Eat this before my arm goes numb.
Here’s my Winter 2015 show. I turn to SHAFT once again, but this was purely coincidental…honest it was. This isn’t a hype show either, so I might actually enjoy this one. But who’s to say? It sounded interesting when I saw the promos, and food anime always sounds interesting in my books.
My take
- Start with a nonchalant apartment with a pretty-looking kitchen, add a cute schoolgirl living on her own, sprinkle with all sorts of ingredients and voila: a meal. Then make the girl taste it, and watch her eat it in slow-motion and hear her cries of excitement that sound a little…erotic. And there you have it: SHAFT does cookery. And only they can pick up on the joys of good food; the real joys. Move over Gordon Ramsey.
- Example: Eat supermarket ice-cream, and more than likely it’ll taste okay, or possibly terrible. Then actually go out and fork out money on ice cream and more than likely it’ll taste something completely different. And that’s what SHAFT has picked up on; how the best ingredients make the best food and give the best reactions to their cute moe characters.
- This isn’t the first time SHAFT has tackled food either; it featured prominently in the Hidamari Sketch shows, as the senior girl Hiro was the one who ended up feeding everyone in the apartment block, and looked gorgeous cooking it at the same time. Only this time we get the idea that making this and making that sounds good; after all, it’s Ryo and Kirin doing the tasting for us. Is this some time of cookery show? Hell, while I was getting the images for this post, I was worrying on whether big chief Justin would say something, since Ryo gets a little too excited when eating food sometimes in the show. And I’m probably right when I say that we’ll see much more to come.
- Ryo is obviously going to take the lead, but that’s okay, because she’s moe. She looks moe when she’s happy, or sad, or cross, and she even looks moe when she’s trying her incredibly delicious food. However, episode 1 of Koufuku Graffiti left me at a little loss. I had actually hoped that this would be a decent and proper intro episode, but instead we only have 2 main characters prominent, and mere glances at the other girls that last, at most, a few seconds. I could be wrong, and we might see every other character next week. I hope so. I enjoy the cute Ryo and her way of eating which I don’t think she can avoid…but I don’t know what to make of Kirin though. Tiny kid who can eat a lot, is a little spoilt when she runs away because her mom is a crap cook, and then suddenly sees the light when meeting her second cousin and decides to be close family (YURI ALERT!). But then on the other hand I can see a kind heart in her; she figures out that Ryo has no confidence in her cooking since she started living on her own (and thus had no one to compliment/judge/criticize/put down her food). But even still there’s the other main girl to come: Shiina. Is she a good cook, or does she just rely on cup ramen?
Every dad in every anime reads the newspaper.
- I don’t want to call Koufuku Graffiti a ‘meh’ SHAFT show, but there’s something at the back of my head that can’t help it so far. The last ‘meh’ SHAFT show I watched was the uber-moe Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko, which was 4 years ago. It turned out to be really funny and fantastic by the time it ended, even though its first episode wasn’t that great. This has not been the best introduction of the show, however, it’s left me eager for more. Who will we see next? What will Ryo cook next? What kind of food will make her go nearly orgasmic? We’ll see. But it is kind of sweet how she’s extremely eager to follow in her late grandma’s footsteps, and become a good wife. She could always put her cooking skills to the test by going on Iron Chef, or even go to catering college and become a Michelin chef, but I guess having a husband is okay…I guess…
This is the perfect wife, Ryo!
- I’m hungry now.
