Finished Minami-ke and it was a good old time. All of my previous comments still stand basically, and...well.
So I started Okawari right after, and what I wasn't expecting was that it'd be done by both a new studio and a new director. So all of that business about the show "settling into itself in later seasons" is right out the window, because holy hell does this feel like a different show (though that said, I believe Okaeri and Tadaima are buy the original directors- I haven't really looked into them yet).
Any of you watch Oregairu and then got whiplash once you started season 2, only to see that everything looks different and you can't even recognize some of the characters until their names are said? That's basically what Okawari felt like. And to some extent it takes this to some extremes. For instance, the Minami household is basically nothing like it was before, and a lot of the time it feels like the house's layout changes to suit the scene its in. The characters look less cute than they used to (I don't mean that they look worse, moreso that the aesthetic has moved closer to realism than anything else), and unnamed characters are filled in in black.
Other than that, there's the opening, which I somehow like more than the original's despite it being this eccentric anti-sitcom opening that doesn't fit with the show at all but, in a stranger sense, works with it really well. And I suppose I could go into a long post about what I think about it buuuuut since my contractual obligation ended with the original I'd rather not bore everyone here with my mad ramblings about the sequel. So I'll just condense it.
Okawari feels like if someone watched...let's say an Akiyuki Shinbo show or maybe Revolutionary Girl and said, "I want to make something like that." Then later went on to make The Devil is a Part-Timer and *shivers* Mirai Nikki. And that's exactly what happened. Well, the latter half happened, at least- but these odd perspective shots, the excessive use of darkness (and shading in general holy hell why is this show so dark), and an immense amount of butt definitely make it feel like the former. Which isn't really a bad thing so much but there is a definite disconnect from the former. Pretty much everything that the show either looks different or is straight up different (Haruka's school, I would assume for the sake of differentiation, is probably the most jarring thing to change in the show, to the point that I thought she might have started college in between the two series). And apart from that, the new designs can tend to emote...not so well. There are times when an emotion is meant to be displayed but it shows far better in the voice actor's performance than it does in the character's expressions or body language.
Also, they still do the hyper-realistic face gag but unlike in the original, they transition into it in real time. As in, Naru coming to terms with the falsehood of her mandom style. My problem with this is that it works less here than it did in Barakamon or the original Minami-ke because, apart from it now having a telegraph, it seems almost obligatory, as if it's something that the manga did (which I would assume it was) or potentially something that the original did to great reception that they had to replicate. Normally this would work fine but...like...there was this one scene where a character idly sat biting her nail, said gag happened thereafter, and then she changed back and said her piece. And the scene was about as funny as that previous statement reads. To this end, I think I actually have to repeat what I said about the original: this feels like a show that to settle into itself- less so the fact that it's an anime and moreso the fact that it has shoes to fill and, currently, its vision and the vision of the director don't seem to be fully in sync yet.
Aaaand that post turned out to be even longer than I wanted it to be and even less coherent than the last one. But to conclude, yeah, original Minami-ke was a good time, and Okawari's doing pretty fine, too. To the latter's credit, despite being less engaging from a character development standpoint so far, its general comedic timing and humor is better than the original's right from the get go, so despite the criticisms from my end I am actually enjoying it because there are clearly a lot of ideas floating around here that work thanks to some pretty eccentric execution. And the ending's hypnotic as hell and super mid-2000s.
Also Kana's my favorite.
I wanna be sorry.
But I can't.
I just.
Can't.
EDIT: Whelp I keep on truckin and Okawari's easily better than the original, at least from a comedy perspective. It settled into itself really quickly.
