Yasuna is a chipper energetic high school girl with bravado thats entirely fueled by her lack of brains. Her everyday high school life might have consisted of endless pep rallies and airheaded trips to the mall with friends had she the ability to make likeminded friends Instead she wound up making friends with the girl seated next to her in the back of the room in their homeroom class the cold foreigner Sonya. Its difficult to say what black magic lead these two oddballs to become so tight with each other but ever since their paths became intertwined Yasunas ideal school life has become nothing but danger and abuse at the hands of her new BFF who turned out to be an assassin Assigned to their school as part of her career Sonya has little patience for her bubbly friend who interferes with her work constantly ropes her into crazy schemes and even more constantly sets off her PTSD to which Sonya always has a wrestling hold and a broken wrist to give her in return. And if these two didnt sound like enough of a classroom disruption Yasuna soon meets Agiri a mysterious acquaintance of Sonyas who claims to be a ninja and is always ready to supply her two pals with acmestyle ninja gadgets for a small fee of course. With these three nuts in the same basket school life is sure to be anything but normal or average for everyone involved. Ive talked about JC Staff before to the point that I should probably replace Gainax Month with it. I wont of course. JCs animation production tends to fall into three different camps In one camp you have beautiful animation that obviously had lots of effort and resources poured into it like the first 7/8ths of A Certain Scientific Railgun and most of Toradora.. Then you have bafflingly ugly anime that tries to look more expensive than it actually is like Okamisan and her Seven Companions. Finally you have the camp right in the middle Anime with moderate budgets that save money wherever possible and make up for it whenever necessary. The majority of their work falls into this category like Azumanga Daioh Excel Saga and of course Kill Me Baby. Keeping with the trend Kill Me Baby isnt a show that really demands a high budget The characters are chibis despite technically being in high school and they dont demand a wide range of movement to express their parts in any given situation. The budget is normally saved for the rare special effects and lighting techniques as well as some surprisingly smooth action scenes. The money they do spend on slapstick and physical humor is well spent causing little to no visible hiccups in the process. Whats equally impressive though is the art style and use of color. This show features a very restrained sense of artistry using minimal and often recycled illustrations for the backgrounds of any given scene but theyre still relaxed and detailed enough to blend and come to life in the story. The backgrounds are adequate at the very worst but what I found myself more attracted to were the colored backgrounds that appeared behind the characters whenever the actual backgrounds disappeared. At first glance youd think they just took a bunch of white boards gave crayons to a few elementary school kids and pasted the result onto the background in place of actual environments. On closer examination however it becomes clear that each of these backgrounds is intended to express the feelings of the characters and whats going on in each cut. Imagery similar to a sunrise will be used when Yasuna has what she perceives to be a great idea and when you cut to Sonya bluntly explaining why its a bad idea youll instead see what appears to be the last few rays of Yasunas sunrise being trapped under a blue screen thats covered by vertical white lines In other words Sonyas raining on Yasumas sunrise. Mixed colors whether blended or overlapped are used respectively to convey agreement or mixed feelings. Weird purple bubbles will look as though their pushing back a calm blue background to convey that Yasuna is disturbing Sonyas piece etc. Its simple and not terribly deep but its still a really nice touch and once you start noticing it you likely wont stop. The character designs should be somewhat on the generic side The genki girl has messy short chestnut hair the coldhearted foreigner has blonde pigtails and the mysterious girl has long dark hair But the chibi aesthetic makes these choices feel like more of a deconstruction or parody than it actually is. The facial expressions are thoughtful and detailed and expressive enough to serve their purpose. The music is kind of forgettable Its the kind of samey generic music that youd expect from a sliceoflife gag show But the opening and closing themes are just awesome enough to make up for it. The opening theme is called Kill Me no Baby and I had a hard describing it until I read someone on ANN calling it spedup polka music which sounds about right. Its catchy and its sung by the main cast members who repeat the title of the show overandover again in in the chorus. The ending theme The True Secret Behind Our Feelings is a bit slower and features the same two actresses singing over a lowkey techno beat The songs are cool but what really sells them both are the videos which I could watch over all day. The openings video features the three girls and one unnamed character fighting off an alien invasion No Im not kidding it shows a UFO attacking the earth with the ninja the assassin and the idiot fighting them both inside and outside of the ship. The ending is somehow even funnier as it features Sonya and Yasuna doing a synchronized dance that looks like its going to be morning exercises at first but turns out to just be a series of hilarious moving poses. The English dub is Well its a bit of a mixed bag but at least the good and bad points are very clear cut. This is a Sentai dub and based on the period that it came out its fairly obvious that the scripting and ADR directing was in the hands of one Stephen Foster. This isnt Fosters usual kind of dub though To start with the good attributes he didnt rewrite it. It stays very faithful to the original script with the only real changes being the odd adlib from Luci Christian and these normally work for the better making her characters snarky sarcastic humor more accessible to a western audience. Speaking of Luci Christian one of the usual positive aspects of a Stephen Foster dub is still present here and Im surprised people never gave him enough credit for this The acting in English is really good maybe even slightly better than the Japanese. Luci growls and grumbles her way through the longsuffering straight man Sonya and Hilary Haag turns her childish charm up to 11 for her role as the bubbly Yasuna and the two of them work off of each other brilliantly. Rozie Curtis also does a fantastic job as Agiri making her character sound aloof and nonchalant yet with condescension and some distinctly bad intentions lurking below the surface. Brittany Karbowski is enjoyable as usual playing a nameless character whos only known by the descriptive term Unused character and wants nothing more than to find some sort of purpose in the main cast. Unfortunately such uncharacteristic quality comes at a steep price. This is a somewhat common thing in Fosters work and I plan on talking about it more if I ever review Medaka Box or Kids On the slope but in order to stay faithful to the script of an anime Foster compensates by completely ignoring lip flaps. Yes he makes no attempt at directing his actors to match what theyre saying with whats on screen its ugly but true. What the characters are saying in English will begin before theyve opened their mouths and end afterwards and no pause is acknowledged. Id say to ignore it but its really distracting and its hard to get over just how well a better director would have been able to make the dub look and sound a lot better without having to sacrifice one for the other. Im not the first person to make this observation but comedy is hard to review. Humor is subjective and thus theres no way to predict whether or not other people will find the same things funny that you do. Kill Me Baby is a sliceoflife slapstick comedy told mainly through extended vignettes so I can understand many viewers will likely find themselves losing interest during the full length episodes of a show that ideally should have been presented in 12 minute chunks. I like to find other things to discuss when reviewing comedies but in Kill Me Baby the only thing I can really discuss IS the comedy so bare with me through this. The style of comedy that Kill Me Baby uses is the classic StraightmanGoofball type of style Where you have one character acting like a fool and trying to get on their counterparts nerves and that counterpart delivers by either pointing out the goofballs foolishness or just flat out smacking a bitch. This style is used often in the genre and I must say Im quite fond of it myself but unless both characters take their roles to extreme levels its hard for this dynamic to carry a series. Luckily both Yasuna and Sonya take their respective roles and make them the central elements of their characters so that the style can be carried to some very versatile places. Yasuna isnt just a happygolucky idiot shes a prankster and thrives on the chance to get the better of her BFF making her a very active goofball. Sonya is extremely edgy and has a laundry list of trigger warnings as shes frightened of most animals and is quick to become offended making her a perfectly reactive straight man. The rest of the cast is small consisting mainly of twobit extras that were not supposed to commit to memory such as Girl who lost wallet belonged to owner of annoying dog and Old man who keeps getting roped into stuff. Agiri makes for a great third wheel as her weirdness and casual antagonizing is one of the only things that Yasuna and Sonya are ever on the same side about giving us rare glimpses of camaraderie between them. Unused Character is surprise surprise kind of useless and doesnt do much other than act as metacommentary on the small size of the main cast. She could have honestly been left out basically and she knows it. With her and Agiri acting as occasional crutches this show survives primarily on the strength of its two central characters and the wide array of interactions they can have. For the most part the story really only has three settings Walking to school hanging out between classes and walking home from school and the amount of material they can squeeze out of these settings is amazing. Yasuna always has something to bother Sonya with and even when she doesnt she still has enough dimension to carry a satisfying vignette. Sonya herself does of course have the violent and sour reactions in good supply but for whatever reason shes still more or less game to TRY and enjoy her time with Yasuna and she even shows some shockingly real vulnerability in her occasional confusion over Japanese culture as well as in the ways her PTSD has believably affected her reactions to otherwise nonthreatening noises and events. I could easily file this show away under the long list of plotless sliceoflife shows but when I really think about it that wouldnt actually be fair. Yes theres no long term plot nothing overall that the girls are trying to accomplish despite Yasunas futile insistence of a motive in the final episodes. The plots believe it or not come in the lengthy vignettes that make up each episode. This isnt like in Azumanga Daioh or Lucky Star where entire stretches of story can be made up of just interchangeable interactions that seemingly have nothing to do with each other For the most part an episode of Kill Me Baby will consist of quartertohalflength stories where something happens Yes things are constantly happening in this show to varying levels of importance or impact And theres almost always a clear goal even if that goal is just the two characters getting the best of each other. While this style of storytelling doesnt wear thin easily the jokes themselves can become kind of repetitive and it can sometimes feel like the writers were stretching for ideas. Vignettes that remove themselves from the normal setting such as Yasunas New Years dreams kind of fall flat and the humor can lose steam if youre bingeing more than a few episodes per sitting meaning a portion of one episode per day would probably be ideal. Having said all that I still say that Sonya and Yasuna are the backbone of this series and while the execution isnt perfect its still a great concept that the writers are at the very least having a lot of fun with never having to resort to cheap fan serviceWhich is good because seriously how do you make small anatomically disproportionate bobblehead characters sexy without failing at it like Lucky Star did?. The writer of the original manga Kaduho clearly loved these characters and you probably will too. Kill Me Baby is available from Sentai Filmworks and is available on DVD and Bluray. Its also available for free on Crunchyroll and you can find pretty much the entire series dubbed on . The original manga by mysterious author Kaduho is not available stateside. The followup OVA series Kill Me Baby super can be viewed online in many different places. Out of all the anime comedies that Ive reviewed thus far I think the one this most closely resembles would be Squidgirl A fun series built on the strength of one really strong concept enthusiastically explored in enough creative ways to excuse the somewhat lackluster backdrops that its set against. But like Squidgirl its biggest problem is just how simple it is. Sure theres some complexity to the characters but theres little to no depth to any of it. Its not really worth a second look unless the humor really worked for you but in my case it definitely did and as fastpaced as the jokes in it are youre sure to find at least a few moments per episode thatll work for you to. Its a decent comedy that promises some great laughs and thats all it really needs to be. I give Kill Me Baby a 7/10.