The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Snack Basue

A beautiful young woman and a wrinkled old lady work at a tiny bar in Sapporo. What customers will come through their door—and what kind of crazy conversations will they have?

Snack Basue is based on a manga of the same name by Forbidden Shibukawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

I like to think that after decades of absorbing Japanese culture by osmosis, I at least have my finger on the general pulse of the nation's sense of humor—ahem, I'll have you know I have played many Like a Dragon Games—and even when I'm not laughing at a comedy's jokes in particular, I can still get a relatively good idea of whether or not that comedy is working as intended. Cromartie High School? Serve it to me on a platter. Pop Team Epic? Shut up and take my money. Asobi Asobase? Inject it into my veins and give me a second season immediately, you son of a bitch. Snack Basue, though, is operating on a much deeper, much more Japanese level of bizarre weirdo “comedy,” and I am for once at a complete loss. That rating up there isn't so much my declaring that Snack Basue is “bad,” so much as it is me admitting defeat, throwing up my hands, and crying out, “Seriously, though, what the hell is this? Is this funny? I can't tell anymore! Someone, please, tell me what is happening…”

Maybe I am also saying that this show is bad because many aspects of this episode drove me up the damn wall. The unappealing character designs, the Newgrounds-Circa-2005 style of animation, the chintzy music, and the stiff pacing all combined to create an experience that was downright unbearable for me. I was already drifting in and out of focus throughout the entire first sketch—where the Random Business Guy was talking to the “Kazuma Kiryu If He Were Being Cosplayed By William Shatner” Guy about the appeal of snack bars and god knows what else. But it was around the time that the skeezy wannabe sex pest started crying into his highball over how the ladies refuse to perform “maintenance” on his “multi-purpose tool” that I developed an active hatred for everything that was happening on screen.

Then again, I imagine I would get the same reaction if I grabbed some poor Japanese guy and forced him to stay up late and watch old reruns of Tom Goes to the Mayor on Adult Swim. That show is a comedic gold mine, and I will straight-up fight anyone who says otherwise. But I also would not blame the Japanese guy for reaching for the nearest blunt object to bring right down onto my skull, because let's be real: Some humor simply does not cross cultural barriers without a lot of effort and time being put into mitigating the friction—and I do not know if I possess either the time or the energy to transcend that barrier.

I had several thoughts while watching this, apart from, “When will it be over?” I wondered if it wasn't working for me because I lacked cultural context. Then I wondered if I didn't get it because I don't go to bars, or drink. But I think it may just come down to this being a style of storytelling that relies on character interactions rather than plot, and none of these characters are remotely interesting. Based on a manga series, this takes place entirely within the eponymous snack bar, which is not what I thought a “snack bar” was—it's just a small bar as opposed to a venue that sells snacks. The bar is owned by “Mama” Basue, and Akemi is the junior hostess. And, uh…people come in? And they talk?

The first segment features a new customer coming in and everyone pressuring him to tell them his problems, while the third is about a regular who buys cheesy perverted gadgets because he says that all men are fascinated by tools. This eventually turns into him admitting that his “crotch tool” has never gotten used, at which point he attempts to get Akemi to go out with him. It's a tired old joke about how he assumes she's romantically available because of her job, and the fact that she's trying to get over her ex, which may just be her having something to encourage the customers to talk and/or drink. Her design, and indeed everyone's, is blocky, and a few are the sort of deliberately unattractive that feels very deliberate as if it's part of a joke—like Basue's hairstyle or the fact that the guy in the third segment is shown as being portly.

I suspect that this will come across better if you have a firm basis in this area of Japanese culture. But otherwise, this isn't artistically appealing enough or witty enough to have much chance of finding a broad audience—or at least an audience that includes me.

I suspect there's some cultural friction here that is preventing me from fully clicking with what this show is going for. From its extremely flat approach to dialogue and animation to its extended references to popular karaoke music, I'm pretty sure I'd need to be a salaryman in Japan who frequents this exact kind of bar in real life to fully understand the humor it's going for. I'm not, but I have most certainly been trapped in a crummy bar full of annoying people who won't shut up, and this show captures that vibe in the worst way possible.

This episode is deathly boring. It's built on such a specific, singular kind of humor that if you are not in the exact audience it's aiming for, you might as well stop reading the subtitles and start drinking for 20 minutes, for all the laughs you'll get out of this thing. Heck, maybe a high enough BAC will assist in mining even the tiniest bit of entertainment out of the endless, circular conversations that make up the entire runtime. If nothing else, it should make the time go by faster, which is a godsend with how stultifying the pacing and delivery of every line of dialogue is.

In a different context, with a different delivery, maybe something like this could work. If the jokes were sharper, or the characters' personalities were more interesting, or if the animation leaned harder into its purposefully limited style, you might have something charming, if a bit niche. As-is, we have the animated equivalent of sitting at the bar at 2 am, while the drunkest and dullest patrons are trying to hit on the bartender, and praying that your rideshare driver gets there sooner than the estimated time, just you can escape this deeply banal purgatory.

Alright, let's get some things out of the way from the start. In every way, this feels like several episodes of a short-form anime crammed into a 24-minute package. The scenes are largely unrelated (other than the setting and bar workers) with no narrative through line to speak of. Also worth noting is that there is some serious budget animation going on here. We're not quite at Eagle Talon levels but there is a noticeably low “frame rate” to the animation and the camera lingers on single shots for much longer than is normal.

Now that we're done with the technical stuff, let me say this is probably the most “made by Japanese people for Japanese people” anime I have ever seen. The show is a constant stream of Japanese-centric humor, gestures, wordplay, and cultural touchstones. I've lived in Japan for almost 20 years at this point and I'm certain more than half the jokes went completely over my head. But were the jokes that I get funny?

While the majority left me stone-faced at best, I will admit that there were two that got a laugh out of me. The first was the time stop gag—which was not only funny because it's a dig at otaku who watch way too much porn but also because of what it says about both Akemi and Basue (as to be shocked by what he was trying to do, they had to both be familiar with the concept themselves). The other was the closing credits with the completely irrelevant-to-the-song-you're-singing karaoke b-roll background video playing throughout. That's a true part of the Japanese experience right there.

All in all, I'm shocked this anime got licensed—not because of the quality of its animation or writing but because of the nature of its humor. Without an extremely deep knowledge of life and popular culture in Japan (far, far beyond what you might absorb through watching anime alone) there's just no way you'll catch the vast majority of the jokes. And frankly, without them, this anime is nothing but a boring slog.