Tonari no Seki-kun: A (Way Too Late) Review

[radio414 906]

Crunchyroll Link

I guess the first thing I’m supposed to do is apologize? Like, the beginning of February was the original deadline and I just whizzed right by that with a halfhearted apology post. But that post had said a week from then and now it’s a week from then and it’s all really just a mess. Here it is now, though, my review of my Anime Secret Santa gift, Tonari no Seki-kun:

It’s cute. 

That’s it, that’s the review.

Okay, okay.

If I’m going to do, like, an actual review, I guess I should start with the basic info stuff, huh?

Tonari no Seki-kun, or My Neighbor Seki if Japanese isn’t your style, is a manga by Takuma Morishige that started a decade ago, and while Wikipedia says the manga is still ongoing, the most recent volume came out three years ago so take that as you will. It follows Rumi Yokoi, a schoolgirl as she tries to follow along with her lessons if only the boy sitting next to her, the titular Toshinari Seki, would stop fooling around with whatever’s on his desk. In the first episode, it’s simply dominos made from pencil erasers, but as the series progresses, so too does the complexity of Seki’s games.

It’s also in the first episode that the dynamic between these two characters is clearly established. Rumi Yokoi is a girl split in two, trapped at the crossroads between Seki’s delinquent play and the instruction of the teacher. She acts as the audience surrogate, the Watson to Seki’s Holmes, explaining and interpreting Seki’s actions to form her own (and therefore, the episode’s) narratives. Seki, meanwhile is almost entirely oblivious to Yokoi’s attraction, only noticing when she gets directly involved in his play (though sometimes not even then).

I use the word “attraction” deliberately, of course. While there is never any actual romance throughout the show’s twenty-one episodes outside of a loving couple of shogi pieces (it makes sense in context), the tension between the show’s two leads is certainly noticeable and commented on by the show itself in the form of a second narrator, a classmate named Sakurako Goto, who only gets to sit near Yokoi and Seki during art class, but when she does, hoooo does that ship set sail.

One of the most notable aspects of Tonari no Seki-kun (to me) is its brevity. The show is a healthy twenty-one episodes long, but each episode is a nice seven-and-a-half minutes, a runtime that includes the OP and closing credits so really each episode is a compact five minutes in length. It’s a format that I can really get behind, honestly. Each episode has something it wants to present or an idea it wants to portray through Seki’s games, it says it, and then it gets out to some groovy percussive beats.

Outside of the OP and ED themes, the soundtrack is suitably melodramatic and matches the tone, but not all that memorable (the robot song is the exception that proves the rule here). The emphasis in the story and sound design is clearly in Yokoi’s narration, which makes sense given it’s an adaptation of a manga. Yokoi, meanwhile, occasionally comes off as overeager, which, again, melodrama, and while I’m here for that, I don’t think I was always as here as Yokoi was. Goto, when she shows up, has similar problems, but given that her episodes have the conceit that she’s comedically reading too much into things, it didn’t quite grate as hard.

Plus, Goto’s reaction shots are cuter. There, I said it. It’s all in the pigtails.

Overall, the art is as can be expected for TV series anime on a TV series anime’s budget. The most time is spent on Seki, of course, because he’s the one doing the unique thing each episode, which leaves Yokoi to only occasionally pop into frame with cartoonishly dramatic lip flaps when her physical reaction is necessary for a joke. That being said, some of Yokoi’s reactions dip a bit into the uncanny valley.

this girl has seen things

It isn’t all bad, of course, nor is it all generic. Several episodes have imagine spots where Seki’s games literally come to life, turning his desk into a fantasy realm. I don’t know enough about the animation process to know if this other style actually costs more money to produce (especially since it mostly consists of still frames) but it certainly was a style choice I appreciated.

Some shots are obviously CG as opposed to animation, but it was never anything to immersion-breaking. I know I said I disliked “that animation style where it's clearly all 3D models but it's trying to pretend that it's 2D” but first, that’s not what I meant, and second, this would probably be an outlier anyway. Most of the movement that would require computer graphics anyway is left offscreen anyway; part of the charm of the series is Yokoi looking back at Seki’s desk and discovering just what has been gone in her absence.

The other part of the show’s charm is in how it plays with diegesis. Most of Yokoi’s narration, and even many of her reaction shots, is non-diegetic, or not part of the universe of the show. To put it another way, we, the audience, are the only ones that can hear it. But occasionally, she’ll slip up and say something in diegesis, out loud to her classroom. It’s a single joke, and I could see it getting old for some viewers, but it put a smile on my face each time, so I guess it worked.

What did get old for me, though, was in how Yokoi was treated whenever she inevitably gets caught snooping. Most of the time, she just blusters out an apology and the instructor continues with the lesson, but occasionally, she tries to point out Seki’s antics, but each time, of course, Seki has already put everything away, and she just looks crazy. I found this similar to Cadance’s antics in Phineas and Ferb, and had a similar takeaway: it’s a bit malicious on the creator’s part and makes me feel like they’re gaslighting their characters, driving them mad.

There aren’t too many (onscreen) consequences for this, but you just know Yokoi’s going to question her subjective reality one day

this girl has SEEN things

Wow, that ended a bit too heavily for how down-to-earth slice-of-life this anime really is. I think I covered almost everything I said I wanted and didn’t want to see in an anime, though, so let’s just talk about the final part.

“I like pretentious writing because I am pretentious,” I said. And I meant it.

I admit was a little disappointed in my initial viewing of Tonari no Seki-kun because, well, it did initially seem so straightforward. But then I realized one could easily make a basic Freudian analysis of the show’s two main leads, comparing Yokoi to an individual’s superego and Seki to their Id, how through that lens, the show presents the superego as always desperately trying to take control, but always failing to completely suppress the base desires of the Id. Choosing to go down that route, also leads to quite a few puns. For example, the ending credits literally splits the screen in the middle, separating the characters, and Goto, who one might (charitably) read as the ego, wants to “marry” the Id and Superego concepts. The fact that this wordplay even exists only supports my theory that this was an intentional part of the anime’s design and not just a coincidence I came up with after a few minutes of skimming Wikipedia.

To be fair, you have to have a pretty high IQ to understand Tonari no Seki-kun…

I don’t want to give Tonari no Seki-kun a score, because, as an English major, I don’t believe in numbers, but I did enjoy my time watching it and I’m glad to have participated in the Secret Santa event. To those who want to follow in my footsteps and give the series a try, I will say that the third episode, Desk Polishing was when things really started to click for me, and getting there is just about the length of a normal episode of anime anyway.

If you do like it past that point, I’m glad my review could help in some way, and if it doesn’t click, well, you’ve lost less than an hour of your time.

Thanks again to my secret santa for the recommendation, and I’ll see you all on the forum,
-radio414

Crunchyroll Link

Edited February 18, 2020 by radio414

[Sethera 290]

I read a little bit of the manga that inspired this, and I found it pretty funny. The only issue I had is it was kind of the same plot, over and over and over again, but I didn't get far enough to find out that ended up changing or not. Going from your review, it sounds like they added a couple things to spice it up, but otherwise yeah. Most of the charm seems to lie in that the formula itself is charming, even if they repeat it a lot. Which, fair. I remember having a lot of fun reading it.

I didn't consider the Freudian aspect, but that does make things more interesting--if it's true and not a Wikipedia coincidence. lol I might try and see if I can spot any underlying themes/psychological references myself while I read/watch it.

This review makes me want to pick up Tonari no Seki-kun again, so I might do that sometime. And watch the anime too. I'm not a huge anime watcher, but I'd probably be able to handle this series considering how short the episodes are.

Also:

"I don’t want to give Tonari no Seki-kun a score, because, as an English major, I don’t believe in numbers"

This is gold right here.

[radio414 906]

2 hours ago, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd said:

I didn't consider the Freudian aspect, but that does make things more interesting--if it's true and not a Wikipedia coincidence. lol I might try and see if I can spot any underlying themes/psychological references myself while I read/watch it.

Don't actually look for that stuff; it's mostly a gag I wanted to do since I said I want something "pretentious" (scarequotes mine) and the anime is anything but.

If you are looking for "underlying themes", and again, this is certainly not part of what the author or animation team was going for, I spent some time in an early draft with a more in-depth analysis of exactly what Yokoi and Seki are ignoring. The phrase "I think Global Warming is an important issue" appears on a chalkboard at one point and there's a video about the dangers of smoking, so I was going to go into the glitz and glamor of media versus the existential threat of death on a both personal and societal level but it turns out that's not a very fun or funny thing to write about (I did want to be at least a little fun and/or funny) and the whole bit was taking up a larger percentage of the review than I was comfortable with so I cut it.

[Sethera 290]

I wondered about that. But hmm, I'll have to pay more attention to the chalkboard it seems when I read/watch it.