Imagine your regular work day at your desk job. Your morning commute, your idiotic boss who makes you do more work than you can handle, coworkers that drive you mental, your bottomless pit of self-deprecating despair that you must not let set in. Do not let it set in. Now imagine that you’re also a Sanrio character who screams Death Metal into a karaoke mic to blow off some steam. Welcome to one of the most relatable anime in recent memory and quite possibly the best new anime on Netflix. Today, we are talking about Aggretsuko. Let’s jam.
Now calling something the best new anime that Netflix has to offer is a bold claim. I’m making it anyway, especially since Netflix’s offerings have been rather robust as of late. But when trying to determine the best, I didn’t want to just stop at what has been critically acclaimed. Sure, Netflix has Masaaki Yuasa’s fantastic Devilman Crybaby and that has its niche, but if you fit into said niche, then my god is that show surprisingly epic. Netflix also has Violet Evergarden, which I have talked about before as being a beautiful series both in its animation and the story that it tells. However, as good as those shows are, and as highly as I recommend them to virtually everyone, if I was asked by someone whose tastes in anime I didn’t know what show on Netflix they should watch, I would not first recommend Devilman or Evergarden. I would start by recommending Aggretsuko.
So what is this show about? Well, the setting of our little foray into making light of the crushing reality of desk work is unsurprisingly a traditional Japanese office space. Specifically, it is the accounting department of a non-descript trading firm. The minor details of this get glossed over in favour of allowing you to cookie cutter fit the setting into whatever job is more relatable to you. It doesn’t matter what the jobs specifics are, the problems are all the same.
Of course, the job comes with all the staples. Retsuko’s boss is a literal chauvinist pig who delegates everything to his underlings while somehow still believing that he is doing the most amount of work around here. There are the office politics of coworkers who don’t get along privately but are publicly cordial. And then you have Retsuko, the little red panda who’s just trying to do her best and make it through the work day without snapping someone’s neck. She wouldn’t actually snap someone’s neck, but she would think about it. Really hard. Most days she is not a happy panda.
This is the bulk of what Aggretsuko has to offer as a show. Continual work related situations that we’ve all been in – or can at least imagine quite easily – and demonstrations of how we would really like to react to them. Now we have seen this kind of thing before. American audiences have both the film Office Space from the 90’s as well as the more recent TV series The Office to showcase the comedy potential of a horrible workplace. But Aggretsuko speaks to us on a deeper level than most and it’s a level that so many of us can relate to. It’s a slice of life that uses its relatable simplicity to make it entertaining. This is quite a surprise for a show starring Sanrio characters.
What does Sanrio have to do with it? Well, let me explain.
Sanrio is, to put it simply, a Japanese marketing company. They don’t necessarily create media. What they do is create branded content that can be used for merchandising. The most well-known example of this is Hello Kitty, Sanrio’s most popular character and also one of the most successful marketing brands in the world. Now, that marketing has bled over into the anime sphere before. As we know, anime is a powerful marketing tool and Sanrio has been a producer of anime for its own popular titles. But everything Sanrio does helps to build up its own brand.
With that in mind, Aggretsuko is an interesting step for them. Sanrio traditionally sticks to the cute section of Japanese pop culture. They are very family friendly, and that kind of a general audience gives them a wider berth to work with. Now while Aggretsuko doesn’t contain anything that’s vulgar or offensive, having a character whose favourite pastime is getting drunk and singing heavy metal music is not traditionally placed in the family friendly category. And Retsuko will shred your face off, metaphorically speaking.
Retsuko herself is a bit more than just a stand-in for us to relate to with our own jobs, made obvious by the fact that I doubt most of us scream heavy metal in a karaoke parlor every night. Though that’s probably because karaoke parlors aren’t as common in Canada and the US as they are in Japan… That said though, as an audience surrogate, she’s a fairly clean slate, aside from her nighttime habit and her simple desire to just be happy with her job.
She hates her job but doesn’t really have any future plans for advancement in the company or any desire to actively find another workplace that might be less horrible. The only thing that she does to make herself happy is carry around a dedicated microphone, which we assume gets a lot of daily use.
Along with Retsuko in her crappy office job, there are other friendly coworkers like Fenniko and Haida. Haida is the guy who low-key crushes on Retsuko hard, but she’s mostly oblivious to his advances. This is mainly because his advances are so subtle most people would need an electron microscope to notice them, poor guy. Then there is the sociopathic Fenniko, who in contrast is about as subtle as a brick through a window, though not necessarily in public. She’s the one who won’t attack you to your face but will instead stalk you and try to ruin your life through social media. She also has a laugh that could stare into your very soul. Though these characters are quite similar in their disdain for their workplace, unlike Retsuko, neither of them gets to the point where the job continually beats down on them. Because they have Retsuko, the office pushover, the good and reliable worker for the company who won’t rock the boat regardless of how much she wishes to complain, and – as someone who would do the exact same thing – this is all relatable as fuc-
The downside to both her blank nature and the fact that she’s a Sanrio character is that her existence relies upon good marketing and being a character who is unchanging even as the decades roll by, so she can’t really develop as a character at all. Sure, we see what her existing personality would do in a variety of situations and – for this short 10-episode season with only 15 minutes per episode – it works out fine. But if a next season is to be produced, we might have another Konosuba on our hands, where jokes and situations get recycled for the sake of additional content without developing beyond the status quo.
That said, there is still plenty of entertainment to be had with her as she is. She’s the perfect mascot for the modern disgruntled office worker in this quirky and much more lightweight series, and it’s lightweight in more ways than one.
The animation is not much to write home about. This is a series that sticks very firmly to the model set by the individual character’s designs and doesn’t have much wiggle room as far as what the characters can actually be animated to do. Now to make up for this, everything is supplemented by both the show’s soundtrack and its vocal cast.
The soundtrack itself is fun and upbeat, but constantly repetitive. With the exception of anything in the heavy metal genre, there are only a few songs that get reused throughout the entire series and they are repeated at length so much that you’d think we’d get tired of them eventually. Unfortunately for us perhaps, the majority of those few tracks are earworms, digging into your subconscious, making you listen to them as you progress through your own everyday life. Or maybe that’s just me.
Its vocal cast, in both languages mind you, adds a bit to the charm of each of the characters. Erica Mendez swaps between the upbeat diplomatic tone that Retsuko normally uses as a mask, to the much more flat “I’m so done with this crap…don’t talk to me” that she sports when she’s alone. And Katelyn Gault’s Fenneko still has the subtle sarcasm that made her character memorable to me, while also keeping her laugh.
Now it’s worth noting that watching in Japanese is a different experience. The English version, while still hitting all the right notes and being the more enjoyable of the two in my opinion, is not a direct translation. Instead, it removes many of the cultural specifics to Retsuko’s situation that would normally be lost on Netflix’s general American audience. It is not made worse by this change; in fact, I think it actually makes it better. There are a lot of very specific references to Japanese work culture that you’d only understand either if you’ve worked in it, or if you’ve immersed yourself in the culture enough to recognize it. The adaptation replaced most of those with their English workplace equivalents. This ultimately is more entertaining for an English audience. And if anything I’m thankful for it, as it gives me a reason to watch this show twice!
Aggretsuko is a fiendishly enjoyable anime series that somehow goes beyond a simple marketing ploy by its creative producer. It’s funny, quirky, and it’s also rather short. The whole series can be viewed in about two and a half hours, so it’s more like a long film than a proper anime series. But because of this, it doesn’t overstay its welcome at all and is just a wonderful little experience that anyone can watch without any prior knowledge needed.
As such, I’d like to present Aggretsuko with the recommendation to buy it – you know, if you could. No word on whether or not that will actually be possible in the future, but if it does happen, it is worth your money. Hell, right now it’s at the very least worth a month’s subscription to Netflix to watch this just on its own, let alone everything else that Netflix has. So please, go and check it out.
For alternate anime recommendations, if you are looking for a series of short sketches with some cute characters to warm your heart for a few minutes, then Bananya might be more your speed. Though if you want to see the only other example of good heavy metal in anime, then Detroit Metal City will certainly cover your bases.
Until next time – ladies, gentlemen, and others – stay frosty.
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