first day of high school before we even physically see her.

We then cut to Yui, whose figure is squirming under the covers as she greets her alarm with a reluctant sigh. A desperate hand reaches out from under the covers, just barely out of reach of the alarm clock. We zoom in on her hand where, in one half-second motion, Yui musters all her strength to reach out, knocking over the alarm clock and clutching it by the snooze button. With a job well done, we zoom out as she relaxes her hand and drifts back to sleep.

In these first 30 seconds, all without a single word, we intimately experience Yui trying to get up for her first day of school, and through that we get an incredibly distinct feel for her eccentric airheaded personality.

Throughout the rest of K-ON!‘s two minute introduction we get an accumulation of these subtle gestures that emphasize Yui’s personality. We see her slip on the wooden floor trying to race to school, before sheepishly picking herself up again. We watch her furiously dashing to get to school, interposed with half second cuts of her getting distracted by a cat on the side of the road and helping an old lady cross the street. We see her panning her head across the entire room during her entrance ceremony, leaning forward, twisting in her chair to look behind herself, and gradually turning her head to each side in sheer awe of her new high school surroundings.

Of course, Yui isn’t a spectacularly nuanced personality even as far as traditional 4-koma slice of life goes, but by representing her character through this build-up of subtle human gestures instead of light but obvious punch lines, there’s a certain genuine resonance that Naoko Yamada creates with the character.

But slice of life isn’t all just cute girls being silly. Everyday life has a lot more stories to tell, and to that end KyoAni also shines. If you look at their track record, you’ll notice that the only 4-koma manga that they have actually adapted are the aforementioned K-ON! and Lucky Star, and that many of their works are typically adaptations of light novels and traditional novels. KyoAni has perhaps the most consistent in-house craft in the industry, and they’re the standard bearer when it comes to the ability to build little individual moments into a whole that’s endearing and, at their very best, deeply resonant.

Although KyoAni has kept almost all of their shows within the specific focus of high school life, they’ve told a lot of different stories within that space and traversed numerous genres. The screwball comedy of Nichijou; the mundane mysteries of Hyouka; the goofy but endearing romantic comedy about socially confused teenagers of Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions; the intimate ensemble human drama of Sound! Euphonium; each of these demonstrate just how many ways you can tell a story about the everyday lives of high schoolers.

KyoAni has an incredible talent for painting intimate pictures of everyday life.

Just as there is with K-ON!, there’s a lot to talk about in the subtle character moments of many of these shows. I could talk about the first episode of Chunibyo, where former social outcasts Yuuta and Nibutani meet when they both self-consciously go to look at themselves in the mirror on their first day of high school. Or I could talk about episode five of Euphonium, where an initially awkward and distant conversation between Kumiko and Reina leads to Kumiko forcefully trying to close the distance between them before Reina finally accepts her with a vividly warm smile. There are a lot of little moments and gestures in these shows that I could dissect and admire for their deep human resonance. KyoAni as a collective has an incredible talent for depicting these moments, both humorous and earnest, that paint intimate pictures of everyday life.

But maybe you’re bored with all of these anime about teenagers, and you want more everyday stories about adults. Well, to that end, I introduce to you Shirobako. I went into brief detail about Shirobako in my contribution to the favorite anime of 2015 post, but it’s a series that’s worth talking about more.

Shirobako begins with our protagonists as high schoolers, glowing with optimism and working their way towards their dream jobs in the anime industry. Then cut to several years later when they’ve gotten their foot in the door, and they’ve realized that things aren’t as magical as they seem. What they’ve got on their hands is a job, one filled with seemingly impossible deadlines and unreliable collaborators and lots and lots of sleepless nights.

Shirobako doesn’t hold back on the sentiment that even dream jobs can sometimes really suck, to the extent that you start to deeply question why you’re there. It doesn’t try to heavily glamorize or dramatize real life; it represents the struggles of working in the anime industry, and by extension the struggles of adulthood, with deep earnestness. But as much as our worst selves like to think that life is all miserable, for a lot of us it really isn’t. Shirobako recognizes that, and it balances its upfront reflections on creative struggles with an endearing cast of characters and a warm sense of humor.

Shirobako is a phenomenal, relatable series that’s a little closer to real life.

While Shirobako doesn’t create the kind of moment to moment resonance of some of the shining parts of KyoAni’s best, it does present something that KyoAni probably never will: a serious slice of life story about adults. If what you wanted out of slice of life was something a little closer to real life, and maybe something you can personally relate to more, Shirobako is a phenomenal series. There are plenty more slice of life shows like Shirobako if you do some digging, that offer something more for mature viewers to appreciate. After all, this genre offers as many possibilities as life itself.

Maybe what you look for in anime are action and thrills, or bold weirdness and psychological themes, or a whole range of other things that do so much more for you than these relatively mundane narratives about regular life. I appreciate anime for those things as well. But hopefully reading this will help you appreciate just how much there is to offer in the slice of life genre. We’re all here because anime is special to us in one way or a million, and it means a lot to be able to value each and every one of those things.

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