I have a few shows from last season that I haven't yet gotten around to completing, so seeing as I just finished watching a longer show, this seems like as good a time as any to finally get around to completing them. And I'm starting with 'UchiTama - Uchi no Tama Shirimasen ka?' While the character franchise may have started back in 1987, this is a 11 episode TV anime directed by Kiyoshi Matsuda.
The show is very simple. It's a laid back comedic slice of life show about a group of cats and dogs that live on 3rd Street. The show sometimes has more emotional and dramatic moments, but there are very few of them. A very interesting thing about this show is the way it uses abstraction. The cats and dogs themselves are actually normal animals in universe. However, they imagine themselves to look the way they do in the human character designs. Whenever more realism is required, such as a paw, the anime shows them as real animals. But most of the time they're represented by their human characters designs. And my goodness, they're are cute.
My favorite aspect about this series is definitely the character designs and the various outfits they wear. It's very interesting to see the way they imagine themselves to be, and a lot of the comedy in the series is derived from the contrast between what they imagine themselves to look like, and what they're actually like. Another thing worth mentioning is the voice acting, because it's actually really good, and not to mention the popularity of many of the Seiyuu present in the show. They even have Kana Hanazawa, Kensho Ono and Yuki Kaiji. And all of them, including the ones I didn't mention (there are a lot of them), do a great job. I do feel it necessary that the show includes some dramatic stuff, and it really misses. When watching this, I wanted a comedic slice of life, and when it suddenly, out of nowhere has a dramatic episode, we'll let's just say it doesn't really work that well. It's never really expanded upon or referenced again, it's just there, which is really weird. Apart from that one episode though, it's all good.
Is it a show worth checking out? Probably not. There are a multitude of comedic slice of life shows out there, and apart from the whole anthropomorphic animal thing, it doesn't really do anything different. If you're in need of something from this genre, then you have many, many much better shows to choose from. It does lean more toward mediocre than bad. If you're really in need for some comfy slice of life, then sure, by all means: check this out.
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