This Week in Anime

Househusbandly Duties

Steve
Nick, I don't know about you, but I've been blown away by the overall quality of the new premieres this season. Episode after episode, show after show, my arms can barely hold all of the quirky, interesting, and bold new anime titles that aspire to push this quasi-medium of ours forward. I can't wait to talk about them! Too bad we can't yet! We gotta pay the Netflix tax first, so let's break down just what the heck happened here.

Okay, as someone who actually had to suffer through the entire length of that garbage, I can at least qualify every ensuing criticism I'm going to make here with the acknowledgement that Way of the Househusband, even in this form, is a billion times better than sitting through Back Street Girls: Gokudols again.

And if we do get a Back Street Girls season 2, ANN better be ready to break out the hazard pay.

Yeah so that's the elephant in the room with a big dragon tattoo on its back. What we have here is an adaptation one might generously describe as a "motion comic," in which the source manga panels are recreated as faithfully as possible in anime form, with minimal motion and even less in-betweening. It's, uh, a choice.

And I believe the story is that this style was a request/demand by one of the bigwig producers, so I'm not laying any blame on anyone actually involved with the hard work of making this style work as much as possible. It's a shitty situation. And it certainly doesn't help that this has been applied to the genre that probably requires the most fine-tuning out of all of them when it comes to stuff like presentation and pacing: comedy.

I haven't read the manga at all outside of the scattershot pages that get posted on Twitter all the time (which are consistently very good). So having the element of novelty on my side, I still had some good chuckles, but I couldn't escape the nagging feeling that a lot of these jokes probably worked a hell of a lot better in their original form.

Like, we don't have to talk shop too deeply—mostly because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about—but manga and anime two fundamentally different mediums. The way you process information by reading a still picture with printed words is completely different from how you process information from moving pictures and spoken words. Translation from one medium to the other involves just that: translation. You have to make educated decisions and changes in order to take a joke that worked in a manga and make it work in an anime.

And I lied, I will talk shop a bit more: one way manga controls pacing is by the size and placement of its panels. I read the first chapter of the Househusband manga after watching the anime, and the manga's sense of paneling is really smart! There's a conducive rhythmic crescendo to its punchlines. But the anime recreates the manga so faithfully it won't change the size of the panels, so you get these awkward pans over a portrait-oriented image when seeing the full picture at once is usually integral to the joke. The end result just looks weird, and it doesn't work.

And you can use negative space constructively in an anime! Osamu Dezaki did it all the time. But there has to be a reason for it beyond "whoops, all motion comic!"

Honestly, in spite of my complaints (which I haven't exhausted yet), the intrinsic charm of the material still ensured I had a pretty darn good time watching it. Tatsu is a fun character, and anime does at least one thing right by casting the single most perfect voice actor for him: the inimitable Kenjiro Tsuda.

That scene is legit the one part where I laughed out loud. Absolutely nothing better than hearing TsudaKen tunelessly wring Happy Birthday out of his vocal chords, with the exact texture of having just gargled an asphalt milkshake.

Oh believe me, I have been, and all too easily. I genuinely believe a lot of Househusband's success stems from people who just wanna see a happy couple who love each other very much. It's a beautiful and uncomplicated thing to behold.

It also helps that Tatsu is the platonic ideal of the Venn diagram intersection between Wife Guy and Malewife.

What a catch.

Somebody's pinky finger is def gonna have to roll for this.

Lest I complain too much about the adaptation choices, however, I do have a Netflix-centric complaint: they don't translate one of the best Tatsu & Miku moments! He only wins his Instagram contest because Miku gives him his sole like.

Now that's true love.

Yep! I mean at this point I'm used to slamming back these shows for the column, but nobody should aspire to be as broken as us. Please savor your anime.

To be fair, we do get to see a cat dueling a pooping cat. That's pretty epic.

I'm also assuming the decision to give all the animals googly eyes was another thing ported faithfully from the manga. Which in this case was actually very good.

Yeah I imagine one of the fun things about adapting a comedy to animation is how it opens the door to enhancing the material with new jokes you can only do in animation. Just spitballing, but consider if you took all the effort spent redrawing the manga panels exactly, and instead directed it towards some absurd sakuga localized entirely in that scene. Boom, you have a novel visual component that complements the deadpan over-the-top humor of the source material.

It makes sense! Animators new and old are gonna be more familiar with the usual workflow. And if you're gonna rock that boat you better have a good reason for doing it.

Dang, I thought I was being mean, but I didn't even think to compare The Way of the Househusband to DARLING in the FRANXX. That's ice cold. Fair, but cold.

Oh yeah, and sometimes the negative space is filled in with random colors, because why the hell not?

All we're missing a bouncing Vtuber head in the corner and a chat scroll filled with unintelligible emojis.

If you have a Netflix subscription anyway and you're curious, you might as well check it out. Like I said earlier, I still had a pretty good time with it, and the voice-acting is frequently its saving grace. But the manga is probably the safest bet.

Ha, I knew I'd find a way to slide the mahjong scene in here.