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This Week in Anime
Is Do It Yourself Worth Watching?

by Steve Jones & Christopher Farris,

This "girls join an ailing club" anime has stayed mostly under the radar, but its stellar animation and humorous character writing is reason enough to move it off your backlog.

This series is streaming on Crunchyroll

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Steve
Chris, I'm sure many of our readers are scrambling for last-minute gift ideas with the holidays fast approaching. Lucky for them, I've got just the thing to help: an anime chock full of cute, eye-catching crafts you can make at home, with plenty of precise and technical animation. Plus, a pig with sunglasses. Doesn't get more festive than that.
Chris
Careful, poor Meat there worries about enough in general without the concerns that he's specifically going to wind up a Christmas ham.
DIY is a big umbrella, so surely, if you think about it, that includes cooking food you've grown yourself.
The crafty characters of this show haven't graduated to those kinds of Silver Spoon levels yet, so instead, we'll have to settle for them constructing an adorable miniature Oinky-Doink Cafe for the little pork chop to live in.

And if you find yourself interested in projects like that, which make great holiday gifts, this show will be happy to teach you how to...Do It Yourself.
And look, I get it, in a season full of chainsawed men and mercurial witches, a comfy show about girls big into woodworking probably isn't at the top of anybody's anime priority list. But I'm here to convince you that Do It Yourself!! is a special little sleeper hit with plenty of action, drama, and terminally clumsy heroines.
Heck, DIY even seems to have been overshadowed in its cute-girls-doing-cute-things category by this season's Bocchi the Rock. Which certainly isn't fair; there's plenty of room under that particular awning for multiple shows. And even if there wasn't, the girls of the DIY Club could add on an extension in an afternoon or two.

It helps that DIY is going for a different vibe than Bocchi. That all-important comfiness you mentioned is undoubtedly its defining feeling, making it come off like a successor to Laid-Back Camp more than anything else (hence us giving DIY a shout-out when we talked about that one's movie a couple of weeks ago).
Yeah, spiritually, I'd pin it closest to Laid-Back Camp too. And as with that show, the x-factor that pushes DIY beyond the limits of your average esoteric hobby anime is, appropriately enough, craft. Everything comes together in a meticulously cozy package, from the character designs to the writing and animation. The vibes are impeccable. I mean, just look at Serufu's design. Gaze into her void of a mouth. It tells you everything you need to know about her personality.
She doesn't need to tell you, "No thoughts, head empty"; you can look in there and see for yourself!

This story being anime-original and true to the show's core thesis was a boon to Pine Jam's production. The freedom they had to craft everything about it themselves from the ground up, allowing the setting and the characters like Serufu to be perfectly refined, lets those all-important vibes come through clearly.
It holds pace with Laid-Back Camp's brand of dumb humor too. Like, our protagonist's full name is Yua Serufu, solely because of the terrible pun it allows, which the show proceeds to gleefully jab the audience's ribs about time and again. I respect it so much.
They're very proud of it. As they should be.

As far as I can tell, all of the characters' names are puns in Japanese, with some being much more labored than others. Conveniently, though, Serufu gives everyone great nicknames. Like Jobko.

Perfect character. Perfect name. No notes.
They had to give Jobko a distinctive nickname, given that her full name is far too common and typically American.

I must've known at least three girls named this in sixth grade.
Jobko's the most relatable character in the show for me personally. Yes, we may both be Americans with painfully dull names, but more importantly, we both know the acute pain of learning kanji.

This isn't a joke, this is life.
The acute relatability of an accomplished genius who is also a tiny, lonely child who can't read.

Jobko rules for many reasons, including compounding some of Serufu's already-impressive nicknaming shenanigans.

Poor Purin/Pudding will be lucky if even her mother keeps calling her Miku moving forward.
It's only natural for the entire cast to recognize the pudding-like consistency of her face.


If pouts could generate electricity, Purin would have already solved the energy crisis.
Maybe the magnitude of her tsundere attitude has powered humanity's progress into the technological near-future depicted in DIY? We might never find out due to Purin being terminally unable to admit her feelings. Both for Serufu and the fine art of handcrafts.
Purin's the secret sauce tying the whole show together. She's tsundere in an almost refreshingly classical sense. Like a worn t-shirt that's boomeranged back into style. The series perceptibly brightens whenever she's around because it inevitably turns into an opportunity to dunk on her stubbornness.


Jobko stone-cold murders her here. It's so good.
The poor girl's got it bad, and I don't think I'd want her any other way. Apart from providing chemistry to bounce off of Serufu, Jobko, and others, Purin's position to the rest of the cast presents a clear goal and motivation for Serufu, from the beginning of the story and continuing through it.


The clumsy cutie just wanted to reconnect with a friend she felt she'd drifted away from, and if she had to make multiple new friends and develop new skills to do so, well, win-win.
I also love how Purin's presence tends to reveal how savagely perceptive Serufu can be. Behind her space-cadet exterior, she knows that Purin wants to join their club. She practically teases her about it multiple times.

This makes more sense once we learn that Serufu's a genius who's only held back because God had to nerf her for being too powerful.

The plot twist of the century. Poor Rei went from basking in the mystique of being the coolest, most capable club president to wondering how she wound up running a crew of actual child geniuses.

That's another part of the show's style: Everyone has their distinct strengths and weaknesses, but your book smarts or natural dexterity shouldn't dictate how enjoyable it is for anyone to hang out, making everything from trinkets to treehouses.
Rei, for instance, is introduced socket-wrench first. Thus, she leads the club and most of the crafting activities, which further benefit from painstakingly precise technical animation and storyboarding.

Whenever someone pulls a power tool out, the show turns into a YouTube tutorial, and I mean that in the best way possible.
The contrast between the loose, animation-friendly character designs and the lovingly rendered real-world tools is a genuine stylistic highlight.


Also, anything that nets us additional shots of anime girls wielding power tools is an obvious win. Everyone knows that.
And if they don't know that, Shii can beat some sense into them.
The last time I saw a cat with a mallet that big was in a Tom & Jerry cartoon.
We're not kidding about the cat thing.

It's the future! We have no idea how far splicing human and animal DNA has progressed in this hypothetical setting! It makes complete sense for Shii to be some experimental human/cat hybrid.
The near-future setting is a cool detail and a deliberate one when you consider DIY in the context of rapidly advancing technologies, including the current hot-button issue of AI. This is all stuff the show brings up in its text! Like Serufu, it's got a surprisingly good head on its shoulders.
I initially had concerns that the series might be condescending or dismissive of technology, but that is not the case. DIY recognizes that there's always going to be a necessary place for progress in an advancing society but also posits that there's no reason not to integrate it into the sheer joy of creation. Jobko's a great example of that balance, using apps to measure spaces and produce blueprints, all still in service of doing stuff like hanging up hammocks and building tree forts.
Yeah, there's a lot of nuance and thoughtfulness to its interrogations of how work and technology interact, which is unsurprising if you consider that one of the people behind the show's original concept is (probably) Mitsuo Iso. He's not directly credited, but someone named IMAGO is, and considering the context of that word in Dennou Coil, alongside DIY's thematic fascinations, it's pretty obvious.

I also can't think of many anime creators besides Iso who would give a pig both sunglasses and a power drill.

At least the pig is wearing some eye protection while using that thing, which is more than I can say for 99% of the tool usage in this series.

Like DIY, I love you and what you're doing, but when you already acknowledge in several scenes that there are going to be safety issues for some of these activities, maybe you also ought to instill the most basic precautions to the audience while providing these otherwise lovingly-detailed tutorials?
Serufu's lucky she lives in a cartoon world where band-aids can heal all wounds. The show's just a little too airy to deal with anything more serious than that. Though it was funny this past week to find DIY dipping its toes into some honest-to-goodness drama.
One of the heaviest drama bombs of this anime season comes from the handicrafts healing show! I was amazed at how effectively the series commits to it, including ominous lightning flashes and held shots implying that Serufu's smile and optimism were gone.
Serufu goes into a dang fugue state and has to be fished out of it by the love of her life and a couple of wood planks.
Sometimes all you need is confirmation that your particular Squidward really likes Krabby Patties to get you back on the sawhorse.

Though your club advisor delivering replacement goods and expositing the whole dang thesis of the work probably helps too.

I'm amazed this wasn't the series finale considering everything that happens. Especially with how it ends with Serufu finally proposing to Purin with that classic romantic gesture we all know and love.

The Witch from Mercury's famous proposal ain't got nothing on the raw passion of your crush asking you to build a treehouse together.
Both DIY and Chainsaw Man teach us that power tools are the quickest way to a person's heart. In one way or another.
The show's found its way into my heart, in that gentler sense, throughout this season. Serufu her, uh, self, in particular, is a character who's grown very near and dear to me. It's nice to see someone who struggles with some things and is aware of it but still has friends who are happy to include her, help her out, and let her exercise her unique talents.

While also watching out for her as much as possible.
Of course. DIY is an exemplary and comfy iteration of the hobby anime genre, and I'll be sad when it eventually has to go. It's one of those shows that feels like a true labor of love, much like the crafts made by the girls. And I can't say that many other anime have made me feel like picking up a hammer and nails and applying some elbow grease, so DIY's in an echelon all its own.
It's fun that the show works as an example of joyful creation for its own sake. It shares seasonal space with many glossy, high-profile adaptations and franchise entries. Doing it all yourself means it remains true to yourself, after all.
So please, join us as fellow DIY devotees! Or meet the wrong end of Shii's crowbar! It's a simple choice!
I know I wouldn't take that chance.
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