“Super Seishun Brothers” is a series about two sets of twins and their amusing life together.

This is a short-pull series, as the episodes run about five minutes each, and it details the lives of (left to right):
Chika and Chiko Shinmoto
Mako and Mao Saito

We are going to assume the guys and girls are the same age, as the boys are second-year high school students and the girls are second year college students (except Mako does not go to college, but it helps with the reference).

We see their lives together as they fuddle through things. The episodes are pretty close to blackout sketches or run on one theme (the middle episodes contend themselves with adventures at the big Japanese anime/manga event), but are almost too brief to really build characters. They seem more like figures to say dialogue and hang stories from than any real people, and the problems are not really problems, more like observations on how a particular set of lives run. (more…)

When an outsider, aka those “normal” people who don’t watch anime because they’re “too old for cartoons”, thinks of anime a few things come to mind. Things like well-endowed women, giant robots, and obnoxious teenage boy protagonists. And, well, they’re probably right to an extent. Those of us who are well adapted into the anime world know that there’s much more to it. Yet, it seems that no matter what we’re looking at, be it anime, movies, television, or video games, we are obsessed with grouping everything into categories. For video games we have fighting games, RPGs, puzzles. For movies or television there’s action, fantasy, comedy, etc. Within those groups, we have tropes that are associated with them. The wise old wizard belongs to fantasy, the funny roommate who’s kind of a womanizer belongs to comedy. With anime this need to categorize is certainly evident, but I have found that Usagi Drop is in a category of its own.

If you’ve seen this short but loveable series, try to think of one trope that it really fits into. The main character is a bachelor, but he’s not a skirt chaser, or the chosen hero. He’s just a typical thirty – something man. Usagi Drop is considered a slice of life anime, but the setting isn’t a school filled with peppy teenagers. It also can fall into the very rare josei genre, but doesn’t focus on romantic relationships like they so often do. I would argue that Usagi Drop would fall into the “other” genre if there was one in anime. This is what makes the show so special. It doesn’t have any of the clichés that anime are always associated with. It’s a breath of fresh air, really. (more…)