Parents arrested
Children must survive alone
Spider legs are hot
The new anime adaptation of the Creatures Family Days manga is part Japanese and part Taiwanese. Whether or not the partially non-Japanese origin has anything to do with it, the series has got a subtly different feel from a lot of anime that one would consider similar. Imagine if I asked you to name the first anime that came into your head from the following descriptions:
“People with superpowers”—My Hero Academia, and too many others to count
“Ok, then: People with superpowers who try to live normal lives among ordinary people”—Saiki K., Actually I Am, and again too many others
“sigh How about monster girls?”—Interviews with Monster Girls, Monster Musume, Actually I Am, etc. etc. etc.
“Well, then, kids living on their own?”—Heck, even Naruto did that!
And yet Frankenstein Family feels different from all of these. The setting is most like Saiki K., where you have young people with unusual abilities living a semi-hidden life among ordinary society. But it’s not really like Saiki K. at all. The slice-of-life feel approaches more that of Interviews with Monster Girls, and yet this has a much mellower feel to it. I don’t mean this in a positive or negative way: IMG just hits stronger emotional notes, while FF is pretty calm.
Personally, I enjoyed IMG more, but that’s not to say I don’t enjoy FF. FF shies away from a lot of cliches, though not all, and that makes for a refreshing viewing. So far—two episodes in—there’s been none of the overused, hackneyed let’s-put-the-ordinary-male-protagonist-in-contrived-“accidental”-compromising-situations-with-the-monster-girls shenanigans that I’ve come to expect as a matter of course in these shows. The tsundere sister was a bit too obvious in her tsundere-ness, but that’s a minor quibble.
So if you want something touching and fun, without hitting extremes of comedy or emotionalism, look no further. Oh, and it releases two episodes every week! How cool is that?!
Oh, I do have one complaint. The voice actresses have these live action segments before and after the actual episodes, and I found them annoying. But that’s what fast-forward is for. I’ll continue following this one.