Alright then going into my 4th breakdown, I’m sure all of you are as excited as I am. This time I’m going to show you some of the lighthearted aspects of anime; focusing on the sketch comedy/slice of life (ish). Kill me baby is one of the most recent series I have become infatuated with, as you may of noticed from so many of my previous posts. The series revolves around the everyday hijinks of high schooler Yasuna Oribe, who has a friend named Sonya with an unusual profession, assassin. Now wait a minute, can this really be considered lighthearted and slice of life when this girl deals with the dilemmas of being friends with a hitman? How many people have that sort of life? The answer to this question though is who cares it’s funny, stop being a wet blanket!

Now Kill me baby is what is known as a 4koma series, you can think of this like the funny pages in the newspaper. It follows a comic strip style format in its plot starting with setting the scene or exposition, then the foundation of the story is laid out from the scene or rising action, next an unseen event follows or climax and finally the conclusion or basically the punchline. Lets take a look at my trailer then:

Story:

So lets talk about comedy in anime for a second. Basically every series has some form of comedy of course, no matter how serious, gritty, gory or whatever there always tends to be a scene that causes an intended laugh. That brings us to pure comedy animes though, kind of a tough market really, they don’t usually have outrageous plots with things like superpowers, supernatural or thriller excitement and they usually just focus on everyday problems. When the whole basis of show is to keep viewers watching only by means of laughter it just really turns into a hit or miss situation; you can really think of these animes being similar to the show Seinfeld, all of them shows about nothing.

Having said that, the best way to decide if a comedy anime like this is something you’ll enjoy is to just watch a few minutes of it. So in lieu of my normal synopsis of the first episode, I will show you a highlight from it instead. I’m doing this because you really cant appreciate a comedy like this in words alone. I found that I loved this show and I don’t generally watch pure comedies. However I’ll let you all decide:

Characters:

Once again this anime being pure comedy there really isn’t going to be much development character wise. However since this show has an extremely small cast and they still have some aspects that can be looked over, I will go along with my standard process:

Originality:

Alright now down to the shows overall merits. Like I said throughout my post, this series along with any comedy (no anime…. no anything), opinions are widely subjective. You will either like it or you won’t, if you did great lets talk! If not I’m sure we can discuss some other anime. If we can’t even do that then um… how about that weather? Anyways kill me baby is definitely one of the first animes I’ve seen to go and make statements such as “baby please kill me” so lightly and do it twice per episode; yes that’s technically its name but that’s besides the point. While this show has some kooky antics that may seem like nothing more than a Saturday morning cartoon to some people. I think it still attempted to add its own flare, in a sort of morbid yet adorable way that made it more funny. However that idea is hardly original, there are many shows who make jokes out of the morbid and bizarre. I just think though, if something is able to entertain you sufficiently enough does it matter if it’s not the most original thing in the world? Don’t need to fix what isn’t broken right?

Resources:

• The series Kill me baby!
• Prelude and action by Kevin Macleod
• Kill Me no Baby by Mutsumi Tamura
• SmallCarriageClockTicking.wav by acclivity