MIDORI NO HIBI

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ComedyMidori no Hibi

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  60/100
  A silly romantic comedy for anyone who's ever made a joke about dating their right hand.

  Legend tells of a delinquent, blonde of hair and covered in old wounds. His legend is vast, and his presence a specter of pure terror. He goes by several names- The Mad Dog. The Demon Fist. Underneath his reputation, however, is Seiji Sawamura, a socially awkward seventeen year old boy who has pride, stands up for those weaker than him, and can not for the life of him lose his V-card. He desires nothing more than to end his love confession losing streak, but little does he know that a cute underclassman has been looking his way for quite some time. Midori Kasugano is too shy to approach her bad boy beau, but she won’t have a choice when fate intervenes, as it always does, and throws them together... quite literally, in this case. Seiji wakes up one magical morning to find that his right hand has been replaced at the wrist by Midori’s upper body! How did this happen? How can they undo it? What happened to Midori’s real body? And how can they find the answers to all these questions when everyday life itself is about to become more than they can hand-le?

  Midori Days was produced by Studio Pierrot, whom I had talked about extensively back when I was still writing for my blog.  The quality of their work is fairly inconsistent, but the unifying thread I can see in a lot of it is that it’s mostly low budget fare, and it either looks decent in spite of this, or it’s Naruto.  As for Midori Days, it’s able to get away with a lot of shenanigans due to the fact that it’s a wacky gag comedy, and the dirt cheap budget is one of them.  Bright colors and dynamic framing make the key frames easy to ignore, fast cuts and repetitive actions shots give the illusion of increased movement, and they do legitimately save chunks of money for moments where they want to feature more extensive animation, thanks to corners being cut often enough to make up the difference using methods just smart enough to not shove it’s frugality in your face.
  
  The character designs are simple, there’s nothing really unique about them, but they still look fine.  The characters largely seem to feature realistic bodily proportions, offset by slightly moed-up faces.  Think of a slightly more generic looking version of Great Teacher Onizuka, another Pierrot property.  A lot of the comedy in an anime like this comes from exaggerated reaction shots, and in support of this, the facial expression artwork does it’s job perfectly well.  It’s not one of the best-looking anime I’ve seen, but it does as much as it needs to for this kind of material, hell, the fact that everyone stays clean and on-model is more than I’d ask for in any similar title.  I appreciate cheap productions that know how to manage their budget, and while I will again state that a lot of that is due to the lowered expectations of the genre, I’ll take what I can get wherever I can get it.  The music is fine...  It’s generic, but it’s still energetic and has effort put into it. 
  
  If the opening isn’t at least 75% made up of clips from the series, I’d be surprised, because while I haven’t gone out of my way to make any comparisons, the vibe is there.  The English dub feels archaic, like a relic of the late nineties, despite being released in the mid to late 2000s.  Drew Aaron is a somewhat lesser known voice actor, but he has the energy necessary to keep up with the speed of the comedy, and he approaches the role with more than enough enthusiasm and personality.  He does a lot of the heavy lifting throughout the story, and the only real downside to his performance is that he sounds distractingly like Vic Mignona in this particular role...  Not at a basic register, but like, when Vic is doing his ‘Edward over-reacting to being called short’ bits.  The weird thing is that Vic actually does appear in one episode, credited hilariously as “Vic FilletofTomorrow,” and you’d have to look up the credits to make sure one actor wasn’t playing double duty like in GTO.
  
  Then you have Kether Fernandez as the female lead, and I don’t know what to think of her.  She’s clearly doing an extreme falsetto for this part, using a shrill pitched-up voice to portray a shrunk human, but I don’t know what her real voice sounds like because I can’t find any other roles from her.  Does this mean she only ever did this?  Not necessarily, there have been cases of well known voice actors using false names to avoid credit for a role they don’t want their names attached to, and on a rare occasion they actually get away with it.  In all fairness, I’ve also found sources suggesting Seiji was played by a different actor, so the casting of Midori Days is just a bit dubious.  If Kether Fernandez did vanish after this role, it’s kind of a shame, because the Media-blasters DVD release has bloopers, and she has a wicked sense of humor in them.  Fans of nineties and early 2000s Saturday Morning and Toonami anime might notice a few recognizable names in the cast...  Rachel Lillis, Carrie Keranen, Dan Green, Sean Schemmel(who also directed), but the only performances that really stand out are the two leads.  It’s a fine dub, but it doesn’t improve on the Japanese version very much.
  
  Midori Days is a gimmick anime, and despite what your immediate impression of that statement probably is, I don’t mean it as a slight.  It’s not impossible for gimmick anime to blow away your expectations, even if they do live or die based on the strength of their core concept.  I’m a huge fan of Girls Und Panzer, for example, and that was firmly a gimmick anime.  Show’s like this are usually built around one single bizarre or unexpected idea, and while they can be taken in an infinite number of directions, what matters at the end of the day is whether or not the gimmick worked, how it was explored, and the level of appeal it managed to have on the viewers.
  
  You know you have a gimmick anime on your hands when you can sum it up in one sentence, without using any specific descriptors, and people who are aware of it know exactly what you’re talking about.  “You know that anime where high school girls have tank battles as a sport?”  “You know that anime where a dead guy turns into a dog and his favorite author wants to fuck him?”  “You know that isekai that had THIS one unique detail included?”  And of course, you can’t have a conversation about gimmick anime without someone bringing up Midori Days.  “Hey, you know that anime where a cute girl’s upper body becomes some dude’s hand?”  If you’ve ever encountered this anime...  Whether it be on store shelves, or in an AMV Hell clip, or pretty much anywhere else...  The imagery likely has never left your memory.
  
  In a lot of ways, the gimmick of Midori Days is not unique, certain elements of it have been done before.  There’s plenty of media about a foreign being attaching itself parasitically to your body...  Parasyte might be the most famous...  There’s media about a body part becoming sentient, my personal favorite example is Mitch Connors from South Park...  And there’s been media where two people are fused together and forced to share a body, dating at least as far back as the 1972 movie The Thing With Two Heads(my most obscure reference ever, probably, but I regret nothing).  All that aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story where someone has to share a body with their crush, and by extension, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this concept explored as a romantic comedy, so point for Midori Days, this is definitely a unique concept.
  
  So how well does it work?  Well, at first pretty damn well.  This is a story about two individuals whose lives are changed suddenly, without warning, and in the most ridiculous and outrageous way possible, so of course the results are ridiculous and outrageous.  The first third of the series is pure slice of life gag comedy as Seiji tries to go about his daily life with his hand replaced by a girl, and the writers clearly had a blast figuring out different ways to exploit the concept.  Seiji is a delinquent, used to fighting gang battles and combatting authority figures, and his affliction ties into that in some pretty entertaining ways.  The fact that Midori has feelings for Seiji is another bonus, as she tries to council him and make his life better, conveniently ignoring her own circumstances as this situation is the perfect turn of events to help her overcome her shyness in approaching Seiji.  It’s a wacky gag comedy, and it’s best when it’s in this element.
  
  Unfortunately, as we transition into the second third of the story, things begin to settle down a bit, and the exaggerated elements of both Seiji and Midori start to move into a new light.  For Seiji, this is a good thing, because we stop seeing the tough stupid virgin, we start seeing more of his strengths, his values, an his insecurities.  For Midori, well, her obsessive jealousy over Seiji was fine as a comedic element, but it gets pretty uncomfortable when we’re not supposed to laugh at it.  At some point, she got the idea that because she’s become attached to Seiji and confessed to him, that makes them a couple, and she starts to sabotage his chances with other girls who start to come into his life, which might cause you to lose sympathy for her over time. 
  
  The second third of the story is also where the comedy starts to shift away from Seiji and Midori, and onto a gaggle of other over-the-top characters, and yeah, they’re not great.  First off is Shuichi, an enthusiast for idol-girl hand puppets, what a coincidence.  It’s almost like he was designed specifically to be Seiji’s foil and would make no sense in literally any other anime(well, School Rumble could probably make him work).  You have some little girl who’s in love with Seiji and has some arbitrary parent issues to work out.  You have Seiji’s abrasive asshole sister, whose only positive contribution to the story comes from her involvement with his backstory...  The fact that she’s the one who toughened him up so much IS a refreshing flip on the tired old trope of female characters only being badasses because they’re father/brothers/male authority figure didn’t want them to be a victim...  But it doesn’t excuse her accusing him of being a pedophile because of the child glomping onto him, then turning around and encouraging her to seduce him.
  
  The only supporting cast member I kind of like is Beniko Iwasaki, a classmate of Seiji who sits beside him in class and initially acts as a well-meaning foil to him, keeping him under wraps for his own good, before she starts to fall for him...  And surprisingly, not over a misunderstanding.  She gets a glimpse of his actual moral fiber when...  Okay, it’s a spoiler, but it’s a LOT to take in, so all I’m going to say is that something very extreme and uncomfortable was about to happen to her in broad daylight, with literally hundreds of other students watching, and ONLY Seiji made any move to save her, which does paint him in a positive light, but at the expense of making the Japanese education system look even more horrifying than it already did.  That instance alone does taint her a little bit, and I can’t say I’m totally on board with a tsundere flipping from platonic feelings to head-over-heels love in such short succession, but she’s likeable enough, so it’s fine?
  
  The reason I bring all these characters up is because when a gimmick is presented in this specific way, it has to be THE point of divergence in the main characters’ lives, or it will quickly start to feel dull as it gets normalized.  A gimmick may be able to take a back seat to the story if the writing is strong enough to juggle both without one overshadowing the other, and since that is sadly not the case with Midori Days, it does start to lose steam throughout the middle of the story.  I’m not going to say much about the final third, there IS a decisive conclusion that doesn’t involve any sort of cliffhanger, and it doesn’t NOT work, but I can’t help but wonder how much stronger it could have been had the middle of the series not dragged the way it did.  It kind of feels like they were grasping at straws to find some sort of depth in their story, as they devoted an entire episode to a ‘what if’ scenario where Seiji and Midori swap places, and it turns out to be a dream sequence.  Okay, cool, glad you had your fun, guys.
  
  Midori Days is at it’s strongest when it’s not taking itself seriously, as it is a genuinely fun gag comedy.  It’s clever with the jokes it tells through it’s concept, and while the comic timing isn’t always on point, there’s enough jokes that land to make up for the ones that don’t, and they even manage to play around with tropes and expectations a bit.  Like, you know that old anime trope where a guy walks in on a girl changing, or vice versa, and either way she freaks out and hits him?  Well, Midori Days sets this joke up a few times, but the pay-off is never what you expect.  I guess on that note I should mention there is nudity in this show, and it’s kind of inconsistent in the way it’s used.  Sometimes it’s part of the set-up to a joke, sometimes it IS the joke, such as when Midori is topless when she’s discovered on Seiji’s wrist...  This series also has the dubious distinction of only featuring the SECOND most uncomfortable anime scene involving a naked girl in a coma...  And while none of it ever feels gratuitous, it doesn’t feel as casual or normalized as it did in Strike Witches.  Rather, it feels like they were looking for any plot-justified excuse to showcase exposed breasts, with a wink and a nod to people who capture screenshots for fanservice sites.
  
  To it’s credit, outside of all the bare boobs, this show is surprisingly innocent.  That’s not to say it’s clean, but it also never really goes all the way dirty.  Adolescent sexuality is acknowledged, but never exploited.  For example, we get constant references to Seiji being something of a porn addict, and it’s what he spends a decent portion of his allowance on, but the idea of Midori replacing his hand being used for any kind of sexual experimentation is left as far off the table as possible, and thank god, this concept could never have supported that kind of weight.  The humor goes lowbrow, but it never goes blue, creating a very distinct line that it never crosses, and that goes a long way in rendering the skeevier aspects of the story a little more palatable.  That innocence also has a potentially unintended side effect, as it also excuses some of the dumber aspects of the series, such as the basic logistics of Mirori’s situation, and whether or not people can see or hear her when they damn well should be able to.  It’s rare for naivety to work in an anime’s favor, but when you fly by the seat of your pants the way this show does, it’s not impossible.
  
  Midori Days was originally available from Animeworks, but is currently out of print.  It’s fairly easy to find used copies online, though.  The original manga by Kazurou Inouei out of print from Viz Media, but is equally easy to find. 
  
  So should you watch the gimmick anime about a girl becoming a guy’s right hand?  I think so.  It’s not a must-see by any means, and it’s very obviously not for everyone, but it’s a pretty unique novelty anime that’s worth experiencing at least once.  There’s a lot of things I appreciate about it, from the job it did managing it’s meager budget, to the fact that it dares to be quirky and weird, and does it’s own thing rather than following the crowd.  It has a really strong start, and a decent enough conclusion, even if things take a major dip in the middle, harming what could have been a special little oddball and turning it into something that’s just okay over-all, worth adding to your list, but that you’ll probably forget most of the material for pretty quickly afterwards.
  
  I give Midori Days a 6/10.

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