Hey there Youre a first year right? Have you decided what club to join? If not then why not check out the girls soft tennis club? Dont let the name fool you theres nothing soft about this sport. See that deep scary looking gash in the ground? Last years team captain did that and that was just practice. We work hard we train hard and when the mood strikes we play hard and one of these days were going to Wimbledon Or well one of our members thinks so but they dont actually have soft tennis there. Dont tell her itll shatter her dreams. We ARE going to win the soft tennis national championships one day and if you have any interest in sampling the taste of victory or even if youre just hungry for some roasted japanese giant salamander then you need to join the soft tennis club today Softenni was produced by a studio called Xebec and if you know that name you know its not a promising one. Xebec had an extremely negative reputation for the two decades and change that it existed and while they produced a ton of recognizable anime titles they were almost all met with universal panning over their low quality artwork and animation. If you want to know how bad this got well just look what they did to Love Hina and the first adaptation of Negima. Less than a month ago I tried to watch a series called Rio Rainbow Gate and while the visuals werent the main reason I dropped it four episodes in they certainly didnt help matters. Ive reviewed several of their titles before and I dont think Ive ever had anything positive to say about them but I think it may be time to break that trend and while I have no plans to review The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye in the future Softenni also looks pretty good. Thats not to say it had a high budget because it clearly didnt but for a cheap anime it was really smartly directed. When youre producing a comedy anime its generally pretty easy to cover up a poor budget by developing a style that takes advantage of those limitations and Softenni does exactly that. The interesting thing is that Softenni is the only anime that Ryouki Kamitsubo has ever directed on his own with his only other main directorial effort being the first season of Hidamari Sketch for which he shared a codirecting credit alongside Akiyuki Shinbo. Aside from that hes plied his trade consistently up to this day working as an episode director key director and storyboard artist for several different production companies and at least from what I can tell a good number of the projects hes been a part of were not the best looking anime youve ever seen... Most of them having budget issues of their own... So if Softenni was his attempt to show off what he could do on his own with all that collaborative experience then its a shame he hasnt had a second solo gig. The character designs are fairly basic... Color coded teenage waifus with varying body types pretty much what youd expect out of this kind of show... But proportionately they are a blend of realistic and cartoony that makes for believable sports action along with a ton of comedic exaggeration in their bodies and the perfect canvases for wacky reactionary facial expressions. The stiff animation that they use during comedic and conversational scenes which are only barely recognizable as cut corners are the perfect compensation for the more expensive and smoothflowing action scenes both on and off the court which cleverly consist of both cheap and expensive shots edited together fairly seamlessly. The color palette is bright and vibrant side and supporting characters are designed in a way that makes them distinctive and recognizable but not to the point of distracting from the main cast and there isnt a lick of CGI so Xebec doesnt have anything to overcompensate and tank the budget for. The only real complaint I have is the prevalence of cheektalking shots some of which are even more cursed than what Im used to and cheektalking is already one of the most cursed anime tropes. I dont have a lot to say about the audio... The music is generic but fun. Theres no English dub and Im not great at judging the acting of Japanese sub tracks but it sounds to me like everyone was having a blast in their roles and they had really strong comedic timing and chemistry with each other. Thats all I got for that so moving on. In all the years Ive been writing reviews theres one subgenre that Ive kept coming back to and that my opinion on has been fairly consistent... That being wacky random gag comedy. If youve been following my reviews then you know where I stand on this but if youre new to my work heres my basic opinion on them: Wacky random gag anime have an incredibly short shelf life. This is because most entries in the genre are going out of their way to be as random as possible filling their episodes with walltowall nonsequitors and consequencefree slapstick violence. The problem with this approach is that its manufactured and it winds up becoming repetitive based on the conventions of writers and directors involved. The longer they go on the more they expose the method behind their madness making for an anime that starts out kinda funny but loses its effectiveness and becomes predictable down the line until its nothing more than a shadow of a once promising comedy. There are very few directors who are able to keep this material fresh but for most other directors they tend to try and artificially inflate their series to a full and respectable length by flanderizing the characters as quickly as possible pushing them to inhuman extremes so people wont notice their lack of development or their repetitive usage and using themed episodes in lieu of an actual plot or story. This can be different bodily fluidsPanty and Stocking different shallow genre parodiesExcel Saga Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi or anything else really. This is a pretty lazy tactic on its own but for shows that dont employ it they can get real dull real fast. For example take Hare+Guu an anime from 2001 that people today only really remember for its many AMV Hell clips. For a 26 episode show Hare+Guu piles on so much wacky randomness right off the bat that within the first third youve already seen the main girl inhale people into the pocket dimension within her stomach and nonchalantly spit them back out and Im sorry but once you play the Loli version of Kirby card youve officially peaked. Hare+Guu hits diminishing returns so quickly that when I watched it I accidentally did so out of order. I dont know how my dumb ass managed to do this but I somehow mistook episode 26 for episode 8 and I swear to God I didnt notice anything was wrong until I got to the end and I was like Hey wait a minute... So is there any way to avoid this fate? Well yeah there are two ways and one Ive already touched on. As I mentioned in my reviews for Puni Puni Poemy and Inferno Cop one surefire way to keep a wacky random gag anime fresh is to keep its run time really short so the series ends long before its effectiveness does. But there is one more far more ambitious tactic and that is to approach your material with a sense of genuine insanity. In case youre wondering the difference between manufactured randomness and genuine insanity is that with all those previous shows I mentioned nothing makes sense because the directors are afraid theyll become boring if they make sense. When insanity is genuine however everything reads like it made perfect sense to the person writing it and in a way that the reader can just barely pick up on... Theres a noticeable line of logic but its a logic that nobody with a sane mind would ever think of on their own. To give you an example of what I mean... How many of you remember Azumanga Daioh? If the answer isnt all of you Ill be sorely disappointed. It wasnt the first sliceoflife school comedy but it was arguably the first great one. Anyway the most iconic character from that show is probably Ayumu Kasuga also known as Osaka by her friends because shes from Osaka and teenagers are dumb. She starts off as just your average space cadet but because Azumanga Daioh is one of those rare shows that actually gets better as its cast gets flanderized she picks up a few more awkward quirks by series end one of which is that shell sometimes say really disquieting things in the middle of a conversation. Like theres this one scene where her class is trying to figure out what to do for the cultural fest and the debate is between a haunted house a cafe and a petting zoo so she suggests What about a haunted petting zoo cafe? And when her classmates express confusion she explains Therell be lots of cats and dogs in the cafe... And theyll all be dead. You can probably see where her train of thought went in order for her to arrive at that solution but you wish you couldnt right? Thats the kind of insanity that Im talking about. Its not just random nonsense it connects in a logical way. A character like Osaka isnt necessarily smart or dumb she just has her own unique... And pretty fucked up... Way of thinking. This kind of logic exists right at the very edge of a deep dark rabbit hole and the more you come to understand it the deeper down you go until youre pretty sure that one day youll be deemed unfit to stand trial. The reason Im bringing this all up in connection to Softenni is because in my mind the best way you can possibly describe Softenni to someone whos never seen it is to say that if Osaka from Azumanga Daioh were given the opportunity and resources to make her own anime Softenni is the anime she would make. I say that because the way her mind works is disturbingly similar to the way the world of Softenni works. Softenni is a very weird comedy and it goes to some extremely bizarre places but at no point does it ever feel like its trying to appeal to people with ADHD or the same kind of lolsorandom Hot Topic market that Invader Zim used to dominate. It doesnt feel like its throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. It feels natural organic and genuine and while thats not the only reason I find it so gorram funny it does create a pretty strong comedic foundation. Its really hard to talk about a show you find genuinely funny without spoiling a ton of jokes but I think theres at least one really broad series of events that I can use to establish my point Around the midpoint of the series the tennis club hikes through the mountains to get to a training camp. On the way there they come across a natural hot springs so they stop to bathe. While theyre bathing a giant bear approaches them menacingly so one of the first year members engages in a naked martial arts battle against the bear which ends with him acknowledging her as his equal and offering to let the entire club ride on his back the rest of the way to the camp. See what I mean? Not only can you see a very clear thread of logic connecting these batshit crazy story beats but cant you just picture Osaka herself hunched over a laptop outlining this whole story thread? Theres nothing realistic or believable about the way these stories progress but theres always some kind of connection that keeps it from feeling like stuff just happens storytelling and in the long run this pays off in viewer investment. When you know for certain that the writer of a gag comedy isnt going to let themselves get away with pulling random bullshit out of their pocket but theyre also not retraining themselves to the boundaries of reality it creates a very real sense of anticipation over whats going to happen next. Theres a ton of fanservice in this show which is probably its biggest selling point with first time viewers but its very unusual fanservice. Characters are constantly shown in some form of undress ranging from underwear shots panty shots to fullon uncensored nudity but the weird thing about all of it is how bizarrely innocent it all feels. You can only really call it ecchi by default as its fanservice that seems entirely uninterested in servicing fans. The reason I say this is because out of all the fanservice thats present in this showminus the specials its fair to say that over ninety percent of it is used as part of a joke and the remainder is just incidental. There are some scenes where it honestly feels like the series is making fun of you for finding bare breasts sexy or that just flat out spit in the face of the very idea of female nipples being the subject of censorship. You wanna know what the first nude scene in this series is like? In episode 1 the oldest girl on the team and thus the captain by default is wading nude into a nearby lake. When the other girls find her she bursts out of the water all glamorously like the little mermaid the sunlight glistening on her body... Until the camera cuts to a few yards back and we see the reason she was out there in the first place. The camera cuts back and we see that shes wrestling a Japanese giant salamander out of the water and as we find out later she had intentions of the culinary nature. You see one of her quirks is that she has a really weird appetite... Not only does she crave exotic meat but she likes to hunt her prey with her bare gorram hands hunting them in the nude like fucking Beouwulf. What the fuck are you supposed to do with that other than laugh? I wont spoil them here but with the exception of maybe the blonde foreigner every character has their weird highly distinct and remarkably consistent quirks none of which ever feel repetitive even when they become running gags. On top of that the slapstick is also really funny. I know what some of you are thinking... Its a tennis show what kind of slapstick could they have other than people being hit in the face with balls? And yeah that does happen but with comedic timing thats more than sharp enough to justify it and beyond that you would be surprised just how inventive the comedy can get even on the court. One of these jokes was spoiled in the opening and it still had me in stitches over how well it was timed and executed. There are plenty of references but outside of a few Evangelion nodsmostly surrounding one girls partial resemblance to Rei Ayanami theyre used sparingly and they dont feel abrasive if you dont get them. Theyre even explained popup style on the DVDs if you care to pause and read them. I cant say in good conscience that every joke works... For example they introduce a new character towards the end who only made me laugh like once... But the jokes that dont work arent cringey or annoying or at least I didnt think so. At worst theyre just kind of there and you let them pass by while waiting for more of the good material. Beyond the comedy Ill admit this isnt the strongest sports story or character piece but it does enough with what it has. There isnt a whole lot of character development but what we do get for about half the cast is still complex enough to support them. There isnt much in the way of sports drama or tension but there are still situations where youll be rooting for the characters to win. Its light on substance outside of the comedy but for a pure comedy show I dont think thats such a bad thing. Softenni is available from Sentai Filmworks. This release comes with a collection of shorts which to be fair are the only bits of fanservice in the show that are just there for the sake of more fanservice. The original manga is not available stateside. As Ive mentioned before humor is extremely subjective. What one person finds funny might not work for another person and vice versa. Its also important to point out that at least in my opinion critics do not exist to decide whats good and whats bad. Its our job to state our opinions as clearly and concisely as possible so that people whose tastes relate to ours can use us as a basis of what they most likely will and wont like. With both of those caveats in mind I really like Softenni. This show fits my brand of casual weirdness and surreal humor to a T. Its one of the most consistently funny pure comedy anime that Ive ever seen and while I cant recommend it to anyone whos out there looking for some actual depth or emotionally resonant moments I can wholeheartedly say that if youve agreed with my takes on anime comedy in the past Id recommend giving this show a try. I give Softenni a 7/10.