Aggretsuko: satire of reality

I love Japan. The food is great, the cities are marvelous, arcades a plenty, the people leave you alone and they have the best public transportation I’ve ever seen. Being from New York makes it all the more frustrating when I hear that the downtown 6 train is running 30 minutes behind schedule and it makes me froth up anger and spite, where as in Japan the train is on a schedule as tight as a latex catsuit and are always on time. One of the stations even played the Astro Boy theme when a train arrived for fucks sake (I’m dead serious about that). I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s a wonderful country and I can’t remember a time where I felt more at ease. Which is why it’s painful to admit that I don’t think I could live there and it has nothing to do with a language/culture barrier or the fact that I fucking despise The Good Dinosuar and think Frozen is mediocre at best which would undoubtedly lead to my public execution. It’s because unless I actually become a well paid writer (fuck you a man can dream) I’d have to get an actual job and I lack what I like to refer to as “the Japanese work ethic.” Meaning working 16-18 hour days at a job that robs you of your mind, body and soul and just as you walk through your door and fantasize about getting some sleep, you have to spin on your heels and run out the door to catch the only train that’ll get you to work on time. And the result of this level of conditioning stress will have one of three effects on me, 1) I become a single function robot without a single trace of humanity left, 2) I die from exhaustion or 3) decide that the best way for me to catch up on sleep is to hurl myself off the Tokyo tower. Which brings me to Aggretsuko, a satirical look at the life of a Tokyo office worker brought to us by Sanrio of all people, the Hello Kitty company. However instead of a delightful romp with cutesy characters, Sanrio shows us cutesy characters with an edge I didn’t even know it had. It’s like if Cinderella had ordered her step family killed after she became royalty and fed their remains to the mice as payment for the dress they fucked up. Ok Aggretsuko isn’t morbid, but I doubt Hello Kitty ever dealt with being so low on food money she had to eat bread crust and mayo for lunch.

In a depiction of Tokyo just a few species short of being fucking Zootopia, we follow the life of Retsuko, a cutesy red panda as she goes through the motion of getting through a day of work without smashing her boss and/or co-worker’s head/s through a computer monitor. To make sure she doesn’t go berserk, Retsuko vents her anger by channeling the spirit of Nathan Explosion and sings death metal. To each their own, I watch tv, write, collect comics and habitually wank to vent my own frustrations and I like how Retsuko has to remind herself to switch between rage death metal mode to normal worker mode to keep her love of metal a secret since metal is her only light in an otherwise bleak and unforgiving world that wants nothing more than to swallow her whole and revel in her suffering as she tries claws her way up from the maw only for it to drag her back down into the dirt where she belongs.

Fuck sorry, I keep going to the depressing side of things when Aggretsuko itself is a comedy that’s brightly colored and lively and has fun and quirky characters who are stereotypes of people you’d actually see in an office environment, the big-mouthed gossip, the suck up, the bitter coworker who really just needs a hug, the sexist boss depicted as a literal pig, etc. basically characters that make the audience roll their eyes and say “oh yeah, I know that guy” and it’s nice to see how Retsuko interacts with them, either being friendly, brushing them aside or just waiting for the day they die. That being said the series really doesn’t sugar coat how Retsuko is nothing more but an expendable cog in this office work environment, getting bitched by her boss and senior staff, doing other’s work, all the while bottling up her rage and dreaming of a day when she can quit her job and knee her boss in the fucking bollocks all the while drifting from task to task with a smile on her face while slowly dying on the inside.

It may be a cruel thing to say, but it really seems like Retsuko brings a lot of this anguish on herself, like the scene where she’s stopped on the street to be asked about her boss and she goes off about him. Yeah her face was obscured but it’s not too hard to figure out who she is, it’s like Superman and a simple pair of glasses. And of course it bites her square in her ass, because why wouldn’t it? And while it was nice to see Retsuko stand up for herself when a new job opportunity presented itself she really should’ve waited to make sure it didn’t fall through and get even further on her boss’s shit list. But I can’t exactly blame her, in fact I commend her for not offing herself and contributing to Japan’s ever-growing suicide statistic and instead tries new things to help her get through the day, like taking up yoga to land herself a man and become a housewife, oh Retsuko you scamp. She even makes friends with the higher-ups in the company, namely Director Gori and Washimi, the company president’s secretary.

And if I may digress for a hot second, I actually prefer the Japanese dialogue over the English, not because the English dub is bad it’s actually quite good and not because I’m a bottom feeding, parasitic, taint worm who says “ONLY THE JAPANESE DUBS ARE GOOD,” but because Washimi and Gori have a bit more depth to them in the Japanese dub. See in the Japanese dub Washimi and Gori admire Retsuko despite their status for being able to keep coming into work with her head held high despite the shit storm she’s subjected to and it’s because of that they both think that Retsuko’s the bee’s knees and want to hang out with her but are a little too scared to do so. While in the English dub it seems more like the only reason they admire her is because they have a girl crush on Retsuko, at least Gori does. Which is not to say there isn’t implied girl crushes in the Japanese dub, but it’s not the reason they like Retsuko. It only takes a yoga class and a karaoke hang out to become friends and it’s much more believable that they became fast friends because both parties thought the other was just so fucking cool that they’d never want to be friends with them/her but find common ground a bond over it and thus a new squad is born instead of it being something out of infatuation. They even give Retsuko advice on her life, Washimi flat-out saying that Retsuko’s plan to just get married and quit her job is a bad idea because it wouldn’t be fair to her or the guy she marries if it’s for a selfish reason and using her sway with the president to get Retsuko’s boss to start treating his staff with more respect. It’s the little victories like this that keep you rooting for Retsuko to make it through the next day.

The writing? uh, it’s… ok I guess. Which may cause some of you to raise a brow or two because I have a tendency to fire shows out of cannons if their story is less than satisfactory, but it’s the truth. Nothing really grips my heart like Mola Ram in the Temple of Doom or takes me on a fucking awesome rollercoaster like Megalo Box because the scenarios Retsuko’s in have been done and seen before and it’s not hard to predict what’ll happen next. Retsuko goes to a wedding, Retsuko now has no food budget because of the money gift to the couple, Retsuko is offered a job with an old friend, falls through because friend doesn’t really know what the fuck she’s doing and this is only episode 2, it’s not exactly “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” And the show only has one joke, sure there are a few moments that are funny but the only joke that gets told is “cute red panda goes death metal angry” and while it is amusing, stops being funny after a while. But what the show does do well and allows me to spare it from cannon fire is how they develop their characters. And I’m not talking about our protagonist, because I like to think I explained enough about how great Retsuko is without spoiling anything major I’m talking about the supporting cast. A good example is Tsunoda the deer girl who I like very much. I recall watching this with a buddy of mine and when they first saw her the response I got was “Wow she’s such a bitch!” But I don’t get that from her, in fact she might just be one of the smartest characters in the show. See Tsunoda on the surface is a bubbly, cutesy, pretty girl who acts dumb and sucks up to the boss so hard she might as well be called the Cervinae vacuum to get out of doing any actual work. But when Retsuko wants advice on how to get on the boss’s good side, Tsunoda basically acknowledges the fact that no one in the office likes her and that she acts the way she does so she doesn’t wind up like Retsuko, getting kicked around like the office soccer ball. It’s her survival tactic and while you could argue that Retsuko’s way of dealing with work is the more honest therefore the better way, I can’t say what Tsunoda does is wrong or that she’s a bitch, she’s found a way to get in and out at work while still clinging to her sanity and I have to applaud her for that.

So I guess another good question is, if this show beats down a cutesy animal girl and constantly reminds me of my least favorite topic the “real world” and has writing that’s slightly average then why do I like it so much? Well because life is a lesson in duality and one can only experience pleasure if there’s been pain to be put into context, I like to think this applies to a story and characters as well. Seeing Retsuko get knocked down only for her to get back up and eye the unfeeling monster that is office work with determination and drive is rather endearing and we celebrate her highs because we’ve seen her at her low. This is probably why I really, really love “M.A.S.H” as much as I do. From the opening credits the tone is established saying “take the war and the casualties seriously because the doctors and nurses of the 4077th will” and you can feel the crushing weight on their shoulders from the war and their duties to save as many soldiers as they can only for them to go back to the front and either die or get sent back to a M.A.S.H unit and start the process all over again until God willing they get sent back home and the toll it takes on the characters is painfully evident in some cases, but the show doesn’t take itself so seriously that we can’t enjoy Hawkeye’s wise cracks at Frank’s expense or Klinger’s latest attempt at a section 8.

The other reason is probably because this was done by Sanrio and allow me to elaborate with a quick hypothetical. Let’s say Aggretsuko wasn’t done by Sanrio and instead of cutesy animals the characters were just regular humans, would people still watch it? Maybe some but I’m sure it wouldn’t have as much of an audience as it does now and I for one wouldn’t even fucking bother watching it because it wouldn’t look appealing or very interesting. But that’s the Aggretsuko difference, its unique style of brightly colored animals makes it stand out amongst the other slice of life animes that exist and the level of separation between us and the characters is just right for us to enjoy the story without it bumming us out despite how real it can get which I think would lose its charm if it were a person getting dragged around on a choke chain through yet another degrading day.

You may have noticed this review is considerably shorter than my last one, well what did you expect? Each episode is 15 minutes long, it was the 1st season and there’s really not much else to say about it. But over all I enjoyed my romp with Sanrio’s risk, it doesn’t do anything ground breaking but it’s unique, has charm and is a lot of fun if you got time on your commute and want to bang out an episode or two and want a reminder of no matter how much you struggle you’ll only be met with a cold grip of loneliness and death as you punch the clock and count down the hours like you’re waiting for your own execution and you’re not sure if it’s better to wait for the executioner or take matters into your own hands then Aggretsuko’s got you covered. Wait what was I talking about?