Bakemonogatari

Similar: The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi
Season 1 of the Monogatari Series; Ongoing
Followed by: Nisemonogatari, Nekomonogatari, Monogatari Series: Second Season

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Anime Rating: 4!
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If you want something completely different, check out Bakemonogatari. I first saw this when it was coming out in 2009 and I'm finally catching up on the rest of the series that is out. I've made it clear that I'm pretty big on uniqueness but Bakemonogatari takes the cake. The style is extremely clean and it is immensely dialogue heavy so if you're not into that they I'd stay away. It's based on a set of light novels by Nisio Isin and the anime watches like a novel if that makes sense. There are essentially dialogue/thought cards that appear on screen to either indicate time passing, dialogue that isn't vocalized, or just to break the tension; different color cards will appear literally saying black scene or red scene or other colors while the dialogue is occurring to break up the images.


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The show also uses intense amounts of minimalism to tell the story. There are absolutely no characters in the show that aren't important to the story. The entire world is empty except for anyone that has dialogue pertaining to the story which can get a little weird at first but since the story contains so much dialogue it's easy to forget that no one else is there.


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The story revolves around Araragi Koyomi and his interactions with different girls that encounter supernatural trouble. What I do like:

• The story's goal is that no one can save another person. Everyone must save themselves, anyone else can only help. This is really nice because the set up is a prince-style story where Koyomi goes around saving everyone. He actually rarely does so. He helps out as much as possible but rarely does any saving since most of the supernatural occurrences take place due to the beliefs or mentality of the girl and usually needs to be literally saved by someone else.
• The show plays a lot on sexual humor and sexual tension, sometimes having that be an actual sub-plot of the show. The main cast is essentially a collection of introverts and the main focus is mostly them bantering back and forth which is wonderful and having the sexual humor in there works and is pretty amusing.

It becomes a bit troublesome that the show is geared towards a male audience, so while there is lot of skin shown on the female side of the cast, the male side rarely has any. Which leads to the audience of the show discussing about how deep the show is (which it is) while showing images and gifs of the female characters half naked. Whether it's the author or the publisher, I have no clue, but I think the show would be even better if it leveled out the sexuality. It's rare to find a show that actually portrays sexual humor somewhat normally and treats it as banter:



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This is far enough into the show (actually from Second Series, sorry) where you know that he wouldn't actually use it and it's just comedy.

So Pro's: It's different, dialogue-heavy, characters are explored thoroughly, has a bunch of action and romance, and relies on meta-humor.

Con's: While sexuality is used as symbolism for a few of the characters in what I believe to be a positive light (feel free to disagree), the overuse of sexuality on only the female characters gets a little frustrating to the point where the the plot and unique ascetics of the show get overlooked.

It's a pretty cool show. Check it out!


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