Fall Anime 2014 First Impressions: Denki-Gai No Honya-san

DenHon_1

So the Fall season didn’t start off as great. This was to be expected since the summer season had so many interesting anime to watch, and now we’re forced to start all over again and search for anime that will become the precious pearls of this season.

Yours truly begins this season with a cute comedy named Denki-Gai no Honya-san which takes place in an area where magical things happen: mythical creatures rode around, rare treasure can be easily found on the street, and happiness is seen all over the place.

Why yes – I’m talking about a Denki-Gai, or if you’d prefer in English, an Electric Town. Perfect examples are Tokyo’s Akihabara and Osaka’s Den-Den Town which are often portrayed in anime, but in DenHon’s case, the Denki-Gai is in an unspecified town (I’m sure that most of us want to think it’s Tokyo due to a few spotted references, but we can never be too sure).

The colorful characters of DenHon all work in a manga shop and from a first glance, it’s pretty easy to guess exactly what type of character they are. There’s the innocent but brash type, the silent type, and the list of predictable character types to be found in comedy anime goes on. To be honest, I’m not a fan of all of the character types they’ve chosen for the setting, since I doubt the chemistry between them will be credible, but because there’s only one episode out so far, it’s too early to say so.

Before starting the first episode, I’d forgotten who the main character was and once I was into the episode, I believed it was Hiotan- but apparently it wasn’t a she. Glasses (who also goes by the name Umio), the anime’s protagonist hardly had any presence that indicated who he was. And it was only after lumping him with the other characters that I remembered his assigned role (or in other words, I actually had to go back and re-read the same resume for the realization to take place). Apart from a few interactions with the possible love interest-Sensei, I’ve missed every other clue which pointed out Umio’s difference from the others.

There’s not much to say about DenHon’s art; it’s cute, isn’t out of place for a comedy anime (brought to you by the studio behind the Joshiraku anime) and that’s it. However, I would enjoy it more if the art was a little more consistent, you know, to really mark the humor.

Speaking about humor, the jokes in the first episode are meant to be funny…but something must have gone wrong with the execution somewhere since there wasn’t any impact, any finishing blow and it didn’t even make me laugh (much less smile, and I usually laugh at the smallest things). I just hope the second episode will somehow manage to fix how they handle the jokes to make them laughable and not only watchable.

For a first episode, DenHon had a pretty weak start and left me with a rather disappointed impression of it. In hopes of seeing the production fix the small issues seen throughout episode one, I’ll continue watching it for the time being.

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