Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, directed by Kazuya Miura. Studio ENGI. 4 episodes (at time of writing) of 22 minutes (approx. 88 minutes). Ongoing. Rated TV-14.
Available on Funimation.
This show annoys me.
Mind you, its existence doesn’t annoy me, and its content doesn’t particularly annoy me; what annoys me is that this plotless, generic, milquetoast series is the most talked-about anime of the season. That’s how far this medium has fallen over the last two decades.
Granted, it might not be getting so much attention if some busybodies hadn’t had a conniption over it. In 2019, before the anime appeared but while the manga was enjoying some popularity, the Japanese Red Cross did a blood drive using the titular heroine, Uzaki-chan, as a mascot. The poster features her playfully goading you into giving blood by asking if you’re a wimp afraid of needles.
A blogger known as Unseen Japan criticized this poster and proceeded to bother lots of people about it. Here are his own sanctimonious words on the subject:
Uzaki, in other words, is explicitly appealing to heterosexual men via her sex appeal. And she’s goading them into giving blood by bringing their manhood into question. (“You’re not afraid of a little shot, are ya, ya wimp?”)
My first reaction—and my wife’s to boot—was that this wasn’t an appropriate image for the Japanese Red Cross to use.
After hiding behind his wife’s skirt, he goes on to claim victimhood status because he got pushback for being an irritant. Perhaps the strangest comment in his lengthy essay on the fallout from this is his assurance, “… I have absolutely no grip [sic] with ecchi anime, or with sexualized depictions of men and women ….”
In other words, he has no ethical ground to stand on; were he a Puritan with an actual moral code, his busybodiness would be tolerable or at least self-consistent, but by his own admission, he made a nuisance of himself simply for the sake of being a nuisance.
Also, LOL at “heterosexual men,” as if that’s some unique or special category. Newsflash: Men are attracted to large breasts; follow Unseen Japan for more groundbreaking discoveries.
The Controversy
Anyway, it’s thanks largely to this guy that anybody in the West had heard of Uzaki-chan before the anime made its appearance on Funimation, where, at the time of writing, it is being simulcast (that’s fancy for “shown in the U.S. shortly after it’s shown in Japan”). Because Uzaki has once again made herself known to weeaboos of the West, the controversy over her has once again erupted.
The opinions of her are sharply divided but, just like Unseen Japan’s, strangely vague—because nobody involved has anything like the most basic ethical training, nobody can say exactly what he disapproves (or approves) of. It’s all emotion with no substance, rather like (as I’ll get to in a moment) the anime itself.
If my Twitter feed is any indication (a risky supposition), the primary complaint about Uzaki is that, because she’s short and small in her proportions (except of course for those breasts—something else I’ll get to in a moment), she feeds into the pedophilia that’s rife in anime and anime fandom.
Her defenders answer this by pointing out that her “official” height, according to her creator, is within the normal range of adult Japanese women. Sometimes, they also delve into discussions of normal body-to-head ratios of cartoon characters of various ages.
The arguments of Uzaki’s defenders are, frankly, not worth discussing at length. Regardless of how many centimeters tall she’s supposed to be according to her official bio, it’s nonetheless canonical in-universe, and stated several times, that she’s unusually short; and although apparently nineteen or twenty years of age, she is even once mistaken for an elementary-school student. Also, it’s certainly true that her character design, minus the chest, could easily be used for a child—but that could be said of a lot of cartoon characters since cartoon characters, perhaps especially anime characters, are stylized by their very nature.
My answer to her critics, rather than getting into these faux-technical discussions, would be to state simply that the show doesn’t have the appearance or attitude of lolicon. Lolicon usually comes in one of two forms: On the one hand, there’s the CLAMP-style, pseudo-innocent lolicon, which pairs up adults with children and then acts as if it doesn’t know there’s anything wrong with that; on the other hand, there’s most of the rest of lolicon, which knows it’s transgressive and revels in the fact because it’s “naughty.”
Uzaki-chan doesn’t evince either of those. I realize it’s subjective, but I reject the claim that this show is a sort of lolicon because it just doesn’t have the “vibe.” The protagonists, Uzaki included, are supposed to be in college, and that, as far as I can tell, is all there is to it.
The Plot
I have perhaps got ahead of myself by discussing the controversy before the storyline—but that’s because there isn’t a storyline. The show revolves around two characters, the titular Uzaki, who is giggly, energetic, and mischievous, and her sempai, the brooding loner Shinichi. The two were in high school together and were both members of the swim club. For some reason, Shinichi has turned into an introverted gamer in college, and Uzaki, upon discovering she’s in the same university as him, decides she’s going to drag him out of his shell whether he wants it or not.
The Theme
This show falls very much into the motif called “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” a term, intended to be dismissive and derisive, that was first coined by film critic Nathan Rabin, who later expressed regret for creating it because it got overused to describe most any female character who is quirky or has a love interest. Nonetheless, it’s a term that really does describe the show before us: This is the story of a goofy, energetic, airheaded female whose entire existence surrounds her attempts to rehabilitate her brooding and friendless (yet hunky) male counterpart.
I don’t hate the concept of the manic pixie dream girl, really. I’m not a feminist, so manic pixie dream girls do not, by their very nature, send me flying into a rage. But the execution in Uzaki-chan is so damn basic, there’s nothing to recommend it. Uzaki appears to have been created based on a checklist of what loner weebs like:
- Small and cute? Check.
- High energy? Check.
- Scatterbrained? Check.
- Huge honkers? Double check.
And that brings me to another point: Almost all of the humor in the show is built around Uzaki’s ample breasts. Over and over, we are reminded that she has big jugs. And her boobs are huge. And she has giant chimichangas. And large knockers. And bazooms that can bring down the space shuttle …
If that last paragraph started to sound monotonous, that’s because I was trying to capture the feeling I get while watching this show. This is yet again a Japanese pop-cultural creation made by someone who’s mistaken breasts for a personality trait. Uzaki even wears a shirt that announces, “Sugoi Dekai,” which Funimation helpfully translates as, “Super Huge.”
The Characters
That being said, the show has a certain charm. Shinichi, for reasons unclear, has an extremely fastidious nature; he finds Uzaki annoying but is also clearly attracted to her physically—a fact that apparently irritates him, so her physical proximity causes him an angry reaction. Uzaki, for her part, is apparently so naïve that she doesn’t realize how she’s bothering him. She also tends, innocently, to say things in public that sound sexual to passers-by who don’t know the context, causing Shinichi further embarrassment.
This is mildly cute, but it’s hard to imagine a backstory that would justify all this. How did these two make it to adulthood being this oblivious?
So far, the show has also, inexplicably, dodged opportunities to add complications to its razor-thin plot. Shinichi works in a café, where his interactions with Uzaki are closely observed by his people-watching-obsessed boss. After a couple of episodes, we are introduced to the boss’s daughter, who appears to be attracted to Shinichi. This looks like the setup for a love triangle, but the show foregoes such an angle by setting her up as yet another obsessive people-watcher, a role that was already filled, making her redundant.
It is almost as if this anime is deliberately avoiding the development of a storyline. It has elements of a romantic comedy but without the obstacles that the hero and heroine in a romantic comedy usually need to overcome: The only thing keeping Uzaki and Shinichi apart is their own obliviousness, which, since their backstory is as thin as everything else, is inexplicable.
My Comments
The reason for the deliberately provocative claim in the subheading, that this show is “everything that’s wrong with anime,” is that I strongly believe that “moe” is eating anime alive. Moe is a vague term; it literally means something like “blooming” but is used in anime fandom to refer to the feeling one gets upon looking at a pretty girl, and it has become the raison d’être for much of anime today, to the point that plot, character, and other essentials of storytelling have been largely shoved out of the picture. I don’t begrudge Uzaki-chan its existence, but it is ridiculous that this is the most talked-about show of the season, a show that offers nothing except yet another hyperactive, big-breasted waifu character that weebs can moon over and then forget about when the next season and the next waifu come along.
Anime has been largely destroyed by undiscerning weebs who are easily entertained by a mindless parade of idealized cute girls. I admit I like cute Asian girls as much as the next creepy weeaboo (I married one, even), but they are not, in themselves, enough to sustain good storytelling. Anime should feature stories about cute girls, not merely be a cute-girl delivery system.
